Ajax and Rails

This is just a short post to save a few links and document that "Server Javascript Responses" in Rails are still useful in 2018/19.

Lifecycle of SJR

The basic idea behind Server Javascript Responses (SJR) is diagrammed below:

SJR works like this:

1. A User submits a form that has the Rails attribute remote=true on the form tag which makes the form submission happen via AJAX. See the Rails guide for more information.

2. The server receives the data payload and processes a response.

3. The Response from the server is a blob of JS not JSON that usually comes from a matching name.js.erb template.

4. The User's browser receives the JS blog and evals the JS to update the page.

Links

1. DHH's original post
2. Medium post about eschewing fancy front-end frameworks for SJR
3. Ajax calls the Rails way