Skuunk Works

Whilst I am primarily a JavaScript programmer, my framework of choice is Ruby on Rails. A lot of JS guys like Node or other frameworks which are JS all the way through, but there's a lot to like about Rails, even in 2016 and it's worth learning another language (Ruby) or two (SQL) in order to get the best environment on which to write your JavaScripts. Before I say what I like about Rails though, I will take you through what I don't like just to balance things out. What I don't like about Rails Asset Pipeline still does not let you use ES6 Modules.  Even at this late stage, one still cannot access ES6 Modules in Rails in a "Railsy" manner. You can either bypass the whole Asset Pipeline or else separate out the JS using Webpack or whatever, but in a standard Rails project, the fact that the asset is generated with unique hash in the file name before the extension pretty much nullifies its use for ES6 Modules which need a static location to store the fi...

So in my latest project, we are using Ruby on Rails and the react-rails gem to implement our React components. While react-rails is fine for the most part (and for simple components), there is a severe limitation in that you cannot use ES6 modules (i.e. using the import and export classes) because of the way asset-pipeline works. Asset-pipeline precompiles all your JS into one mega JS file and therefore doesn't allow you to call individual JavaScript components in separate files (because they don't pushed to the server). This is a severe problem which I hope gets fixed soon, but in the meantime don't hold your breath. There are workarounds using Browserify and/or Webpack, but they are messy (Google them for more info). In any case, react-rails does allow simple React components in Rails apps and it mounts them all in the window/global namespace, so you can use a good 75% of React within a Rails application. So now, we come to testing... Facebook uses a testing f...