How Rails Developers do Ajax (with jQuery) in 2011

February 09, 2011

Wanting to survey what the current state of the art in Rails Ajax development is, I asked this question on twitter:

I got a lot of great responses! 44 last time I checked. Here’s what I found out people are doing:

• mustache.js
• Sending JavaScript back down to the client using .js.erb template files (Ryan Bates linked a couple of examples here and here)
• JQuery templates
• Hitting RESTFUL endpoints and responding with JSON data to be manipulated on the client
• Using backbone.js
• Rendering partials and updating elements on the page with their raw content (the original old-school Rails way of doing it)
• Use SammyOnRails

There is definitely a divide and a lot of opinion (suprise!) between those who are OK with delivering JavaScript and/or HTML from the server to be rendered on the client and those who prefer to deliver data and have the client process it. I’d characterize the former as the less clean, more pragmatic approach and the latter as the idealistic cleaner approach. It seems that tools like mustache.js, backbone, JQuery templates, and Sammy.js are tightening the gap between quick + dirty and slow + clean.

What do you think? What did we miss?