NWRUG in three weeks — Beyond Stimulus: Simplifying JavaScript in Rails with Helium

[Rob Whittaker]

Hi folks,

Our next NWRUG is in three weeks on 20 November back at Colony, One Silk Street, our own Darren "Daz" Jones Townsend will give us a guided tour of their declarative alternative to Stimulus:

Stimulus has been a core part of Rails for nearly four years, transforming how we use JavaScript in our applications. But as great as it is, Stimulus controllers can sometimes feel clunky and awkward to work with. But what if we could do better?

In this talk, I’ll share how I set out to improve the developer experience by creating Helium — a tiny declarative JavaScript library that does everything a Stimulus controller can do, but directly in your views using simple data attributes (think Tailwind for JS).

I’ll demonstrate how it works, show some real-world examples, and rework a few common Stimulus controllers to highlight the cleaner, more expressive syntax Helium offers and hopefully show that it might be time to ditch Stimulus...

We’ll be at the venue from 6:30pm with the talk starting at 7pm. Afterwards we’ll retire to a nearby establishment for a drink and some pizza, kindly provided by our sponsors Fatsoma and thoughtbot.

Register here if you would like to attend. Full details on this (and all our events) over on our website.

See you soon!

Rob and Tekin