Philosophy

Lean on Rails

Move as much logic as you can into Rails. For example, instead of doing this:

  json.firstName @user.first_name

const Header = ({firstName}) => (<h1>{firstName.toUpperCase()}</h1>)

we do

  json.firstName @user.first_name.capitalize

const Header = ({firstName}) => (<h1>{firstName}</h1>)

Shape with presentation

As an end user, its easy to look at any regular web page and understand all the actions that you can take. Its the strength of HTML and of HATEOAS. Superglue is inspired by this and encourages you to shape your JSON in the same way.

Shape your pages roughly how you'll organize your components. Some may critic the addition of presentation, but there is intentionally only one consumer of your shape, your page components.

?> What about forms? You can use form_props to build the right JSON for your React components.

HTML Thinking

Just because you can create a link without a href in React doesn't mean you should. Ultimately, everything renders as HTML. That's why Superglue doesn't give links the ability to make non-get requests. Instead it encourages you to create forms that look like links, the same approach Rails uses. This has the added benefit of easily building for Server Side Rendering.

Embrace Unobtrusive Javascript (UJS)

You may have noticed that we've been using data-sg-remote or data-sg-visit in the examples.

  <a href='/posts?props_at=data.dashboard.keyMetricsChart' data-sg-visit />

Superglue embraces Unobtrusive Javascript. Any link or form with a data-sg attribute receives superpowers inspired by Rails data attributes.

For more advanced use cases, an action creator is passed to all your connected page components.

You can dig it!

/dashboard?props_at=data.greet

A single keypath will dig your template for content and place it to where it belongs in your Redux state. That's incredibly productive and can be used for a variety of rich applications. See the the digging docs or recipes section.

Its still just Rails

We might using React components, but most of what gives Superglue superpowers is that its driven by all the conveniences of old fashion and boring Rails.

app/
|-- controllers/
|-- views/
|   |-- posts/
|   |   |-- index.js
|   |   |-- index.json.props
|   |   |-- index.html.erb