Turbolinks with Phoenix

From the Thought Bot article:

We also added Turbolinks to the app which makes page transitions nearly seamless and let us keep that single-page app feel.

Older tweets on the topic:

https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/591658331988742144

https://twitter.com/mschae/status/615617889870159872

Would be interesting to see in a Phoenix app just to compare and out of curiosity. I actually quite liked Turbolinks (in Rails anyway).

Yea, I always thought it was a very solid concept for more straightforward sites too. The bulk of your page load time is assets and turbolinks prevents all of those reloading on every page. Even if they’re browser cached, the browser still has to make the HEAD calls to verify last modified and etag for every asset. After reading that article yesterday I tried loading it up on my site but kept get blank pages on every click.

Turbolinks is one of those things that I’d love to be able to get working if I wanted it, but would definitely stay away from building into Phoenix under any circumstances.

This is not true. Browsers do not make HEAD requests to check if a cached resource is fresh. They also won’t make a request at all if the resource is cached and the response had cache headers which indicates the resource is long-lived. All proper asset systems makes sure to set response header that ensures the client caches the resource for a long time.

I posted this in another thread but maybe something like progressive rendering would be a better fit for Phoenix…

I spend too much time in Firefox Developer Edition.

The reprocessing of all CSS and JS on each page load would still apply without Turbolinks though, even if it does have a far future expire.

Seems would be good match for Phoenix for MVPs. I have personally never used it so would appreciate information from people who have experience with Turbolinks in production.

Seems like it would actually be fairly easy to do in Phoenix, although I wonder if it is still useful with HTTP/2.

It’s for the most part orthogonal to HTTP/2. It’s more that if there are time and/or resource constraints for delivering full size SPA+Server side rendering+API+Android+iOS solution this seems to provide a “good enough” option. The fact that with http/2 we will get faster page transitions if used with turbolinks is just an added bonus.

Hmm, an idea for even faster, instead of another request and then swapping the body, could request it over an open websocket. Would be easy to package up into a library.

See thread in the Phoenix category: Turbolinks with Phoenix

I have never tried Turbolinks before, but from what I’ve read: You don’t need it in Phoenix.