4: Design Patterns on the Frontend, History of MVVM, Web Components, and You

Fullstack Ruby Podcast

Design patterns on the frontend: this is a subject far too little discussed from what I can tell, yet with a fundamental awareness and regular usage of design patterns, you can dramatically uplevel your frontend code. Rubyists in particular will have a major leg up here over devs coming from communities which are more FP (functional programming) in nature, because the view layer of the web is inherently object-oriented.
Ruby developers are well-trained in the ways of object-oriented programming and using design patterns. This is probably why many Rubyists instinctively look askance at certain modern paradigms of frontend programming. It’s overly complicated, poorly architected, and rarely understood from a proper OOP perspective. You view source on many websites and it’s “div tag soup”. It’s a nightmare. You look at how people will write heaps of functional React components, and it’s a buggy spaghetti code mess.
Well guess what? We can change all that.
Web components, and simple libraries like Lit—combined with an understanding of how the DOM works natively plus MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel)—lets us reason about our frontend in similar ways to how we reason about the backend using the OOP paradigm. A web component is simply the "VM" of MVVM, and you easily add in the V part via a declarative template library or just manipulate the DOM (that is, the View) directly in an imperative fashion.
So Rubyists, stop feeling like the frontend is out to get you, or you need to avoid it, or contain it. Embrace it! The frontend can be just as fun and rewarding as the backend—if you know what to do with it.
CORRECTION: in the recording I said Stimulus doesn't provide view bindings. That's not actually true — you can use data-action attributes so that the events triggered get handled by the controller. However, you can't bind reactive data back into the template. You get targets of course, but it's entirely up to you how you make use of those targets to update the DOM via your Stimulus controller.
Links:

• Model–view–viewmodel - Wikipedia
  • Model ← (from server connection or client data store) → ViewModel ← (bindings) → View
• Knockout (web framework) - Wikipedia
• Web Components - MDN
• Lit: Simple. Fast. Web Components.
• Article: HTML is a Serialized Object Graph

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