I really like the server side routing part of Inertia and that you can pass data to the frontend directly in the first request without needing to do an additional http request (altough this might be a bit problematic for sensitive information in case the sites are cached).
However, there are also things that make it feel gimmicky:
- There are issues like this where they could at least merge the PR to improve the documentation as there seem to be many people to misunderstand the usage the function but it did not happen https://github.com/inertiajs/inertia/issues/1631
It’s funny, this is how we built apps in 2014-era Rails at Airbnb, and by 2015 we were doing server-side rendering of some React components too. We had a thing to pop a React component into our regular rails views as a “partial”.
<%= render_react_component('MyComponent.js', :name => 'Hypernova The Renderer') %>
Wishing this (Hypernova) was still maintained at all! We've been eyeing it, and it would be an absolute perfect fit for our Rails / React-heavy shop that is close to requiring SSR. As is, it seems like the only viable, supported solution in this space is Shakacode's.
It’s really not a lot of code to do this. I’m sure you could study the codebase a bit and then write your own in-repo and have a great time. If I were writing a Rails app tomorrow I’d make my own, although the Shakacode docs looked fine too.
At the Laracon it was estimated the new version 2 of inertia will be released in October with new features like multiple async requests, polling, infinite page scroll with smart background loader, etc
Here's a server-side community adapter our team has been using for ASP.NET Core. It works pretty well! I helped contribute the Vite helper to bring HMR and ease of integration.
How difficult is it to troubleshoot Inertia when something breaks?
That was my only fear when I toyed with Inertia, Django, and Svelte for an afternoon. When I’d get an error it seemed obscure or not indicative of the underlying cause.
What’s everyone’s experience? Inertia seems like magic. And that’s what scares me a little.
My team of 5-6 devs has been using Inertia for a year now. I really don't think that Inertia is magic. Some of us have 10 years experience, some 2 years. I don't think anyone on the team has had to troubleshoot Inertia. Nothing with Inertia has ever broken. Juniors have never gotten confused by how it works.
It is just a simple bit of glue between your Vue app and your backend. The docs are good, and it overall just feels solid/stable. Super excited to see the new changes that are coming too!
I became aware of Intertia from a Ruby shop some time in 2022, who had good things to say, along the lines of "We could not ship as fast as we do without it." At work we are exploring Inertia to migrate parts of a long-lived Rails application quickly-but-gradually into an SPA. Have not gone live with the first feature yet, but so far a proof-of-concept and our exploration have been positive.
By "quickly-but-gradually", I mean that some pages will remain server rendered, and gradually more migrate to being browser-rendered, but each new page or slice of functionality is very quick to port over. If you have any sort of viewmodel, presenter, or form object abstraction in your server-rendering architecture, it is much faster to just turn that into JSON and use Interia than it is to convert everything into pure JS/TS and generalize a set of APIs to serve the frontend. Of course YMMV depending on your existing architecture and needs.
Readit News
However, there are also things that make it feel gimmicky:
- The resolve function createInertiaApp runs more than once (mainly) on the first page load causing a re-render and it seems like there is no plan to fix that in near feature https://github.com/inertiajs/inertia/issues/1595 / https://github.com/inertiajs/inertia/issues/1091
- There are issues like this where they could at least merge the PR to improve the documentation as there seem to be many people to misunderstand the usage the function but it did not happen https://github.com/inertiajs/inertia/issues/1631
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Docs here: https://docs.adonisjs.com/guides/views-and-templates/inertia
Using inertia with SSR is very nice for the combination of:
* I want to have simple server-rendered views, with added client side sprinkling
* I want to be able to use off-the-shelf components like complex data grids to build fast
* I want to minimize API communication headaches
https://youtu.be/uyfyFRvng3c
https://github.com/kapi2289/InertiaCore
That was my only fear when I toyed with Inertia, Django, and Svelte for an afternoon. When I’d get an error it seemed obscure or not indicative of the underlying cause.
What’s everyone’s experience? Inertia seems like magic. And that’s what scares me a little.
It is just a simple bit of glue between your Vue app and your backend. The docs are good, and it overall just feels solid/stable. Super excited to see the new changes that are coming too!
By "quickly-but-gradually", I mean that some pages will remain server rendered, and gradually more migrate to being browser-rendered, but each new page or slice of functionality is very quick to port over. If you have any sort of viewmodel, presenter, or form object abstraction in your server-rendering architecture, it is much faster to just turn that into JSON and use Interia than it is to convert everything into pure JS/TS and generalize a set of APIs to serve the frontend. Of course YMMV depending on your existing architecture and needs.
The project is a lot easier to maintain and Inertia just does what it says it does.
The rails adapter is up to date, sponsored: https://github.com/inertiajs/inertia-rails?tab=readme-ov-fil...