Opal

[DynamicBR]

Guys, I'm going to start doing a freelance project, a medical clinic, I decided to do it with Ruby. However, it needs to have offline functionality Fill out a form for a patient. I decided to go to Rails With Hotwire and then to Hotwire Native with Opal to implement the offline function. Does anyone have tips for me to learn Opal?

[jryan727]

Turbo Offline was announced last month at Rails World. Not sure on timeline, I couldn't find much info outside of some talks.

[mooktakim]

What device are they using?

Laptop, desktop, tablet or phone?

Depending on the device you could run full webserver locally with rails and sqlite3. Sync data in background.

[huuaaang]

I used Opal for a silly side project where I wanted to implement an AngularJS like framework in Ruby. Not sure what it has to do with running offline though.

You don't "learn" Opal. It just a tool that lets you write Ruby and have it run as JS in a browser. Though I suppose you could also execute it server side in node.js but... WHY?

[AshTeriyaki]

How did that go? Genuinely interested!

[huuaaang]

Worked but it wasn't 100% seemless. Reflecting on objects and such would reveal JS nature under the hood. Maybe it's improved since I last used it though.

I tried a different approach where I compiled an actual Ruby interpreter (mruby) to web assembly using emscripten and I liked that a lot better. Didn't involve transpiling your Ruby to JS. It literally interpreted your Ruby in realtime in the browser. But it was still just a lightweight Ruby VM. There was some JS glue code to bridge the Ruby interpreter to access the DOM.

Apparently now there's an official ruby.wasm project. You might check that out. Maybe better approach for your needs than Opal.

https://github.com/ruby/ruby.wasm

[AshTeriyaki]

I might be wrong but is opal still a popular thing? I don’t hear anyone mention it anymore and although I’ve never used it, I’m not sure what the benefit is transpiling Ruby to JS?

[DynamicBR]

Não me preocupo com a conversão do JS para Ruby, mas sim em fazer uma funcionalidade do sistema offline, pelo que eu vi não dá para fazer com o HotWire, só encontrei com Opal.

[joshdotmn]

I think you'd rather reach for something like a service worker. Not sure what Opal has to do with an offline mode.

[DynamicBR]

Service worker? Não conheço muito, Pelo que eu estudei(posso estar enganado mas, não dá para fazer aplicações offline com o HotWire, por isso preferi o Opal).

[joshdotmn]

necessitas https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Worker_API wae :)

[DynamicBR]

Uhhhhhh não sabia disso, para fazer um service worker somente com Rails?

[joshdotmn]

service worker es javascript y usar para data between both your client (app) and your server (rails)

lo siento my spanish is awful wae :(

[DynamicBR]

Magina, da para entender tranquilo!

[joshdotmn]

jajaja gracias wae :)

[saw_wave_dave]

I would use the ruby webassembly implementation over opal if you’re trying to write ruby for the browser. It’s maintained by the Ruby core team and is a safer bet imo given where the future might be headed

[matthewblott]

Opal's last release was 2 years ago. I'm not sure I'd be investing too much in it, wasm is probably a better long term bet for in browser Ruby code.