GitHub is definitely not an MPA. Or at least most of the core functionality people use for work isn’t. It feels like one under ideal network conditions, but if your connection stalls you can see its routing stall before any attempt to load a new page.
No? I'm looking at the request in webinspector right now. GitHub is kicking back the full partial for the issues tab, and turbolinks JS is then swapping out the relevant DIVs -- it's a bog-standard Rails MPA server side routed setup, I think you're just letting the turbolinks animation convince you there's more happening on the frontend than really is.
Github uses something called View Component to render 'partials' (aka components) which is a bit more sophisticated than just Turbolinks and IMO the future of complex web apps
> It's the right balance in-between React/SSR hydration and Railsy server-side apps, taking the best of both worlds.
This is similar to how React Server Components work, except that they work for arbitrary server-side rendering updates to the client as well as navigation. And it’s conceptually similar to how Qwik works, only the “partials” are typically client chunks. And again with Qwik, not tied to navigation, but that’s pretty much how I’d imagine a client routing solution for Qwik would (will?) look.
Eh, we use ViewComponents inhouse at work too, and they're great, but they're really just a better way of approaching partials instead of the normal "grab the Controller's ivars" free-for-all -- they don't move the needle any on the MPA front, and they change nothing w.r.t turbolinks (or any client side JS), since they're purely a server-side rendering time thing.
I'm more interested in the concept of ViewComponents than just the current library. It's really just starting with Rails adopting ActionCable and Phoenix using LiveView (which I see as both immature proto-concepts of the future of JS frontends).
Right now the complexity is a bit high on this approach^ and I personally just use a mix of Vue + Turbolinks/Rails at work for legacy/simplicity reasons. But I'm watching the space.
Ah, AFAIK that's not actually theirs but: https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax (although I guess they rewrote it in TS, unless that's a different project floating around?), from which Turbolinks took its inspiration as a Rails-native built in solution. Presumably GitHub never saw any reason to rewrite for Turbolinks when the latter appeared.
