[swanson]

They are both JS frameworks, but they are fundamentally different approaches.

React (and React-rails) moves rendering / state / logic clientside. You can use tools like react-rails to more easily pass data from your Rails controller to your react components (basically conveniences to create props from instance variables).

Stimulus doesn't handle rendering at all. It's intended to be used for small little "sprinkles" of JavaScript (think things like: showing / hiding content, toggling classes, basic event handlers). If you used to write jQuery snippets to wire up a click event to run ~5-10 lines of JS, then you might look at Stimulus as a more modern implementation (es6, mutationobserver, etc). Stimulus plays nicely with Turbolinks since it needs existing HTML (servered rendered from normal Rails views) to attach to.

You're basically looking at two diverging paths: do you go down a JS-driven SPA application with React (or some kind of hybrid where you have React do parts of the page) or do you opt for Basecamp's "I cant belive its not a SPA" approach with Turbolinks, server-rendered HTML, and Stimulus for small interactivity.

Here's a talk I gave at the London Ruby meetup about Stimulus and in what contexts you might want to use (or not use it): https://assets.lrug.org/videos/2020/september/matt-swanson-s...

[dsego]

What you are describing seems similar to good old BackboneJS?