This week Steph's taking a quick break, but while she's off, Chris is joined by a special guest - Jonathan Reinink. Jonathan is the creator of Inertia.js. Inertia.js (https://inertiajs.com/) lets you quickly build modern single-page React, Vue and Svelte apps using classic server-side routing and controllers, and listeners of the show will certainly have heard Chris rave about it on previous episodes.
Chris and Jonathan dig into what makes Inertia unique as compared to frameworks like Phoenix LiveView, Laravel Livewire, and Rails' Hotwire & Turbo. They also discuss how Inertia embraces the URL, the unique "protocol" nature of Inertia, and how to consider Inertia alongside native mobile applications. Throughout the conversation, Jonathan's consistent philosophy of wanting to build robust, performant, and delightful applications shines through.
Jonathan Reinink on twitter (https://twitter.com/reinink)
Inertia.js (https://inertiajs.com/)
Eloquent Performance Patterns (https://eloquent-course.reinink.ca/)
TailwindCSS (https://tailwindcss.com/)
Church Social (https://churchsocial.com/)
Jonathan on Full Stack Radio (https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1192152495407222784?s=21)
Foundational blog post: Server-side apps with client-side rendering (https://reinink.ca/articles/server-side-apps-with-client-side-rendering)
Laravel Livewire (https://laravel-livewire.com/)
Alpine.js (https://github.com/alpinejs/alpine)
Phoenix LiveView (https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view)
Hotwire Turbo (https://turbo.hotwire.dev/)
The Inertia Protocol (https://inertiajs.com/the-protocol)
Transcript:
CHRIS TOOMEY: I am seeing what I believe to be the relevant things.
JONATHAN REINIK: Let's dance.
CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. And this week, Steph is taking a quick break, but while she's away, I'm joined by a special guest, Jonathan Reinik. Jonathan Reinik is the creator of Inertia.js. And listeners of the show will know that that is increasingly one of my favorite frameworks and, frankly, just ways to build applications on the internet. Jonathan is also the creator of the Eloquent Performance Patterns course, which teaches the Eloquent ORM, which is the ORM in Laravel but really digs into deep performance and database things, so really covering that back end as well. Jonathan also collaborated on the development of Tailwind CSS, a utility-first CSS framework which again is something that I have spoken of in very high terms on this podcast. And lastly, Jonathan currently runs his own SaaS business called Church Social. So really, Jonathan is a bit of a quadruple threat covering back end and front end design and entrepreneurship. So pretty much everything you want to see. And frankly, I've been so impressed by the breadth and the depth of Jonathan's work and just the deep way that he is thinking about building applications. So I am absolutely thrilled to have him on the show today. So without further ado, Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me.
JONATHAN: Thanks so much, Chris. That was a very kind introduction, and yeah, it's awesome to be on The Bike Shed. I've been a long-time listener, and as I've said to you, I really appreciate the support that you've given to my work over the years. So yeah, it's awesome to be here.
CHRIS: That's interesting. We're measuring it in years now, but it's a very sincere thing for me. I think with Inertia, you've built something that is both very unique and a special approach to how we build things, but it's also built from very familiar pieces and allows us to reuse the deep amounts of knowledge that we have in the Rails community or the Laravel community. But actually backing up just a little bit, because we're going to dive deep on Inertia.js today, for folks that are not as familiar or have only heard me mention it in passing, there's a wonderful episode of Full Stack R