Showing Progress of Background Jobs with Hotwire Turbo

In this presentation titled "Showing Progress of Background Jobs with Hotwire Turbo," Michał Łęcicki discusses how to effectively display the progress of backend jobs in Ruby applications using Hotwire, a modern tool that integrates Turbo and Stimulus. The talk is aimed at developers who want to enhance user experience by notifying users of the status of long-running background jobs. The key points of the presentation include:

Introduction to Hotwire: Michał briefly explains what Hotwire is and its components including Turbo and Stimulus, setting the stage for the practical usage examples that follow.
User Interaction and Feedback: He emphasizes the importance of updating users about the status of background jobs, especially when these jobs take a significant amount of time to complete.
Historical Context: The presentation offers a historical perspective on handling background job progress, referencing a 1985 technique that required additional gems (like Sidekiq) to manage job statuses, highlighting issues with complexity and confusion for developers.
Using Hotwire for Progress Representation: Michał describes various solutions to implement progress displays in Hotwire. He discusses a specific application model where users request jokes from an API, and the process of how to handle and visualize the progress of fetching these jokes.
Handling Multiple Background Jobs: The talk also covers the scenario of multiple concurrent jobs, illustrating how to manage updates to ensure smooth user experience without overwhelming the frontend. He suggests using a Stimulus controller as a mediator to handle updates efficiently.
Different Implementation Approaches: He suggests multiple approaches for broadcasting updates from service objects rather than directly from ActiveRecord, achieving a more decoupled architecture. He also presents alternative solutions to tasks not requiring database interactions.
Conclusion and Takeaways: Michał concludes by emphasizing the significant role of Hotwire in enhancing communication between backend and frontend, encouraging attendees to explore these techniques in their applications. He provides additional resources for further learning.

Overall, the presentation efficiently combines theoretical knowledge with practical application, demonstrating the capabilities of Hotwire in modern Rails development.