There’s a traditional Rails way to build a frontend — ERB templates and more recently Hotwire — and it works. But for the kind of modern, interactive apps we’re building today, React gives a better final product, and it’s what AI coding tools are best at generating. The challenge is connecting React to a Rails backend cleanly, and that’s where Inertia comes in.
In this lesson we’ll cover why React is worth committing to, acknowledge the traditional Rails approach and explain why I went a different way, and walk through how Inertia makes Rails and React feel like one seamless app.
- Why React is the frontend tool the entire industry has standardized on
- The traditional Rails frontend approaches and why I chose differently
- What Inertia is and how it bridges Rails and React without an API
- Why this combo is also the path of least resistance when building with AI