Superglue 1.0: React ❤️ Rails. A new era of thoughtfulness
I’m thrilled to announce the release of Superglue 1.0. First announced a year ago, Superglue is a library designed to make building interactive Rails and React apps as productive as the classic Rails stack. In every client project we’ve used it on, I’m often amazed at how well it preserves the Rails developer experience while leveraging the React ecosystem to help teams move fast. It can be said that Superglue is yet another library that integrates Rails and React, but there is so much more that makes it uniquely effective.
I started Superglue over a decade ago, and I’ve seen many attempts to integrate Rails and React—Hyperstack, ReactOnRails, react-rails, Laravel’s InertiaJS, and countless homegrown solutions. They all try to bring the two together, yet the discourse around frontend complexity is as intense as ever. Over the years, one thing has become clear: integration simply isn’t enough.
There needs to be thoughtfulness. How can React enhance my productivity while building on the Rails tooling and knowledge I already have? This question has guided Superglue’s development over the past decade — a careful, deliberate approach to crafting a developer experience Rails developers would love. To put it another way: if using React means losing my form helpers, URL helpers, view layer, or forces me to bloat my controllers or rely on client-side routing, then it’s just not worth it.
