I don't think I've ever seen DHH or the Basecamp crew advertise any of this type of stuff as some groundbreaking new approach that nobody has ever tried before. On the contrary, I usually see them talking about how those old ways of doing web development were actually better in many ways, which is why they're pushing to move away from the current "everything is an SPA" approach.
And all this new tooling makes the experience much better than it ever was in the past.
Not disagreeing with the rest of the stuff. But they literally call it "NEW MAGIC" per DHH's tweet.
Servers could maintain an open connection and stream new data to the browser.
html, http, js, css are pretty thorough in their design, and it shows.
all the features described here are possible without any frameworks, this is merely a much easier way to build it than from scratch.
I gotta give them credit for revisiting server-side page assembling though; moving application logic and templating mostly to the front end was a HUGE mistake. JS is very fast now, but it's still absolutely glacial in its speed compared to server-side code written in compiled languages.