Blog

No more page refreshing with CBWIRE and Turbo Drive

Grant Copley September 12, 2022

Spread the word

Grant Copley

September 12, 2022

Spread the word


Share your thoughts

tl;dr

Turbo Drive can significantly enhance the user experience of your server-side apps by removing unnecessary page refreshes, and it doesn't take much to implement. Once Turbo Drive is installed, link clinks and form submissions will happen in the background via AJAX. You can use Turbo Drive with or without CBWIRE. If you are using CBWIRE, you can now use a plugin to make CBWIRE and Turbo Drive play together nicely.

CBWIRE and Turbo Drive

One of our core goals with the v2 release of CBWIRE was to get it working with Turbo Drive. Initially, we ran into a bunch of JS errors.

Turbo Drive, formerly Turbolinks, is a JavaScript library that watches for link clicks and form submissions, performs them in the background via AJAX, and updates the page without a full reload. Turbo Drive allows you to build apps that look and feel like single-page applications without completely overhauling your code. Even better, it only takes a couple of lines of code to implement.

Setup

NPM

You can install Turbo by running the following npm command at the root of your project.

npm i @hotwired/turbo

Then you can require or import Turbo.

import * as Turbo from "@hotwired/turbo"

Skypack

There is also a Skypack available which you can add to the <head></head> of your layout.



CBWIRE / Livewire Plugin

For Turbo to work correctly with Livewire ( and therefore CBWIRE ), you will need to include the Turbo plugin below your wireScripts() call in your layout.



Note: You MUST have either the data-turbolinks-eval="false" or data-turbo-eval="false" attributes added to the script tag (having both won't hurt).

Enjoy!

Once Turbo is installed, you should find that clicking links and submitting forms within your app does not require any page refreshes.

Turbo listens for various UI events and fetches the updated content from the server via background XHR requests.

For additional information on how Turbo can be used and configured, please see https://turbo.hotwired.dev/.

Also, you can find the CBWIRE documentation at https://cbwire.ortusbooks.com/.

Build something extraordinary.✌️

Add Your Comment

Recent Entries

ColdBox 8.2.0: Middleware, Streaming, AI Gateways, and a Whole Lot More

ColdBox 8.2.0: Middleware, Streaming, AI Gateways, and a Whole Lot More

ColdBox 8.2.0 is the result of work we started in March. Several of its headline features, including route-scoped middleware and Server-Sent Events, were incubated for months before shipping. We held them back on purpose: we wanted the APIs settled, the edge cases covered, and the testing story complete before asking you to build on them. They're ready now.

Luis Majano
Luis Majano
September 23, 2026
Assert Like You Mean It, TestBox 7.1 Part 1: Set Expectations

Assert Like You Mean It, TestBox 7.1 Part 1: Set Expectations

If you have ever tested that two collections contain "the same stuff, order doesn't matter," you already know the workaround: sort both arrays, compare them element by element, and hope nobody adds a duplicate. It works, but it isn't what you meant to write. You meant "these are the same set."

Luis Majano
Luis Majano
September 23, 2026
Is Your QA Process Ready for Your Next ColdFusion or BoxLang Release?

Is Your QA Process Ready for Your Next ColdFusion or BoxLang Release?

As applications continue to evolve, QA can easily become reactive. Teams may test late in the development process, focus only on happy-path scenarios, repeat manual checks, or rely on AI-generated changes without fully validating the results. ​ These gaps can create risks that are not always visible until they affect users, disrupt operations, or require costly fixes in production.

Maria Jose Herrera
Maria Jose Herrera
September 21, 2026