Turbolinks 5 is an awesome JavaScript library that makes your web application faster by eliminating full page reloads. It replaces only the body of the page using AJAX, so JavaScript and CSS are loaded only once. In addition, it uses a cached version if the page has already been viewed.

This allows smaller teams to get the performance benefits of a Single Page Application without the added cost or complexity. I use it on all my Rails projects and clients are always blown away by the user experience and speed of their app.

Turbolinks has been around for a while, but it had its caveats, and thus faced a good deal of resistance from the Rails community. The engineers at Basecamp (thank you Sam Stephenson) then re-wrote the library from the ground-up, fixed the wonkiness, and released Turbolinks 5 — and it has been glorious ever since. …