Rails UI components

Table of Contents

Classical approach #

Classical Rails view (V from MVC) approach is: ERB plus helpers. Which conceptually it the same as PHP4. And it’s understandable - when Rails were invented it was the only way.

There are alternatives to ERB, like: HAML, Slim, liquid. But this is essentially the same approach

New approach #

There are different opinions about React, somebody loves it, somebody hates it. But no one can’t argue that it changed frontend development practices. And the main changes are JSX and components. React components broke old stigma that separation of concerns should be horizontal: HTML, CSS, JS. Instead React component can encapsulate all that it needs. One can pick up component of the shelf (npm) and use it directly (almost) without configuration.

And this idea slowly cripples in Rails world. There are several libraries which adopt components approach:

And benchmark if you’re interested.

ViewComponents #

ViewComponents created by Github. To my taste it requires a lot of boilerplate code. Second concern is that Github took course to migrate to React, so ViewComponents may be abandoned eventually.

Component libraries:

Form builders: