RubyUI (Former PhlexUI): Ruby Gem for RubyUI Components
github.com
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It cannot be overstated how nice it is to move away from erb and into pure ruby. Private methods as partials is a game changer for refactoring your UI.
To create them declaratively (not needing to call them in a set order) you just create a module that defines `before_template` and calls `vanish`: https://www.phlex.fun/miscellaneous/v2-upgrade.html#removed-...
Not a fan of the rails erb helper methods though, so maybe it doesn't count. I almost exclusively use it outside of rails now
It's got a nice path for incremental adoption, so there is no need to go all-in unless you want to. Personally my Rails projects are all 95%+ ruby now.
Another nice knock off effect is that the LSP and integration with my IDE (neovim) is much nicer with Phlex components than it is with ERB.
I also think personally I don't like "magic" spaces like ERB where its hard for me to follow the code path. How does ERB manage multiline blocks with html in them? Hard to understand, harder to explain. To me it feels like there is less to worry about in Phlex where I'm thinking more in Ruby, less in the specifics of the view context.
In some extreme scenarios with tons of very small partials, it can win against Action View because the Action View partial lookup is significant overhead.
I think you’re looking at this from the perspective of having maybe a partial for your header and another for your footer. The way you build views in Phlex is you would have a component not just for the header but also the nav, each item in the nav, and each icon in each item.
We can argue about whether that level of abstraction and reuse is worth it, but the fact is ActionView gets very slow when you build views like that composing thousands of partials — and for people who want to build views like that, it matters.
Still, I think these “12× faster” comparisons are silly. If ActionView was just as fast at rendering thousands of small components, I’d still pick Phlex for the developer experience. I enjoy writing Ruby, not toggling between Ruby and HTML.
They claim it’s faster than ERB but only show micro benchmarks. This is basically a form of lying.
This approach stinks for a lot of reasons:
- it adds a ton of pressure on the garbage collector. - the backtraces suck to debug. Ruby is better now than in 2010, but it’s still lame. - your templates are largely static. Yet when it lives as code you can’t cache any of it. An efficient ERB generator is just cached strings concatenations. Very efficient in Ruby.
Finally, Rubyists hate this and it’s why the community is slowly dying. Almost all your frontend should be in JS/JSX at this point. Even the static stuff.
Didn't have any luck with the Date Picker component demo page (no pop up or validation?), and that's my usual go-to for seeing how these libraries are doing.
Paired with Tailwind, this is the fastest application development I've ever done.
edit: yeah, after reading more, this is an affront against nature. forget about separation of content and presentation, now you can even throw your backend into the dumpster fire!