Phlex is an amazing project. Makes frontend fun again. I've built my own UI library using DaisyUI and Tailwindcss that we use in all our Rails projects: <a href="https://github.com/inhouse-work/protos" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/inhouse-work/protos</a><p>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.
I increasingly wonder if I'm the only one left who genuinely likes erb :-D<p>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
I don't know if I'm a fan but I've almost never had erb be the problem in a Rails app. The LLMs can work with it easily. Don't need to bring in extensions to work with major text editors. Sticking with ERB for now.
I found using partials between projects to be a headache. I wanted a way to standardize my UI for accessibility across all projects and not have to re-implement the same standards over and over. It's nice to be able to package the UI up into a gem and keep it maintained everywhere.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Have you had much luck with slots? I have a project using View Components that leverages slots. I've tried migrating to Phlex, but the lack of explicit slot support has been a bit frustrating.
The RubyUI team is doing a fantastic job. This gem is now one of the first ones I add to a new project. Thanks for your work!
Looks interesting, but I wish there was a way to alias the component names, since every component class, some of which have common names, take root in the global namespace. (though I suspect that easily enough done manually)
They’re not in the root namespace. They are instance methods (on the instance of the component) that start with a capital letter. <a href="https://www.phlex.fun/components/kits.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.phlex.fun/components/kits.html</a>
It's basically a code generator for adding standard Phlex components to your project, so once you've added a component to your application you can modify it any way you want.
I used a rendering library like Phlex back in 2010. I hated it back then and I still don’t like it.<p>They claim it’s faster than ERB but only show micro benchmarks. This is basically a form of lying.<p>This approach stinks for a lot of reasons:<p>- 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.<p>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.
I’m impressed by this project’s progress. It’s more than just a render library. Although they claim it’s 12x faster than ERB, but I couldn’t find their benchmark.
Interesting stuff. Unsure about the Phlex approach but could be worth a go.<p>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.
RubyUI looks interesting, but I wonder how well it scales in large apps. Moving away from ERB makes sense for maintainability, but does it introduce any trade-offs in terms of memory usage or debugging? Would love to hear from people using it in production.
Just curious why the decision was made to go with PascalCase for the DSL? Is this meant to help React devs feel at home? Seems very un-Rubylike.
this looks dope. has anyone built anything substantial with phlex ?
I haven't done anything with RubyUI, but I've been using Phlex for the past couple of months and I never want to go back. It's everything I wanted HAML or Slim to be. Everything is code. You create classes and functions instead of views and partials. Everything you know about managing and abstracting code suddenly applies to your UI rendering.<p>Paired with Tailwind, this is the fastest application development I've ever done.
I believe Clearscope is the largest app using Phlex views exclusively, with 454 components and counting. There’s a list of some other users here. <a href="https://www.phlex.fun/project/community.html#who-s-using-phlex" rel="nofollow">https://www.phlex.fun/project/community.html#who-s-using-phl...</a>
Yep! <a href="https://magicnotes.ai" rel="nofollow">https://magicnotes.ai</a>
It’s pretty neat once you get over the initial weirdness. Unlocks a lot of potential. But because it’s new, there are fewer conventions, so you have to come up with them and be consistent.
I’m using Phlex/RubyUI primarily in my project <a href="https://baheth.ieasybooks.com" rel="nofollow">https://baheth.ieasybooks.com</a> and it is amazing in both performance and developer experience.
Our team was already using the pre-release version in the current project, a brand new Rails 8 monolith. Its being very useful!
Awesome project!
Looks really good and I am happy to see many interesting in Ruby world...
If I can't copy/paste HTML, not interested.
nice
Really gorgeous components. I cant say I understand who would use this or why... but this is a good thing.
the fact that this mentions Tailwind already signifies that its target audience is 10 year olds<p>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!