phlex VS Cells

The community was a delight! I can't even count how many people I connected with, and it was just great to meet people whom I had previously only interacted with online. Also got to meet a lot of those people who significantly contribute to the Rails ecosystem. Everyone I said hi to was more than willing to spare time and nerd out and share experiences. I was also thrilled to connect with Philip, who shares my enthusiasm for Phlex. He provided me with some exciting ideas for creating an even more crazy yet cohesive form object with Phlex.

Why use ActiveAdmin or RailsAdmin: Brick is not nearly as configurable -- at least yet! With Brick you can drop in your own model / controller / view template and it will use it, but on its own you can not change theming / use it to do templating tricks / etc. Currently working hard to arrive upon a straightforward and logical approach so that all of this will be possible. Looking into Arbre (used by ActiveAdmin) and Phlex for inspiration.

Phlex is an incredibly refreshing gem created by Joel Drapper. It introduces a remarkable way to build views in pure Ruby, as exemplified below:

A few months ago I came across https://www.phlex.fun and thought it was a nifty little library that could be useful for creating components. Since then I've been playing around with it in Rails, using it more seriously, and finally took it to a point where I built a Rails application with 100% Phlex components and 0% Erb. The other crazy thing is I figured out how to inline the Phlex view components into a controller, so prototyping Rails apps feels vaguely familiar to prototyping one in Sinatra.

A colleague has been using Phlex and I’ve since tried it as well. For me having it all be straight ruby, in one file, has worked and just from my personal preference something I’ve enjoyed over view_components.

phlex

You might want to take a look at Phlex, which essentially has the same syntax: https://github.com/joeldrapper/phlex

It can be used with Ruby on Rails or other frameworks because I implemented with trailblazer/cells.

I agree, though cells does still have a larger following.

Better official documentation for cells: https://trailblazer.to/2.1/docs/cells.html

So what about the world outside Rails defaults? There are quite a few independent projects trying to help build components in the Rails view layer, among the more famous being Draper (utilizing the decorators pattern) or Cells (full-featured components in views). In the end, we decided to take a deeper look into a relatively new one – the ViewComponent framework.

GitHub has recently posted an article about view_component: https://github.blog/2020-12-15-encapsulating-ruby-on-rails-views/ Before it gets too popular I think I should share my experience with cells So that developers can have another chance to re-think and pick what to use for "encapsulated view components".

This, combined with the fact that we are using cells gem for some view components, resulted in another couple of hours of hunting for the problem (it takes some time to debug what exactly and how exactly changed in Rails internals) and then fixing this problem. At this moment, I already spent over 8 hours debugging Rails internals, different gem internals, fixing application, fixing tests, screaming internally.