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by GenericCanadian 438 days ago
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: https://github.com/inhouse-work/protos

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.
2 comments
freedomben 437 days ago
I increasingly wonder if I'm the only one left who genuinely likes erb :-D

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

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barefootford 437 days ago
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.
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GenericCanadian 437 days ago
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.

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.

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jherdman 437 days ago
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.
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GenericCanadian 437 days ago
Slots are pretty easy in Phlex. Have a look at the README in the repo I linked for an idea. I just create `with_column` or `with_header` methods that take a block and store it.

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-...

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