Markaby, ERB, and the rails lingua franca

Rails
21

Everything Builder-based broke with the move from
instance-variable-based content passing to method-based content
passing, and the Markaby plugin (at least when I last used it with
Rails a month ago or so) required you to use the deprecated @-ways.

What do you mean by this? Could you open a ticket with the bug and
assign it to me? I’ve not been able to figure out what broke (we use
Builder templates in many places).

22

Where are the other users of Builder in Rails? I’ll compare to those
and figure out what’s going on. I thought all Builder had broken. It’s
good news that that’s not the case; the problem may be easier to fix
than we imagine.

Evan

23

I can understand the arguments for having Markaby included in the core
rails. It seems to be the closest way of maintaining the purest Ruby
environment so I imagine it could be added to the package. However,
there is hardly any documentation on Markaby and even though the
learning curve is small a newbie can get frustrated pretty quickly. Its
all in the details…

24

Where are the other users of Builder in Rails? I’ll compare to those
and figure out what’s going on. I thought all Builder had broken. It’s
good news that that’s not the case; the problem may be easier to fix
than we imagine.

“Where are the other users of Builder in Rails?”, what does this mean?
Who else uses Builder or how is Builder being used? I’m using Builder
for all feeds in 37signals applications. And a few other things. I know
a fair number of apps use Builder as the exclusive view technology.

What’s the problem you’re having with Builder? Could you start a ticket
on it? Thanks!

25

I meant “uses”, as in “uses in core Rails.” I mistyped. I’ll look at
the XML stuff.

Evan

26

When CGI first came out, people were afraid of HTML. Perl had a module
to make it easier to write HTML, by using Perl functions (eg p(‘hi’)
instead of ‘

hi

’). Ever hear of this module? Didn’t think so.

If you want to program HTML, you can’t be afraid of it. Wrapping the
syntax in another layer doesn’t add anything.

What’s beautiful about ActiveRecord isn’t that it wraps the SQL syntax
in another layer, but that it frees me from having to think about SQL
in the first place. It knows the tables, columns, how to find the
approproate records, etc. - all on a higher level than individual SQL
commands.

But if I’m going to be writing a lot of SQL, I’ll take SQLs syntax than
another layer which is the same exact thing in different words. Same
for Markaby.

27

S. Robert J. wrote:

When CGI first came out, people were afraid of HTML. Perl had a module
to make it easier to write HTML, by using Perl functions (eg p(‘hi’)
instead of ‘

hi

’). Ever hear of this module? Didn’t think so.

If you want to program HTML, you can’t be afraid of it. Wrapping the
syntax in another layer doesn’t add anything.

I don’t get the impression that _why wrote Markaby because he’s afraid
to “program” in HTML.

Markaby and HAML are cool because they let you accomplish more with
less code than html. I don’t think anyone’s advocating replacing HTML
or ERb, just making these alternative approaches more accessible.

28

Evan, look at the xml stuff in Rails. It’s Jim W.'s stuff.

29

Back in the Perl days I even bought the book on CGI.pm and worked with
it at my fingertips - the way I have “Programming Ruby” nearby these
days - it was the way to write Web apps using Perl.

30

S. Robert J. wrote:

When CGI first came out, people were afraid of HTML. Perl had a module
to make it easier to write HTML, by using Perl functions (eg p(‘hi’)
instead of ‘

hi

’). Ever hear of this module? Didn’t think so.

For the record, back when I wrote Perl I used to use CGI.pm all the
time, including the HTML helper methods.

Evan