# Your view on MasterView! **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [May 1, 2006, 8:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/your-view-on-masterview/59210 "2006-05-01T20:01:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![doug](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@doug](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/doug)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2006, 8:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/your-view-on-masterview/59210/1 "2006-05-01T20:01:35Z")
Has anybody tried (or will check out) the MasterView plugin? Anything else similar to or better than this? From [http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/MasterView+Plugin](http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/MasterView+Plugin) “MasterView is a ruby/rails optimized HTML/XHTML friendly template engine. It is designed to use the full power and productivity of rails including layouts, partials, and rails html helpers while still being editable/styleable in a WYSIWYG HTML editor.” What do you think/feel about it? ---
**Author:** ![doug](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@doug](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/doug)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2006, 6:58pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/your-view-on-masterview/59210/2 "2006-05-03T18:58:09Z")
Doug, If you decide to take a look at the project let me know what you think. I just put it up on Rubyforge recently. I was planning on creating a ‘how it works’ video and a bunch more documentation around it before I announced it on this list. I have just the bare minimum of documentation completed at this point. I demonstrated the project at the St. Louis Ruby user group this past weekend to get some ideas about what questions I need to cover in the documentation. However, all that being said it installs easily (as either gem or plugin) and has a generator to be able to get something up to try out, so one can try it out fairly easily. I was hoping to get more of that done this week so I could announce on the list soon, but in the meantime, feelfree to email me directly if you run into any problems or confusion. That will help me know where to focus my documentation/video efforts. I would also love to hear any ideas or things to add to the wish list for this. I am planning on adding an ajax table list component, database storage for masterview files, amongst other features. I also plan on making it easy for developers to add their own components(directives). To do this I need some good documentation and maybe some work on the api so that things are clear, but at least the system was designed with this in mind. PS. In regards to your question about whether there is anything similar. The closest ones are Liquid, Amrita, and Kwartz, all of which are good projects (and inspired/shaped MasterView to some degree). In developing MasterView I had different goals than each of these projects. Some of the primary goals were: - Create/extend a template engine for rails that would be XHTML friendly and thus could be edited/styled with a WYSIWYG HTML editor even late in development without breaking template. - Keep it simple. DRY. No extra config files, simple syntax with ruby flavor. - Design it specifically for ruby and rails. Use the full power and not be limited in its capabilities over what can be done with ERb - Work nicely with layouts, partials, and rails html helpers. - Reduce complexity, work with existing rails code, no extra view logic or hashes than what is used by ERb. Scaffold generate initial templates or work from existing html prototype. - Use one master file to drive all related sections, simplifying editing. - Preview in browser without running an app. Allow for dummy data in the template so that the page can be viewed and styled independently of the application. - Performance equal to ERb Let me know if I can help with anything and would love to hear your feedback. Blessings, Jeff ---
**Author:** ![doug](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@doug](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/doug)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2006, 6:58pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/your-view-on-masterview/59210/3 "2006-05-03T18:58:18Z")
Jeff, I read about the project and it’s pretty cool looking. You really nailed integrating Ruby/Rails constructs into HTML. My one concern is it seemed that everything had to be in one file. Rather than the “generation” step, where layouts, partials and RHTML are generated - would it make more sense to “execute” the templates directly? That would be a more natural programming model for someone coming to it from RHTML/ERB. Just my two cents - excellent work! ---
**Author:** ![doug](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@doug](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/doug)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2006, 6:58pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/your-view-on-masterview/59210/4 "2006-05-03T18:58:28Z")
Thanks for the feedback, Justin. A few others had mentioned the same concern about too many things in one file. In actuality, you don’t have to put everything in one file, even though that’s the way I generate it. You could use as many files as you want, however the reason I put into one file is to make it more DRY so that if you are editing a layout that is used to wrap many different views. I didn’t want to have this code duplicated, yet it needs to be there if you want to get a real picture of what it will look like in your WYSIWYG editor with everything wrapped around it like it should be. To help things at design time, I use design time only stylesheets to hide the parts you are not working on in the WYSIWYG editor and I have some runtime javascript to allow you to view a single part at a time when viewing standalone in browser (without rails running). This lets you visually work with one page at a time while still not having code duplicated. Of course when you look at the source it is all there and could get large going that route. You can still split out into many files, if you want, it just won’t be as DRY. This might be necessary for larger projects or ones that share layouts heavily. We’ll have to kick some ideas around in this area to see if we can come up with anything to give you the best of both worlds. I could create some sort of rake task that lets you update the layouts of other files from the main one, that would allow you to break things out and yet still be DRY. It’s a little more complicated doing that, but it should work. And yes, I had considered going direct from the masterview file calling ERb directly without generating intermediate (rhtml) files, and this could be the way we move in the future. However I decided to start with the generation approach so that we could see what was being created and executed by ERb (so if anyone had any doubt they could simply look at the generated code). This allows one to learn by trying and will make it easy for people to find bugs in the code. It also has a side effect of allowing you to generate the files on a different box and copy them to any rails server even one without the masterview plugin since they are pure ERb (however that’s not a big feature since we could have a rake option to generate those or something). It was mainly done for debugging, clarity, and to start simple with the intent to re-evaluate at a later date. It is certainly something that can be changed going forward or maybe even be made configurable. Thanks for taking the time to check it out and provide some feedback!! I really appreciate it. Jeff