Draft of Erector talk

I'm giving a talk on erector in about a week at the Washington, DC Ruby User's Group. Here's a draft of my talk; please provide feedback so I can improve the talk (for example, as comments at the bottom of this page).

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Ruby's flexible and minimal syntax makes it well-suited to writing libraries for various tasks

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Erector applies that to HTML (or XML) rendering

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(start up erector in script/console and go through the following examples)

class Foo < Erector::Widget
  def render
    html
  end
end
Foo.new().to_s

Erector::Widget.new() do
  html
end.to_s

Erector::Widget.new() do
  p "foo"
end.to_s

Erector::Widget.new() do
  text "hello"
end.to_s

Erector::Widget.new() do
  p do
    text "hello"
    b "world"
  end
end.to_s

Erector::Widget.new() do
  a :href => "a.html" do
    text "world"
  end
end.to_s

Erector::Widget.new() do
  a "world", :href => "a.html" do
end.to_s

Erector::Widget.new() do
  text '<>&'
end.to_s

Hooking erector to rails:

class WelcomeController <
  ApplicationController

  def index
    render :text =>
      Views::Welcome::Show.new().to_s
  end

end

Structuring views with the usual Ruby techniques: especially inheritance and methods

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Responsibilities of a view mechanism:

• quote output



• balance start/end tags

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Comparison with ERB and Markaby, quoting:

ERB: no, must call h

Markaby: for strings, not blocks

Erector: yes*

* except when you call raw

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Comparison with ERB and Markaby, tag balancing:

ERB: no

Markaby: yes

Erector: yes*

* except when you call raw

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Comparison with ERB and Markaby, subpages:

ERB: partials, helpers

Markaby: partials, helpers

Erector: inheritance, methods

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Similar libraries in other languages:

• Java: webiyo.sf.net
  

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If there is time:

• Calling helpers from erector


• Writing helpers in erector