Cells 3.5 Release Party Summary

{{{ Yesterday we released “Cells 3.5.0”:http://github.com/apotonick/cells, which is another step towards real component-orientation in Rails. *The release party was a big hit.* }}} {{{ “Cells”:http://cells.rubyforge.org/ is the one and only *view components framework for Rails*. It has a vivid growing community and had almost 10,000 downloads in the last year. That’s cool. h3. What’s new?…

Pragmatic Rails: Thoughts on Views, Inheritance, View Inheritance and Rails 3.0.4

{{{ While hacking on “Cells”:http://cells.rubyforge.org/ for Rails 3 with Yehuda earlier this year we were discussing if Cells’ view inheritance will be superseded by Rails.Yehuda patiently *postponed any work on it* with the words _”we will do that for you”_ 🙂 Apparently, he didn’t lie. It seems that “view inheritance will be available directly in…

Spec your Cells with rspec-cells

{{{ Today we released “rspec-cells 0.0.1”:https://rubygems.org/gems/rspec-cells which brings @#render_cell@ to your cell examples. While we ship Cells with a test case for @Test::Unit@ the RSpec example group for cells has been missing for a long time. Based on “Dmytro Shteflyuk’s rspec-cells for RSpec1”:https://github.com/kpumuk/rspec-cells we now *got support for RSpec2*. h3. Usage Put the following code…

Let’s write a Reusable Sidebar Component in Rails 3!

{{{ This is a real world example *how to use “Rails Cells”:https://github.com/apotonick/cells, the popular gem for creating reusable view components*. The following post is clean and all-ages. Let’s just all be friends, no bashing, no f-words today, just a brief HOWTO. It is *different from what you might have learned from Rails so far*. This…

Rails Misapprehensions: What the fuck is MVP?

{{{ People usually make me feel slightly embarassed when they ask things like *”How does Cells handle MVP?”* or, even better, *”Is there any MVP _implementation_ in Cells?”*. Frankly, *I don’t have a fucking clue about the _real_ differences between MVP and MVC*. In the past I usually deflected people’s attention by buying beers instead…

Rails Misapprehensions: Cells don’t break MVC

{{{ I was posting “a stupid simple example how Cells can be used”:http://nicksda.apotomo.de/2010/10/why-rails-controllers-need-a-double-render/ the other day. This controversial post got lots of great comments, thanks to all! While some just questioned Cells and its use, a few *comments really bashed the project* in a very aggressive way. *I like that.* The rudeness in some sequential…

Why Rails Controllers need a Double Render

{{{ In one of my last posts I “already discussed the improvements”:http://nicksda.apotomo.de/2010/10/10-points-how-cells-improves-your-rails-architecture/ Cells brings to your Rails app by *providing view components*. The last day I had an lively discussion about the concept of _partials_ or page fragments in Rails. *Partials make me feel sick.* People ordinarily use ’em in order to have “_DRY_ code”.…

10 Points How Cells Improves your Rails Architecture

The Cells gem has been around in the Rails community for more than four years now. It has hundreds of pleased users who reported all kinds of use cases and how cells improved their apps. Here’s a compilation of the best practices. The challenge A shopping cart in a Rails app. Usually you’d take a…

Cells for Rails 3 considered stable!

We finally pushed out the 3.4 gem of Cells, that’s view components for Rails. Check out the github repo. What’s Cells? If you’re sick of partial+helper botching, if your views are getting too complex or you ever dreamed of rendering actions within actions, Cells is for you! How can I get it? Just run $…