Introduction

Phlex is a framework for building fast, reusable, testable views in pure Ruby.

class Nav < Phlex::HTML
	def template
		nav(class: "main-nav") {
			ul {
				li { a(href: "/") { "Home" } }
				li { a(href: "/about") { "About" } }
				li { a(href: "/contact") { "Contact" } }
			}
		}
	end
end

<nav class="main-nav">
	<ul>
		<li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
		<li><a href="/about">About</a></li>
		<li><a href="/contact">Contact</a></li>
	</ul>
</nav>

Better developer experience 💃

Phlex views are “plain old Ruby objects” — templates are methods and HTML tags are method calls. If you know how to define a class with a method that calls another method, you know how to use Phlex.

Better safety 🥽

Phlex view templates render in an isolated execution context where only the instance variables and methods for the specific view are exposed.

Better performance 🔥

Rendering a Phlex view is significantly faster than rendering an ActionView partial or ViewComponent component.

What’s a view?

Views are Ruby objects that represent a piece of output from your app. We plan to support various different types of output — such as JSON, XML and SVG — but for now, we’re focusing on HTML.

Views can have an initialize method that dictates which arguments the view accepts and is responsible for setting everything up — usually assigning instance variables for use in the template.

The template is a special method that’s called when rendering a view. The template method determines the output of the view by calling methods that append to the output.

Instance methods perform important calculations or encapsulate a small part of the template. Public instance methods can expose an interface that’s yielded to the parent when rendering.

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