From: Jonathan Leighton <lists@...>
Date: 2006-02-17T03:51:01+09:00
Subject: Re: XML Builder - why?

On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 02:50 +0900, mental@rydia.net wrote:
> Quoting eastcoastcoder@gmail.com:
> 
> > The reason I'm asking is that I see that a lot of bright,
> > experienced Ruby programmers use it, and I'm wondering if I'm
> > missing something or not.
> 
> Perhaps because it's straight Ruby code -- you can apply the same
> sorts of transformations/refactorings to your templates as you can
> the rest of your coe.

Personally I use the two in different situations. Generally I prefer to
just use ERb -- I'm not especially afraid of angle brackets or anything
like that, however, in some circumstances Builder is so much more
sensible.

For example, I'm working on a Rails application at the moment which has
a particular item of data organised as a tree structure. To display this
tree structure I obviously need to use a recursive method. At first I
tried to do this with just plain HTML code, but it soon got very messy
with strings all over the place. I also wanted indentation so the
generated source code was readable, which meant passing an indentation
width to the recursive function as an argument... it was all very messy.
Anyway, I refactored this with Builder, which handled the indentation
for me and made the code a LOT more clean and readable because I no
longer had strings and angle brackets left right and centre.

I'd say the above is a very logical use of Builder, although I would
agree with you that using it for a *WHOLE* HTML page is going a little
too far. I guess at the end of the day though it comes down to
preference.

Also, it goes without saying that for true XML pages (as opposed to
HTML), Builder is far, far easier as it helps you keep pages well-formed
and neatly laid out.

-- 
Jonathan Leighton
http://turnipspatch.com/ | http://jonathanleighton.com/ | http://digital-proof.org/