Render It! A Deep Dive into ActionView and Template Engines
summary
Attempts to use action_view outside Rails fail: skip action view option means nothing because action_pack, sprockets and mime types still load it at runtime; rendering text and inline ERB works but file templates require copying action_dispatch/mime_type.rb and configuring a lookup context. Template handlers compile to methods, not eval. Benchmarks compare ERB, Haml and Slim and show Haml is slow — ~10–20% speedup from my Haml fork (local branch); demos and small CLI renderer mostly work after those patches.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:29What is Action View
- 4:02Action View without Rails
- 9:54Action View in Rails
- 10:16Action View with Sinatra
- 17:42Action View depends on Action Pack
- 19:15Rendering templates
- 21:59Action View rendering process
- 31:33Template engine handlers
- 33:43ERB vs Erubi
- 35:28Haml template engine
- 36:55Slim template engine
- 37:38Benchmarking template engines
- 41:41Conclusion and future improvements
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