The Modern View Layer Rails Deserves: A Vision for 2025 and Beyond

July 10, 2025 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Rails revolutionized web development and continues to evolve, but its view layer has remained largely unchanged while frontend needs have evolved dramatically. Rails has maintained its relevance by adopting technologies like Turbolinks and now Turbo/Hotwire while preserving its core principles. But today's developers face challenges the current view layer wasn't designed to solve: complex UI interactions, reactivity, robust tooling for large codebases, intergration with modern UI kits, and modern tooling expectations. This talk explores how a new HTML-aware ERB parser (Herb) could enable a truly reactive Rails view layer, bringing LiveView-style reactivity while preserving the "HTML-over-the-wire" philosophy. It will integrate with existing LSPs, unlock powerful tooling, and enable reactive server-rendered templates that could be reused client-side. I'll demonstrate what's possible through proof-of-concepts and early prototypes, showing how we can collectively advance Rails views for modern development.