‘Iacta alea est’
There are several Ruby web frameworks that can be used as alternatives to Rails: Roda, Hanami, and Trailblazer. Trailblazer started off as an independent framework but has since become a framework-agnostic layer for business logic (including forms).
Of course the “anti-framework” that has featured on the pages of this blog which is made up of a loose collection of (micro-) libraries also has a ‘form object’ library, Scrivener.
Roda comes with forme (and autoforme). It is designed to make creating HTML forms easier, with flexibility and simplicity as primary objectives.
Hanami comes with its own form helpers, Hanami::Helpers::FormHelper (guide), similar to how Rails bakes this into the framework. It focuses on HTML generation. It also has a Validations mixin which can be mixed into a form object providing similar functionality to the next two items in this list.
Trailblazer has reform (docs) which leaves the HTML generation up to you and instead allows you to create a framework-agnostic form object complete with validations.
Scrivener is a small, stand-alone library for validating forms and falls into the form object category, similar to Trailblazer. It too is framework-agnostic.
At this stage it’s clear that the libraries divide mostly into two clear categories. One for a form’s HTML generation and another for a form object which often includes some sort of validation strategy.
There’s a lot of material to examine and I hope to do that in future posts.
—Saturday 1st May 2021.