XRB was inspired by XHP ( github.com/facebook/xhp/ ). XRB is a Rails Engine to be used.

Having used XHP intensively, I saw the benefits of XML literals as first class elements in a programming language. The biggest benefit was that you could easily build large libraries of components to reuse on many sites.

As I was unable to figure out how to add XML literals into the Ruby parser. I thought I would start with a more Ruby approach.

Installation

Edit Your Application’s Gemfile

---

Add to your Gemfile

gem 'xrb', :require => 'xrb/engine'

In your ApplicationHelper add

require UiHelper

Usage

Inside your template files you can now use XRB.

<%= ui :image, :block do %>
  <% ui :link => user_path(user) %>
    <%= image_tag(user.photo.url(:thumbnail), :title => user %>
  <% end %>
  <% ui :group do %>
    <% ui :link => user_path(user) %>
      <%= user %>
    <% end %>
    <% ui :group do %>
      <%= user.description %>
    <% end %>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

Defining your own XRB Element

---

Say you want to define an element ‘user`. Inside a helper file we need to add a function:

def ui_user(xrb)
  user = xrb.attributes.delete(:user)

  xrb.content = ui_output do
    content_tag :div, user, xrb.attributes
  end
end

Change the code inside ‘ui_output` to let design how your component will look like.