Rails (still) needs good tools integrated to make easier and faster — better user interfaces.

Today I was googling for answers to my three basic issues related to user interface development in Rails:

1. How I can get help on having a solid foundation for my layout?
2. How I can map the view as ActiveRecord is mapping data and controllers are mapping user requests?
3. Are there fine UI / AJAX libraries supported by Rails for a rich UI (something better than Prototype and Scriptaculous)?

Or, with other words, when creating user interface I’m usually looking for:

1. a liquid CSS layout compatible with all major browsers to make element positioning more easy
2. a Rails enhancement to make my partials reusable, to represent the view as a set of objects so I can use Ruby magic not only for Model and Controller but also for the View
3. Nice AJAX plugins (Data grid, Tree view, Calendar, etc.) to represent and manipulate data on the screen.

Blueprint CSS

It is a solid CSS framework accepted and supported by the Rails community. It is active, lightweight and live, and has good documentation. Supports liquid layouts and it has my favorite set of icons (the Silk icon set) integrated.

Other contenders were the YUI CSS Grid which it seems to be more heavyweight than Blueprint (zip size is 10.5MB vs. 3.9MB) .

Cells

There are several projects / ideas trying to decouple controllers from views like nested layouts, Matt McCray’s idea of using yield in sub-templates (a comparation of these two is here), and finally there is Cells, which seems too be much closer to the idea of “mapping” screen segments to objects.

Since it seems RSpec support for Cells is coming soon I think this will be a good choice fro me.

jQuery / jRails

And finally the most active, most equipped and Rails-supported minimalist AJAX/JavaScript framework/library seems to be jQuery.

I would not choose heavyweight and widget based frameworks like YUI, Dojo, Ext but one which is very close to the default Prototype/Scriptaculous approach.

MooTools could be another choice but jQuery has better Rails integration and has more extensions as plugins.

"jRails is a drop-in jQuery replacement for Prototype/script.aculo.us on Rails”

UPDATE #1

Results from  Hampton’s Ruby Survey:

1. Prototype —- 466 —- 38 %
2. jQuery —- 508 —- 41 %
3. Moo —- 28 —- 2 %
4. Other —- 28 —- 2 %
5. None —- 71 —- 5 %
6. Don’t do JS —- 124 —- 10 %

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