Week 16 - Introducing Herb, JSX over the Wire, and more!
This edition dives into the powerful new HTML-Aware ERB parser, Herb, and its impact on developer tooling!
Welcome to Hotwire Weekly!
Welcome to another issue of Hotwire Weekly! Happy reading! 🚀✨
📚 Articles, Tutorials, and Videos
Introducing Herb: A new HTML-Aware ERB Parser for smarter developer tooling - Marco Roth published a new blog post announcing Herb, a new HTML-Aware ERB Parser for smarter developer tooling. This release opens a lot of doors for tooling developers to build more accurate developer tooling, including more accurate tooling for Hotwire.
HTML Gardening with Herb - Philip Poots wrote two articles - "HTML Gardening with Herb" and "HTML Parsley with Herb" - looking into the details of the Herb Syntax Tree and talks about the possibilities and use cases this parser could enable.
Slides: Empowering Developers with HTML-Aware ERB Tooling - Marco Roth published his slides for this RubyKaigi 2025 talk, in which he introduced and showcased Herb, talked about the integrations and future plans, an HTML+ERB auto-formatter and linter, and gave a sneak-peek at ReActionView, a new reactive ERB rendering engine concept for Ruby and Rails.
Give a SPA Feel to Your Static Website with Hotwire's Turbo - Jean-Baptiste Kaiser explores integrating Turbo into static websites to emulate a Single Page Application experience without extensive JavaScript.
Migrating to Vite from JSBundling & CSSBundling in Rails - Ken Greeff published a video in which he shows how to swap out JSBundling and CSSBundling to the Vite Rails gem in a mature Rails project.
E-Book: JavaScript for Rails Developers is out now - Rails Designer published a new E-Book "JavaScript for Rails Developers" targeted to Rails Developers to learn JavaScript as their second favorite language.
JSX Over The Wire - Dan Abramov, one of the React core contributors, wrote a blog post about JSX Over The Wire. The idea is to render JSX on the server, sending it to the client and then hydrate it.
Building Beautiful UIs with Ruby: A Rails-Native Approach - Seth Horsley gave a talk at wroc_love.rb 2025 in which he talks about building HTML UIs in Ruby with Ruby UI.
🧰 Libraries and Tools
There are a bunch of things happening in the HTML+ERB tooling ecosystem and there is also a lot of enthusiasm for it.
Some of the projects Marco mentioned in his RubyKaigi talk are already open-sourced and available today:
herb - 🌿 Powerful and seamless HTML-aware ERB parsing and tooling. herb-tools.dev.
🎉 Releases
bridge-components v0.3.0 - A collection of bridge components for Hotwire Native apps.
proscenium v0.19.0.beta10 - Modern client-side development for Rails.
tailwindcss-ruby v4.1.4 - A self-contained tailwindcss executable, wrapped up in a ruby gem.
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See you next week!