Episode 555: Herb and ReactionView with Marco Roth

About this episode

Recorded at Rails World, Marco Roth joins the podcast to discuss the rapidly evolving future of the Rails view layer. Marco explains Herb’s integration into Rails 8.2, how its parser and tooling improve the experience of working with HTML+ERB, and how Herb creates opportunities that weren’t previously possible with traditional Rails templates. The conversation then turns to ReactionView, Marco’s approach to bringing fine-grained reactivity to Rails applications while allowing developers to continue writing familiar ERB. Marco explains how ReactionView can identify dynamic portions of a template, track dependencies, and update the browser without requiring developers to manually wire together Turbo Frames, Turbo Streams, and Stimulus controllers. He also traces these ideas back through StimulusReflex, Hotwire, Stimulus LSP, Turbo LSP, and Prism, explaining how those projects helped make ReactionView possible. David and Marco also discuss what increasingly capable AI coding agents mean for developer tooling. Rather than making tools such as Herb, RuboCop, and Prism less important, Marco argues that agents need strong feedback loops and validation tools to recognize incorrect ou