When the topic of Ruby on Rails comes to developing web applications, an intuitive, efficient user interface is standard. User interfaces built using Rails perform redundantly with robust Ruby on Rails hosting services.
In Rails, the presentation layer refers to views and layouts that structure and style your web pages. To ensure efficient rendering and smooth visual output, especially for high-performance applications such as 3D rendering and AI tasks, an affordable GPU server cost is considered. It is similar for developers who use Rails’ Views and Layout—the process where they learn how all of these pieces work together to build dynamic, well-organized, and maintainable user interfaces.
We know developers are looking to know more Rails views and layouts, so here’s the solution. This article explains how views and layouts work, how they interact with controllers and models, and also includes some other essential strategies for effective use in your application to enrich the UI of the application.
Views and layouts render with ease in a Rails application. Rails hosting providers thus offer reliable servers, optimized infrastructure, and good tools to get an application user interface out within the shortest time possible without hindrances.
With the ideal hosting partner, you can enhance your views feature. A reliable Rails hosting provider offers:
In Rails, views are responsible for displaying data to users. Since most of the fields are going to be filled with content, views are templates whose fields are filled in with content HTML. They even include embedded Ruby, which is code that's put in them to print out information dynamically from a database or other parts of the application.
<h1><%= @article.title %></h1>
<p><%= @article.body %></p>The <%= %> syntax is used to output data.
The @article variable is passed from the controller to the view so that it can be accessed in the view to be displayed.
Partials DRY up your views with common code reusability. You don't need to duplicate identical code across various views. You can extract it into a partial and include it where you need.
A partial is a view file that generally includes an underscore, _. So, if you have a form you know you'll use both inside new view and edit view, the first thing to do is to break the form out into a partial:
<!-- app/views/articles/_form.html.erb -->
<%= form_with(model: @article) do |form| %>
<div>
<%= form.label :title %>
<%= form.text_field :title %>
</div>
<div>
<%= form.label :body %>
<%= form.text_area :body %>
</div>
<%= form.submit %>
<% end %>To render the partial in your views, you use the render method:
<!-- app/views/articles/new.html.erb -->
<h1>New Article</h1>
<%= render 'form' %>Partials make your views more modular and, hence, more manageable, so that you can modify or update UI components in one place.
Rails offers you a range of helper methods that you can apply to your views to make them concise and to the point. These helpers help in generating links, forms, and a lot of other common HTML elements.
Examples of Helper Methods:
For example:
<%= link_to 'Show Article', article_path(@article) %>For example:
<%= form_with(model: @article) do |form| %>
<%= form.label :title %>
<%= form.text_field :title %>
<% end %>You may define your own helper methods that can help keep your views even cleaner. These often go in the app/helpers directory and are available to any view.
Defining and creating a Custom Helper
You might want to create a helper to format dates like this:
# app/helpers/application_helper.rb
module ApplicationHelper
def formatted_date(date)
date.strftime("%B %d, %Y")
end
endNow, you can use this helper in your views:
<p>Published on: <%= formatted_date(@article.published_at) %></p>Layouts in Rails give a way to wrap your views in a common template. They enable defining such a general structure of your application's pages—headers, footers, and navigation bars. You wouldn't have to duplicate the same code in every view.
By default, Rails appends to an application.html.erb layout found at app/views/layouts/. It wraps every view that the controller renders in a common structure for all pages of your application.
Example of a very simple layout file:
<!-- app/views/layouts/application.html.erb -->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>MyRailsApp</title>
<%= csrf_meta_tags %>
<%= csp_meta_tag %>
<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'application', media: 'all' %>
<%= javascript_pack_tag 'application' %>
</head>
<body>
<header>
<h1>My Rails Application</h1>
<%= link_to 'Home', root_path %>
<%= link_to 'Articles', articles_path %>
</header>
<%= yield %>
<footer>
<p>Footer content goes here</p>
</footer>
</body>
</html>
yield:In other words, the yield keyword is where the particular view is going to be injected. For instance, if it were articles/show.html.erb, it is going to replace its content in the layout of the yield section while rendering.
Although the application layout is the default layout, you can still use a different layout for parts of your application. Rails allows this by letting you declare and use multiple layouts by informing the controller which one to use.
Specifying a Layout in a Controller:
You can decide that a particular controller or action should use a particular layout by calling the layout method in the controller:
class AdminController < ApplicationController
layout "admin"
def dashboard
# Action logic
end
endThis will use the admin.html.erb layout found at app/views/layouts/.
Conditional Layouts:
You can also have multiple layouts and apply them conditionally according to the logic:
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
layout :choose_layout
private
def choose_layout
current_user.admin? ? "admin" : "application"
end
endThe asset pipeline in Rails tracks all JavaScript, CSS, and image files. These are pretty vital for building new user interfaces. You can include these assets inside your views and layouts with the help of Rails helpers.
Including Stylesheets and JavaScript:
Chances are high that you have come across the following lines of code in your application.html.erb layout file. These are applied to include the application's stylesheet and JavaScript files.
<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'application', media: 'all' %>
<%= javascript_pack_tag 'application' %>Rails will automatically compile and serve it through the asset pipeline.
Most views in Rails are HTML-based, but in Rails, you can also render the JSON for an API. Instead of an HTML template, you can render JSON directly from your controller:
ndef show
@article = Article.find(params[:id])
render json: @article
endAlternatively, you can define a .json.jbuilder template to format your JSON output more precisely:
# app/views/articles/show.json.jbuilder
json.extract! @article, :id, :title, :body, :created_at, :updated_at
json.author do
json.name @article.author.name
end| Feature | Description | Purpose |
| Views | Templates that display data to the user, usually in HTML or JSON | Defines how the user sees the content |
| Layouts | Central templates that wrap around views | Provides consistent structure across pages |
| Partials | Reusable snippets of views that avoid code duplication | Allows reuse of common elements across views |
| Helper Methods | Predefined methods to simplify repetitive tasks in views | Keeps views cleaner and easier to maintain |
| Asset Pipeline | Manages and compiles static resources like CSS, JavaScript, images | Optimizes performance and asset management |
Views and layouts are also important in Rails because they are the primary movers of the work from the framework itself. This in turn presents well-structured, dynamic, and highly interactive user interfaces. Views take care of how to present data for a user, while layouts give you the structural skeleton holding together the look and feel of different parts of an application. In short, while content has to be presented consistently across all pages, they are flexible and adapt to various needs.
Using partials, developers reuse common things across views without redundancy, making it easier to maintain a codebase. At the same time, layouts provide a central template in which to embed views so that the overall structure of the application is always uniform.
For developers, that's where the craftsmanship begins and how these pieces work together. It is what makes a web application scalable, maintainable, and responsive, regardless of whether you are doing something as simple as creating a little personal blog or a complex enterprise-level application. Mastery of views, layouts, and their related features will help you create an efficient, user-friendly interface, adapting seamlessly to your users' needs.
With an added layer of functionality richness, complex web applications call for optimization. Optimizing your server, app, or website brings the best advantage of faster speed. Optimization of apps for high performance offers usable fluidity. Major apps utilize powerful and trendy JavaScript libraries for dynamic user interface building, like React, and several readymade mechanisms are available. Further, with React js hosting solutions, your optimized apps can perform better.
A developer can also opt for something more, like HTML web hosting, to tweak their apps towards higher quality, faster, and more responsive performance. In this insightful read, we will go deeper into some of the key strategies for optimizing React, including practical advice and tips and tricks that can help you build faster and more efficient applications.
React is one of the favorite JavaScript libraries used for the construction of user interfaces. It is powerful and efficient in building dynamic web applications. However, as complexity and scale evolve, performance becomes a bottleneck. Optimizing React performance is necessary to ensure that applications are delivered to users in a smooth way, improve web pages' rankings, and ultimately achieve business success.
Here's why optimizing React performance is necessary:
The first tip would be to ensure that you're using a production build of React. It is one of the react optimization techniques for seamless performance rates. The development build includes extra warnings and debugging information. Although development build is useful in development, it can make your application slower in production. Hence, for better performance, use production build. To create a production build, run the build command, which compresses your code and removes unnecessary warnings, ultimately making your app faster and lighter.
Command: npm run build
One of the common reasons for the React application's slow performance is the use of unnecessary re-renders. For every case of a component re-rendering, React updates the virtual DOM and compares it to the actual DOM, which can be rather time-consuming, especially for large applications. Developers can significantly improve this by avoiding re-renders.
Here’s how you can avoid unnecessary re-renders:
The shouldComponentUpdate() method allows you to choose which components you want to manually update. If you use React's PureComponent, it will automatically call shallow comparisons for both state and props to prevent unnecessary renders.
Using React's memo function on functional components with React.memo() to "memoize" the component only re-renders the component when its properties change.
Example:
const MyComponent = React.memo(function MyComponent(props) {
// component logic
});In functional components, expensive calculations and functions can be very time-consuming when computed on every render. React’s useMemo() and useCallback() hooks can help optimize performance. These hooks enhance the performance by memoizing values and functions.
Example:
const computedValue = useMemo(() => expensiveFunction(input), [input]);Example:
const handleClick = useCallback(() => {
// function logic
}, [dependency]);Lazy loading is a wonderful way to optimize for performance. You don't necessarily need to have all of your apps loaded at one time; instead, you can split them into smaller pieces and then load them on demand. React's React.lazy() lets you import a component only when it becomes relevant for rendering. This narrows your initial load as well as enhances your overall performance.
Commonad: const LazyComponent = React.lazy(() => import('./LazyComponent'));
This method can be used in combination with the Suspense component to render fallback content while the component is loading.
Code splitting is an optimization technique that allows you to split your application into smaller bundles, thus reducing the amount of JavaScript code that needs to be downloaded at once. Webpack is the default bundler for React applications and has full built-in support for code splitting.
You can import that dynamically like this:
import(/* webpackChunkName: "component" */ './Component');
This will ensure that your application only loads the code needed for the current page, hence minimizing the time taken to load.
If you use inline functions and object literals in JSX, you should be aware that it leads to poor performance as each render recreates them, leading to unnecessary re-renders. The solution here is to avoid or minimise the use of inline usage of functions and object literals.
Start by defining outside of JSX or memoizing using useCallback().
Avoid inline object literals and the event listeners for instances of an element. It is best to make these outside of the render method or memoize them with useMemo().
Example:
const styles = useMemo(() => ({ color: 'blue' }), []);Rendering a large list has a major impact on performance. This is mainly because rendering everything in the list takes time and slows down the application. React provides tools that will optimize list rendering and allow only the necessary items in the list to be rendered.
Use React.Fragment to remove unnecessary div wrappers that slow down rendering.
Virtualization: Packages like react-window or react-virtualized will help you optimize huge lists so that only visible items are rendered, and therefore it greatly improves performance.
import { FixedSizeList as List } from 'react-window';
<List height={500} itemCount={1000} itemSize={35}>
{({ index, style }) => <div style={style}>Item {index}</div>}
</List>React DevTools and browser DevTools such as Chrome DevTools have fantastic profiling tools. You can use them to identify performance bottlenecks. Use them to measure time taken for your components to render, to note unnecessary re-renders, and improve your code accordingly.
The Profiler tab in React DevTools lets you record performance and view how much time each component is taking to render.
Debounce or throttle event handlers limit how frequently performance-heavy operations like search input or window resizing are called. In other words, debouncing ensures that a function is called only after the end of a certain period of inactivity. It prevents repetitive occurrence of functions over time, thereby improving the performance for faster apps.
Example of debounce:
const handleSearch = useCallback(debounce((event) => {
// search logic
}, 300), []);Deeply nested components increase the complexity of your application and slow down the rendering. By breaking up large, complex components into smaller, reusable pieces, you will improve the performance and maintainability of your code.
Your web hosting partner is a major determiner of whether or not your React app is fast. A good hosting provider offers key elements that help improve your React performance. Look for the following key elements while choosing a hosting service:
Optimizing your React app not only offers seamless functionality but also ensures that users have the best experience. The best thing you can do to optimize your React performance is avoid unnecessary re-rendering with the help of a few inbuilt React hooks, like useMemo() and useCallback(). In this detailed blog, we have also included some modern JavaScript techniques, such as lazy loading and code splitting. All these tricks and tips will let your React application be fast and scalable in the long run.
Again, performance optimization is not a fix-and-forget job. You should profile your app regularly and check its analysis report to find new areas of improvement as your application grows.