June 18, 2026
For years, Rails developers have enjoyed one of the simplest and most productive ways to build web applications: write HTML with ERB, let Action View render the templates, and move on.
While the Ruby language, the parser, and the tooling ecosystem have evolved dramatically over the last decade, the view layer has remained largely unchanged. That may finally be starting to change.
During RubyKaigi 2026, two projects generated enormous excitement within the Ruby community: Herb and ReActionView. Together, they suggest a future where Rails views become faster, smarter, and significantly easier to work with.
Meet Herb
Herb is a modern parser and tooling ecosystem for HTML + ERB templates.
Instead of treating ERB as plain text, Herb understands the structure of a template. That makes it possible to build features that Rails developers have wanted for years:
- reliable formatting
- syntax-aware editing
- better linting
- richer IDE support
- more powerful static analysis
In many ways, Herb does for ERB what Prism has done for Ruby itself: it provides a solid foundation that tools can build upon.
Although developers will mostly notice improvements inside their editors, Herb represents a much deeper investment in the future of Rails tooling.
Introducing ReActionView
If Herb modernizes how templates are understood, ReActionView modernizes how they are rendered.
ReActionView is an experimental implementation compatible with Action View that introduces a new internal architecture designed around structured template trees rather than traditional string concatenation.
This opens the door to incremental rendering, allowing portions of a page to be reused instead of rebuilding every piece of HTML from scratch.
Many developers immediately compared the idea to React’s Virtual DOM not because Rails is becoming a client-side framework, but because similar optimization techniques are now being explored entirely on the server.
Server-side rendering remains the goal. The implementation simply becomes much more intelligent.
Why This Matters
Most Rails applications still rely heavily on server-rendered HTML.
Improving Action View means improving the experience of millions of existing applications without requiring developers to adopt an entirely different frontend stack.
The potential benefits include:
- faster rendering
- more efficient updates
- better developer tooling
- improved maintainability
- a stronger foundation for future Rails features
Just as importantly, these projects reinforce Rails’ long-standing philosophy: making the simplest approach also the most productive.
Community Reaction
The response from the Ruby community was overwhelmingly positive.
Many developers described the presentations as one of the most exciting announcements from RubyKaigi 2026. Others called it the beginning of a new era for Rails views.
While both projects are still evolving, they demonstrate that Action View is far from stagnant. Instead, it is receiving the kind of architectural attention that has transformed other parts of the Ruby ecosystem in recent years.
Learn More
If you’d like to explore the project firsthand, the Herb team has published comprehensive documentation covering the parser, language server, formatter, linter, rendering engine, and the experimental ReActionView project.
The documentation also explains the long-term vision behind Herb: creating a modern, HTML-aware ecosystem for ERB templates that enables better tooling, safer rendering, and a next-generation developer experience for Rails applications.
Looking Ahead
Herb and ReActionView are not about replacing React, Vue, or Hotwire.
Instead, they aim to make traditional Rails rendering significantly more capable by modernizing the foundations developers have relied on for nearly two decades.
Whether every idea eventually lands in Rails core or not, one thing is already clear:
The future of Rails views looks far more exciting than many developers expected.
Linking Ruby knowledge from the most remote places in the world. 