In rails, whether to use form helpers or not to?

Question

In rails, is it recommended to use form helpers? Internally, everything boils down to plain html then why not write the html directly? Performance will obviously be better i

Answer 1

Define performance. Your performance or the applications? Say you have the same rhtml snippet spread out across your views. Say you have it in thousands of places. Maybe you even haven't gotten it exactly the same in all places. Now your customer wants to change this (maybe different order of presentation or some such). It'll take you a while to do this in all the views, right? And chances are you won't get it right the first time. Chances are in fact that you'll keep getting bug reports for years to come on places you've missed to change.

The customer will end up paying a lot for that gained "performance". Maybe hundreds of working hours. Maybe tens of thousands if you avoid the DRY principle on principle. Think of all the servers and all the RAM she could buy for those work hours instead. If she spent it all on hardware her application might run hundred-folds faster. Think of all the fun things you could be working with instead of monkeying around changing html snippets.