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

I think that form helpers is a reflection of the DRY (don't repeat yourself) principle. Rather than writing the same code over to do similar tasks, creating a form helper that allows you to reuse that code is the way to go. That way if you need to make a change or fix, you only need to do it in one place. It also helps to make your code more compact and readable to abstract a complex action into a form helper. The same is true of partial views, though partial views tend to encapsulate more complex mark up than a form helper.