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

The form helpers are especially useful to let rails handle creating forms based on your model. To cite the example of the API documentation:

The following code

<% form_for :person, @person, :url => { :action => "create" } do |f| %>
  <%= f.text_field :first_name %>
  <%= f.text_field :last_name %>
  <%= submit_tag 'Create' %>
<% end %>

generates this html

You could write the html by yourself, but by using the form helpers you have to type less and make the form creation less dependent on the rails implementation. You always get a form that writes data into your model when you hit the submit button. If the rails developers ever change the implementation of this, you automatically get the correct html output from your helpers. If you had written the html manually, you would have to update all of it to reflect the changes of the inner workings of rails.