Display Case vs. Draper

[capitalist]

What are the differences between this and Draper?

[codeodor]

I don't have any experience with Draper, so I can't offer anything useful off the top of my head.

@avdi, you'd be the best to answer this, I'd guess. Maybe @steveklabnik has some words since I know he's put some work into Draper and also read Objects On Rails.

If you guys have a moment, would you care to comment? (Does github even let me rope someone not involved in the project into the conversation like that?)

If not, I'll do a little research on Draper next week and post what would be a superficial opinion.

I guess this could go into the documentation of display_case to help people decide when it's better to use neither, one or the other, or both in conjunction.

[steveklabnik]

(Yes, it does let you rope them in)

The biggest difference in terms of implementation is this: https://github.com/objects-on-rails/display-case/blob/master/lib/display_case/exhibits_helper.rb vs this: https://github.com/jcasimir/draper/blob/master/lib/draper/view_context.rb

Usage wise, Draper pretends to be Yet Another Model, and display_case uses the helper in the controller to handle this kind of thing. That's from my initial reading anyway.

[avdi]

TBH I have no idea. I wanted to get the patterns I'd been using on projects down on "paper" before I moved on to see how Draper differed, and I still haven't found the time to do a project with Draper. I gave Jeff some feedback on it in early days but I don't know how much of that he incorporated.

Sorry I don't have a better answer. I'd be interested to see a comparison.

[avdi]

Aside: I'd love to poke around in Draper's Rails integration bits and possibly steal stuff. I put zero time into hooking into the Rails stack and left most everything explicit. I think Draper's probably a lot more advanced in that department.

[steveklabnik]

(oh, and there's gonna be a bunch of re-writing of things for Draper 1.0, so some stuff may change in the future too.)

[steveklabnik]

@avdi ping me if I can help. I re-wrote the generators, for example, to be super awesome.

Honestly, I'm pretty sure the gems are basically identical.

[codeodor]

Thanks for the response guys!

Draper pretends to be Yet Another Model, and display_case uses the helper in the controller to handle this kind of thing.

When I first heard about Draper, I kind of shrugged it off and didn't see the need for it (I was also only 1/2 paying attention). When I read through Objects on Rails and saw the Exhibit stuff, I went off to implement it myself in a project and it looked more like what you described as Draper in that quote.

Just thought it was a funny story I thought I'd share -- nothing more.

[mattvanhorn]

One of the bigger differences I think, is the fact that you can easily layer multiple exhibits on an object, where draper seems to enforce a 1-1 relationship between decorators and models

[steveklabnik]

That's not actually true, though it is kinda implied. I have an open ticket to make this use case a bit more explicit.

[capitalist]

Thanks for the discussion guys. It helped shed some light on the tradeoffs.

[wkrsz]

One Draper feature that looks very useful is automatic association decoration: jcasimir/draper@1580baa

[wkrsz]

I like how DisplayCase relies on passing view context explicitly. Draper can do that too, but also creates and maintains own context https://github.com/jcasimir/draper/blob/master/lib/draper/view_context.rb - much too clever for my taste.