Despite my recent case against high-level components, I do find low-to-medium level components useful when restricted within a narrow context. I could easily foresee abstracting some of the stuff in our 37signals applications into components and then reuse them across our similar products.
But what ever you believe that components will herald the second coming or remain skeptical as I, the infrastructure to build and use components have now come to Rails! It’s incredibly easy to use and components can either render complete screens or parts of other screens.
To demonstrate I’ve made a little movie: Components in Rails.
Components will be part of the forth coming Rails 0.10.0 release (which is due any day now).