History

Prototype at GitHub

Inspired by the benefits he was seeing from using React at GitHub, @joelhawksley built a prototype with @tenderlove of what it might look like to incorporate ideas from React into Rails.

They took inspiration from existing projects such as trailblazer/cells, dry-view, komponent, and arbre, designing an API meant to integrate as seamlessly as possible with Rails.

ActionView::Component

Once the prototype was tested in production, GitHub open sourced the project as ActionView::Component. @joelhawksley presented the prototype at RailsConf 2019.

Support for 3rd-party component frameworks in Rails

In rails#36388, Rails added support for 3rd-party component frameworks via the render_in API.

ViewComponent

In v2.0.0, ActionView::Component was renamed to ViewComponent, delineating it as a project separate from Rails.

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