by Russell Edens. He has a great take on why Erector is interesting, complete with code examples:

With erector [views] are first class plain old ruby objects. Why is this good? It gives you all the tools of inheritance and mixin’s for your views. That is cool. Especially for an application with multiple views of the same underlying models. You can refactor your views into base classes that derive and render the same data in different ways. This is object oriented design for views. Nice.

I’ve seen object oriented view code in other languages and it leads to some very powerful re-use that all OO programmers can understand. The most ambitious of these attemps was by an HR company …[that] created their own markup language that was object oriented. The nature of HR data is that it has very complicated rules regarding who can see what data and when. The OO design of the language allowed that to be abstracted to the base classes and a functional programmer simply focused on the problem at hand. They took it further, as all commercial enterprise applications do, and they allowed the customer to define new models and views. Those views were very easy to write with this advanced data access logic abstracted out. Their customers loved it. They wrote very advanced business applications on top of this abstraction.

Views as simple classes, methods, and objects in Ruby – perfect!

Erector Hello World:

class Hello < Erector::Widget
  def content
    html do
      head do
        title "Hello"
      end
      body do
        text "Hello, "
        b "world!"
      end
    end
  end
end

For more see the Erector user guide.