Rails I18n – Seven Best Practices That You Should Know About

Rails Internationalization (I18n) - Seven Best Practices That You Should Know About
Helper Methods
Rails offers us a bunch of powerful ​helper methods that can be used to display datetime and
month select boxes, convert numbers to currency and display distance of time in words. Some
of them work as magic and can really save you from writing many lines of code every time.
However, be warned that some of these methods are somewhat expensive in tems of processing
time. ​distance_of_time_in_words is one of such methods – it says how much time has passed since
the provided datetime. If you are planning to use this method extensively in some view (the
typical example is the comments block to say how old the comment is), then maybe it is better
to reconsider and put it away. You might think about employing ​fragment caching here but then
you’ll need to constantly expire it. Time runs fast and the phrase “the comment was published X
days ago” should be constantly updated.
Another solution to this problem is performing the calculation on the client-side. For example,
there is a great library called ​Moment.js​ ​that supports this feature (and many others).
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