Hi,

I'm facing a problem of cleaning up my application in Ruby on Rails. What I have is a pretty standard 3-panel, header and footer layout where different parts of the screen contain different functionality.

By that I mean for example that the header contains (among others) a select that allows one to select parts of the application and a context-dependent menu. The main content area contains obviously the most interactive stuff whereas side panels contain quick-links with stuff like shopping-cart preview, list of potentially attractive products for the customer, a selector to narrow down the list of options...

I was wondering how do I go about simplifying the design. Right now I have the stuff that provides data for the "common" stuff (as opposed to direct content that's placed in the center) called from all the actions (with a filter) but that doesn't feel right for me. I've read that "components" are also not the way to go for obvious performance reasons.

Is there something that's more like component-oriented (other frameworks do have that kind of stuff - Grails: <ui:include ../>, ASP.NET MVC: <% Html.RenderAction() %>)?

Best regards, Matthias.