As a Rails developer, you’ll almost certainly need to do some unobtrusive Javascript in your applications - in fact, if you use Rails’ jquery-ujs gem, it’s almost encouraged!

Without writing any script yourself at all, you can have a form button that disables itself with a message while the form is submitted by simply constructing your button like so:

<%= submit_tag 'Submit', disable_with: 'Submitting...' %>

Which becomes:

<input type="submit" value="Submit" data-disable-with="Submitting..." />

With Rails 4, however, using the disable_with key directly has been deprecated - instead, Rails prefers that you place this attribute within a hash of data - presumably to more closely resemble the HTML attributes - like so:

<%= submit_tag 'Submit', data: {disable_with: 'Submitting...'} %>

Interestingly though, I have noticed that any hash keys placed within the data hash will be transformed into HTML data attributes - and most importantly, you can continue to use symbols, not strings, as the hash keys will automatically have underscores replaced with dashes, so:

<%= submit_tag 'Submit', data: {disable_with: 'Submitting...', collapse_element: '#share-modal'} %>

Becomes:

<input type="submit" value="Submit" data-disable-with="Submitting..." data-collapse-element="#share-modal" />

This is a really neat enhancement, and I’ve already found myself using it regularly. It makes it easier to stick with Rails helpers, even when binding to complex Javascript behaviours, and produces much neater template code.