I have a web application that has most of it's logic on ruby on rails, and lately I've been getting good at AngularJS but I'm not a master at it. What I like about angular is that it lets you be very declarative on your javascript code knowing if an element is being referenced on the html unlike jquery. Also it has nice filtering options but that would not be needed cause rails handles that on the server-side. Is AngularJS meant to work as a stand alone framework or it can coexist with server-side frameworks?.
This is more of a discussion question, so not an ideal SO question.
Angular and Rails can happily coexist.
You can use the asset pipeline and load Angular, in the same way that you would any other JS library.
There is a good tutorial here, also, this Railscast is quite handy although it is a bit out of date now.
My advice is to have a crack at it, and then come back to SO and post specific bugs or challenges you are hitting.
Related
I'm building a Single Page (Web) Application. I'm quite smitten by Rails v5.0, especially its built-in API capabilities.
In the past I've built JavaScript frontends using Vue.js, usually with the templates provided by the Vue-CLI project. This allows deployment of Vue component-based static sites basically anywhere. It's great.
Now, Rails 5.1 has some built-in Webpack and Yarn features which look pretty compelling too. I'm not sure how to proceed with my new application.
My questions:
What are the pros/cons of integrating Webpack and Vue into Rails itself, using the Webpacker extensions available in Rails v5.1? I
intend to deploy to Heroku.
On the other hand, what are the pros/cons of using the Rails API-only mode for the backend, and maintaning the Vue/Webpack-based
frontend in its own directory? I'd keep everything in the same
repository, deploy the backend via Heroku, and the frontend via a
static host like Netlify.
Which approach would have more cognitive overhead or technical complexity?
Over the past few days, I've been looking around, and I've not found much concise information on the web about this. People seem interested in the auto-reloading features of the Rails development environment, but I get that for free already with Vue-CLI.
As far as I can discern, these are reasons for keeping them separate:
Deployment of the frontend is pretty darn simple to anywhere.
The Webpacker mode for Rails is very new, and not many tutorials or guides exist yet, especially regarding integration testing. Keeping
things separate means that my existing testing apparatus should still
apply.
Here are some pros for integrating the two parts together:
The possibility of using static assets both for the frontend and possibly for server-generated pages in the future, should that be
necessary.
Buy-in to "the Rails way", with implied future maintenance by the Rails team.
the JS Frontend would not need to be hosted separately.
Don't need to worry about CORS (?)
What other concrete benefits exist for either approach?
When i started i went the webpacker way, somewhow because that's what it looked like it was "supposed" to be. As you say, very little guidance.
Webpacker (with it's reliance on the latest node) seems a moving target, making deployment and even development more complex. For what benefit i asked and got rid of it.
Now i use vue from the cdn. Benefits:
cached close to user
almost zero installation
easy to have dev/production versions
The i write app code into the rails templates. Using haml, and in fact ruby2js, but you can use javascript just fine. That's how i started, but i like ruby, and the ruby code is almost half the size than the generated js, but i'm getting off track.
So templates are your "vue annoted" rails templates.
Small code also goes into the rails template.
More code can be defined in the assets and referred to from the app.
Even components can be written into template using the x-template syntax.
And last but not least: Data can be transferred by to_json, directly into the templates. And in the same render. Much faster than an additional query. When to_json is not enough one can use rabl to get exactly what is needed.
I hope i made that clear. I am in the process of writing some vue-rails stuff up, as there is so little to be found. Look out here (and i'll comment when the post is ready)
I tried Angular, and I liked it. I've began to integrate him into my rails-app, but then appeared some doubts about architecture
Routes. I would like to navigate without refreshing the page, before i used Wiselinks gem, it's easy and cool - just install, patch link_to helper and done. But angular have his own router, and ui-router (which is cool). I want my app to be running at the browser like Opera Mini and IE, but ui-router doesn't have such callbacks as in wiselinks. I wouldn't create mobile site version - the design is adaptive yet. It means, I would use rails routing, but I want to AJAX page refreshing when it can be (progressive enchansement, yep). What do I do?
In many places, the content is rendered by Angular, i.e. a list of posts (by ajaxing json). That fast & cool on desktop, but again old browsers! I need to render it on server for them. Or I haven't?
I'm stuck. Thanks.
This would be best trip to angularjs + rails 4...
This post clear my doubts and now i m very clear about architecture, routes, controllers, model, etc..
http://www.honeybadger.io/blog/2013/12/11/beginners-guide-to-angular-js-rails
I hope this solves your DOUBTs
and to know further about angularjs visit
http://www.angularjs.org
It's not necessary that you have to use angular routing. You can use ng-controller directive to inject controllers in your view.
Angular in general is very fast. I have been using it even in mobile browsers, it works like a charm. True if do heavy $scope manipulation, things might get little slow.
Talking about old browser support, till IE8, you are pretty good, if you follow http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/ie as already mentioned by shaunhusain, but below that I am skeptical.
I wouldnt recommend using wiselinks alongside with angular. We have tried that in a production app and it took us a long time to make this work, there had been so many issues with undead scopes and other artifacts.
Therefore, we have ended up throwing out wiselinks and replacing it with a similar directive written in angular. This way its easier to avoid problems when destroying or compiling dom.
I need some guidance to figure out how to incorporate Angular inside rails.
Reason for choosing Rails : I like their opionated approach to do things right. Also migrations, gems are really cool.
Reason for angular : I was researching and looking for framework best suited for SPA. Backbone seem too abstract. I had choice to make between Angular & Ember. I started reading Angular first and it made sense to me. So i never went to read about ember.
Reason for Angular & Rails: I researched and tried using small scale framework like grape, slim ( Yes i use php too ). But i feel need to stick to rails for long term scope of project. And personally i like doing things rails way.
So here is where i need help,
I have rails project in Rails 4.
Sign-in , sign-up everything is created as followed in Michael Hartl tutorial. Have tweaked stuff based on my requirement.
So post-sign-in or post-sign-up steps a view from show action of users controller is rendered.
I figured i'll need different layout files so i created same for outer pages and inner pages, respectively.
I don't know how to proceed i want to make use of the angular templates and routes for my single page app ( which resides post sign-in ). I am flexible if there is another way. I just need a guide how to use angular seemlessly with rails making use of rails controller to handle my rest request and using routing provided by angular to navigate around in SPA.
Hope i am clear. Feel free to edit this.
here is a great railscasts from ryan bates: http://railscasts.com/episodes/405-angularjs
also here is the source for that railscasts you can get ideas from there:
https://github.com/railscasts/405-angularjs
I'm not familiar with SPA, but I have been working on a tutorial for integrating rails and angularjs, which I'm refining over time. It may provide some answers here - in particular I am using the angular routing to provide a single-page app as you describe: http://technpol.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/angularjs-and-rails-tutorial-index/
I would suggest you to not mix angular into your rails app. Keep both of them separate.
So you could either place the whole of your angular app in the public folder of your rails app or keep it completely away from the rails app. This is more like a service oriented architecture, where your rails app serves as a back end serving as an api and the front end(Angular app) consuming that api.
There are many many nice articles the covers how to handle the authentication/authorization
in angularjs with REST APIs.Authentication with AngularJS and a Node.js REST api
Coming to the rails side for building REST API, Grape is a nice choice. Here is a nice series explaining some best practices about grape.
HTH!
I'd suggest taking a look at this tutorial: How to Wire Up Ruby on Rails and AngularJS as a Single-Page Application. I have used it for a few personal projects, so I am sure that it is up to date as of late 2014. If you want to view it in action you can head to http://goodmatches.herokuapp.com, and you can view the repo.
Try half-pipe gem which makes using bower for managing javascripts assets much easier.
Backbone.js website has some examples. But barring the first one others are not open source. I am looking for a fully functional (meaning it just works) Rails application to study. The app does not need to have too many functionalities. I looked at github and all the apps are broken in some ways.
Recently i found https://github.com/malclocke/fulcrum and it seems to be the best Rails/Backbone example but its not mentioned on the backbone website. Its also a very functional pivotal tracker clone.
I have been working on some non open source projects that use a Rails and Backbone.js stack. Both frameworks can be integrated fairly easily. Of course, it depends on how the application is setup and how you configure each framework to control more or less business logic.
To get both frameworks to play with each other:
Make Backbone collections and models for each Rails model
Route resources for each Rails model
Setup the URL property for the Backbone collections and models to work with your rails routes
Use fetch() and save() in Backbone to get and post data with Rails
I wrote a german language noun trainer using RAILS and backbone.js. It was done a long while ago while I was still learning but you can peek at it if you want.
https://github.com/bradphelan/ohmyderdiedas
I've been actively working on Myelin: http://sourceforge.net/projects/myelin/ (funded from a corporate source)
There are some caveats:
This is essentially a first for me with every technology in there... from rails, to backbone / jquery / rspec... you name it... it's new, so take the code with some grains of salt ;)
I didn't use the Backbone routing, and built a very simple 'router' of my own.
You'll need ganglia and rrdtool installed (macports if you're on a mac should work)
You'll need to alter the development config for sure.
The models, are (mostly) straight up backbone, and I use sync often in the controllers so those should be pretty good examples.
The views are a little more chaotic.
If anyone needs help with anything, just drop a line to me on sourceforge.
There's now a gem in development that provides generators, called rails-backbone. It's Open Source and getting better every day. As of today it's up to date with current Rails 3.1 (actually 3.2 now), esp. including Asset Pipeline, which is very relevant to backbone.js.
We are developing a considerably big application using Ruby on Rails framework (CRM system) and are considering to rewrite it to use ExtJS so that Rails would just do the data handling, while ExtJS would do all the browser heavylifting in a desktop-like manner.
Anyone has some experience and hints about what would be the best approach? Is ExtJS mature enough to be used in relatively big (and complex) applications? And what about the Rails part - what would be the best approach here?
EDIT:
Just to make it clear. I would prefer to do it in such a way that all the javascript client side application code is loaded at once (at the start up of the application, optimally as one compressed js file) and then just use ajax to send data to and from Rails app. Also, it would be nice to have ERB available for dynamic generation of the Ext apliccation elements.
I currently have an extremely large, desktop style app written in ExtJS. It used to run on top of Perl's Catalyst MVC framework, but once the entire View layer was converted to an ExtJS based desktop I started migrating to Ruby on Rails models and controllers. It is equally as fast, if not faster, and easier to maintain and has a much smaller code base.
Make sure that you set your active record config to not include the root name of the model in the json, so that Ext's JsonStore has no problem reading the records. There is an option on ActiveRecord BASE called include_root_in_json you have to set to false.
Make sure that you properly define your Application classes in Ext and maximize code re-use and you are going to want some sort of method to clean up unused nodes in the DOM. Javascript performance can be a real pain unless you are using the latest versions of Safari or Firefox 3.1.
You probably will want some sort of caching method for data on the server to be served to your application in JSON format at the time the page is loaded. This will cut down on the number of round trips via Ajax.
Definitely make use of Ext's WindowManager and StoreManager objects, or roll your own from Ext.util.MixedCollection
Develop your code in separate, managable files, then have a build process which combines them into a single file, and then run YUI's compressor or Dean Edwards Packer on it to compress / obfuscate the file. Serve all JS and CSS in their own single files, including the Ext supplied ones.
[2012 update] ExtJS was acquired by Sencha, who offer a GPLv3 license, and two commercial licenses.
[2008-Oct comment] ExtJS is great on technical merits, but the fiasco with the licensing several months ago have led me to look at other frameworks - I don't trust the creators of ExtJS at all now. I don't like how they worded their license, and how they pretended to be open source advocates whilst obviously attempting to profit unfairly off those who believed them.
I'm only against using ExtJS on moral grounds.
This belongs in answer to Milan's comment on my previous answer, but as a newcomer here I don't have enough reputation points to reply there:
There was a problem with the "sp is undefined", which was a result of Rails' caching of the JavaScript files into one large file (there would be several hundred files otherwise). The caching introduced some weird bugs with newlines which threw the whole thing off. This had me pulling my hair out for a while, but the solution was to update Ruby from 1.8.6 (patch level 72) to the latest 1.8.7. This fixed the problem so please check it again if you want to have a look (you'll need to do a full refresh to beat the asset caching).
I'm glad you've come across the Ext MVC stuff before. At present I can fully believe it must be quite difficult to understand, mainly due to a lack of examples, tutorials and demos. The code itself is reasonably well documented however (at least the newer code anyway, there is a lot which needs clearing out).
I am currently in the process of refactoring a few key classes before it is ready for a proper 'release'. When that's ready (I'm thinking a couple of weeks), I will generate the documentation and set up a quick site with some demos and example code. When I've done so I'll put up a post on my blog (http://edspencer.net).
My aim with this is to try to provide a framework which will make writing this type of application much simpler, and to establish some conventions. Currently there is no consensus or default way of structuring ExtJS applications, so anything we can do to move that along will be a step in the right direction! Comments and contributions are more than welcome.
I've successfully deployed a large RoR/ExtJS app of the kind you describe ("single-page" client-side AJAX driven). Ext_scaffold is pretty much a red-herring.
It's not too taxing to get RoR and ExtJS working smoothly together. The fundamental choice is whether to extend ExtJS to "speak Rails", patch RoR to "speak ExtJS", or meet in the middle. It's going to depend where your team's skills are.
I adopted the meet-in-the-middle strategy, which includes:
Extend Ext.data.Store and Ext.data.Record to be aware of Rails routing conventions
Hack Ext.grid.EditorPanel and Ext.form.BasicForm to play well with ActiveRecord associations
Write some modules to extend ActiveRecord::Base and ApplicationController to simply commits from Ext.grid.EditorPanel and Ext.form.BasicForm
That's pretty much it.
Having said that, there are drawbacks to ExtJS.
You're going to have to get your hands dirty in the internals. Don't be beguiled by the demos.
The community documentation is poor and PHP-centric.
Coming from the Github/Lighthouse-centred RoR world, using VBulletin is like waking up in 1998. I mean, there's no public bugtracker just a forum post that's updated (WTF?).
The code is a bit over-engineered.
The team have lost Open Source credibility so they've lost Open Source oxygen.
The team appear to be focused integration with GWT (can anyone say "enterpri$ey"?).
You might want to have a look at the Netzke framework that is thought to do just that: facilitate creating complex one-page web-application with the emphasis on modular approach.
The advantages of Netzke are:
Reusability and extensibility of the code. Once you get your component (both client and server side) made, you can reuse it in any place, combine with other components, or event extend it with inheritance.
Efficiency. Class for every component is loaded from the server (and evaluated) only once, which saves a lot of time on server-client communication.
It's open source, and it's in active development. It has live demos and example code.
It has prebuilt components that you can use straight away without even touching Ext JS (just configure them in Rails)
It's been used (by its author) for real-life development of a complex logistics application.
Disadvantages of Netzke are:
The code is still young, and the community small.
If you're interested, have a look at the description and design details here: https://github.com/nomadcoder/netzke-core
Live demo/tutorials can be found here: http://netzke-demo.herokuapp.com and here: http://yanit.heroku.com
Ext is definitely mature enough to handle this situation. I'm currently working on a Rails project with a lot of Ext, and the hardest part has definitely been working with Rails's to_json to render JSON that Ext can read (for arrays, hashes, models, which failed validation, etc.)
Check out the ext_scaffold plugin for Rails. I started with this and hacked away at its ActiveRecord/ActionView extensions until it did what I needed it to do.
I has some experience using ExtJS with Rails too. Using the framework is a great way to get some nice looking widgets for free. REST convention should sit well with the framework too if you use it to develop single page applications. Works well with RJS too.
Here are my gripes with using the framework
You can't really make use of flash[:notice] since reloading a single page application is silly. This makes passing validation notices and messages a chore since you have to use RJS/ javascript methods to show them.
You can't use erb much thus you have to encapsulate a lot of the logic into the json callbacks.
I've deployed ExtJS and Rails for a number of applications and they certainly can be made to talk to each other. We've put together a quick demo of an app we're currently developing in Rails + Ext at http://demo.domine.co.uk/admin. Ignore the front end for now as it's not complete - the admin section is essentially finished and you can log in to it with:
username: edward
password: rarrar
As the demo's not completely finished yet I won't guarantee that it works correctly in anything other than Firefox at this stage. There's no reason for it not to work in other browsers, I just haven't spent any time testing them yet. The point is more about the integration with rails though.
Every application on the start menu is interacting with the Rails backend via JSON. I've written a basic Rails plugin to do most of the work for us there. I'll be releasing the code behind that shortly but for now hopefully that gives some idea of how well these two technologies can work together...
While I have no experience of ExtJS (besides reading about in the "Practical Rails Projects" book) I used a jQuery Flexigrid with jrails to get more of a desktop feel.
That worked pretty well.
Ok. I use extjs gxt gwt on many project, and it very easy for develop. But I want to tell you that I built my project with extjs+gwt (gxt), I don't sure about Ruby.
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