I started learning rubyonrails but I heard about Angular.js.
Any alternative or it is compulsory to learn with rubyonrails.
or I can develop webapps without angular.js
Ruby on Rails and Angular.js are two different things. Ruby on Rails is a framework for the server side of a web application written in Ruby, Angular.js is a javascript framework for the client side of a web application. They can be used independently, or together.
This is a fairly broad question, however I'll give some general information on Angular's role within a Rails context, as well as brief info on what else is out there.
AngularJS is not required to develop web apps with Ruby on Rails. Rails is its own framework, one that handles both front end and back end functionality. In fact, to use Angular with Rails, you'd have to prevent Rails from handling the front-end aspect, and have it act as an API provider which Angular would then use to provide an interface.
Angular is a front-end framework - it is generally used to hook up to a backend like Rails, and the two can work in conjunction, though it's certainly not required. You're able to build out full applications in Rails entirely, and can build Angular applications without ever touching Rails. This being said, Angular is not the only framework of its kind, there are several great ones out there:
Backbone.js - a library which provides a ton of flexibility for the developer in how to structure their app; it's fairly non opinionated and depending on your style that can be either great or not so great.
Ember.js - a "framework for creating ambitious apps", as put in Ember's own words. It's an opinionated framework, and if you're experienced in Rails you'd definitely see similarities between the two frameworks in terms of conventions.
React.js - a JS library for building user interfaces - it's basically like the V in the MVC framework, handling only the views.
There's no need to learn any of these to be able to use Rails to build fully functional apps. If you want to build snappy single page applications, then learning to use/integrate one of the front-end frameworks/libraries with Rails would be a good idea.
Hope it helps!
Related
We want to add the routes defined by an LDAP authorization application (a pure API application) to our core rails application, under the path /ldap-auth.
We have the option to use any technology we want for the LDAP authorization application -- we could write it with rails-api, Sinatra, even pure rack -- though we lean toward rails for codebase consistency. The key point is that it's a self-contained application, with its own tests and release schedule.
What would be the most idiomatic rails technology for this use case? Reading the guides it seems that a rails Engine or a mounted Rails API app are the natural possibilities.
My questions are:
What factors should guide my choice of one over the other?
The Engine guide states that "engines and applications can be thought of as almost the same thing, just with subtle differences, as you'll see throughout this guide." However, even after reading through the guide, it's still unclear to me why one would choose to use an engine, versus mounting an ordinary rails app. I'd appreciate clarification on this point.
Finally, if we do decide to go with a mounted rails API application, we'd like to keep it in the same repo. Where is the most idiomatic place to the code? Under /lib?
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.
I've looked up plenty of information on Rails, but I still can't say I'm quite sure of what it is. If I'm developing a web app, what functionality would I get that I couldn't from html/js/php? Would every project benefit from rails, or do you need a certain goal in mind?
Ruby on Rails is a web application framework. Technically there isn't anything that Rails can do that HTML/JS/PHP can do. The point of Rails it to make developing websites easier, faster, and hopefully more maintainable. If you are familiar with PHP, then Rails is somewhat equivalent to Symfony, Kohana or Yii.
I'd recommend trying out some of these tutorials if you haven't already.
Rails for Zombies - you won't even have to setup rails on your machine
Ruby on Rails tutorial book
Railscasts - for once you get more into it
Ruby on Rails is a web framework built for programmer productivity and happiness. It's built on top of the Ruby language which means you get access to all the cool libraries ("gems") other people have written such as file upload libraries and ones that interact with web services such as AWS.
You use HTML and JavaScript with it just like you would in every other web framework out there. The difference? It's not built on top of a hack of a language such as PHP. Good Ruby code is elegant and very readable, and you will find this out in your usage of the framework.
The Getting Started guide explains it very well: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html.
What it is is a framework. It's a set of APIs, a toolkit if you may, to build web applications.
Ruby is a programming language like Python, Perl, C, C++, Java, C#, PHP etc. It's closer to Perl and Python than to other due to its interpretive nature (a scripting language if you may).
RubyOnRails is a framework built on top of Ruby to build web apps. Arguably like Servlets is used to build web apps on Java or .Net is used on C#, or Django on Python or CakePHP on PHP etc. It's an amalgamation of APIs, code generation tools, testing code etc put together.
It's popular because of it's elegance, it's choice of following conventions over configuration (you write less config code or glue code). Once you get the hang of it, there is less ceremony involved before you get from idea in your head to working production application with RubyOnRails (popularly referred to as Rails).
I've been learning the Ruby web framework Sinatra lately, and I'm finding it great to use. Most of the articles and blogs I have read about it seem to assume that it is good only for small websites, or 'tiny' web-apps. Is this true? Can a complete web application be built in Sinatra, or is Ruby on Rails the way to go?
You could, in theory, build an entire web application using Sinatra, and it would offer you more precision control than Ruby on Rails would.
That said, it also removes all of the nice features ruby on rails gives you, such as the Model-View-Controller architecture.
If you're looking to build a web application with database interaction, I strongly advise you use Ruby on Rails.
If you're looking to build a very simple API or something that just takes some data and throws it up onto Twitter or something, go ahead and use Sinatra.
There is no reason that it couldn't be used to build an enterprise website. It's fast and intuitive. Two key things in building a larger web application. While it does lack many of the features of Rails, I am yet to run into a road block.
I personally like the slim nature of Sinatra. It embraces routing instead of making it a headache.
I usually find myself wrestling with Rails, whereas I configure Sinatra to my liking.
As for database interaction, mongo_mapper + Sinatra works very well.
I have to built a social networking site on Ruby on Rails. The features in the site may change from time to time; so we will need to add/remove features with ease. Moreover, we may be building another social networking site. Due to these reasons, we are thinking to build a basic framework for social networking sites in RoR with the feature to install or uninstall extensions to the framework.
I worked previously in Joomla! CMS and its architecture for adding/removing extensions is kind of what I am looking at. In a Joomla! installation there is usually an admin side from which you can add/remove/customize extensions.
I am new to RoR and finding it little difficult to decide how to do this. Any help will be appreciated.
UPDATE 2015: this was answered in 2009 a lot has changed
Plug-ins have been superseded by Gems and Engines
For all the information you need on Engines:
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html
Engines are a fantastic way of building encapsulated and reusable code for your rails apps.
Original Answer for Reference
On the development side Rails Engines and/or plugins is probably what you are looking for.
Rails Engines are small subsets of an
application that can be dropped into
any of your Rails applications and
handle common parts of the application
from scratch.
Say for example your social networking application has a wiki, blog, chatroom etc. You would more than likely want to create a wiki engine, blog engine and chatroom engine.
Engines allows you to re-use such functionality within different applications so you do not have to repeat yourself.
Take a look at: http://rails-engines.org/
Some support for ‘engine’ plugins has
been merged into the Rails core
codebase in Rails 2.3.
I would also recommend taking a look at some public projects say on github and see how people have used engines.
Take a look at some engines:
Wiki-Engine
Skinny-Blog-Engine
Other useful links for reading
Tips for writing Engines
Rails Engines, Railscast by Ryan Bates
The Russian Doll Pattern (PDF)
In functionality terms you could still have an admin area that could activate certain features ie. your blog or wiki by allowing users access to such areas with a permissions/roles system.
ACL9
role_requirement
restful-authentication
If you want to build a CMS which supports some kind of extensions like in Wordpress or Joomla then you will have to either build it and provide guidlines or at least look into how you would upload/install Engines/Plugins from a user perspective.
Not sure on the security implications of this
Redmine has put this kind of functionality into their awesome application. You may want to dig around the source code for tips and clues
Finally Adva_CMS has basically adopted this approach and have created a number of Engines for their CMS application
HTH
Engines are still a pretty solid way to go, the new location to get info on those is located here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html
But what you need is really more application specific. A lot of applications develop these things organically over time. They start out by hand crafting a few of these and then they re-factor them periodically until they find patterns that align with software design patterns and then they develop a plugin framework.
Are you going to expose your interface to end users? To third party developers? What parts of the application are controlled by these plugins? Is it just the presentation tier? Does it affect the data model? Consider the fact that when you publish any kind of external interface, you're developing contracts that you need to honor.
You might check out these design patterns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern. They will help you figure out how to manage your development process. If you're just working on plugins for internal use, then what's the real purpose of them? What makes them different than modules?