I am using a gem that somebody else wrote to serve the fabric javascript library. The gem is using an old version of the library (1.3) and I'd like to be using 1.4 (the latest version). I haven't found any other gems using this version. My question is, is this the best way to load assets, or is there a more preferred method? And, if so, how would I go about building this gem with the latest version of this library?
In my opinion, it is good to do so in most cases.
In your situation, depending on how much time you have, you may want to do one of the following:
1. Contribute to the gem
If the gem is open source, you may fork it, update to the newest version, and do a pull request.
By this way you also give contribution to the rails whole and the others who are facing the same problem as well.
Downside is this takes time. You have to wait for the author to accept the pull request and wait for the next version of the gem. But you can point your Gemfile to use your forked version until the new version is out ;)
2. Write your own gem
Writing a gem for rails providing assets is actually not difficult. You may follow other existing gem's structure and should be easy to understand.
A good example is https://github.com/rails/jquery-rails
Downside is you have to maintain the gem. Otherwise when fabric 1.5 is out, another one would ask the same question as yours again.
3. Put the assets in your vendor directory
Rails project by default do have a vendor directory. It's ok to put external assets here as well.
The above are my preferred way to manage external assets.
Related
My rails 4 project depends on Comfortable Mexican Sofa (CRM) which is loaded as a gem.
I checked out this gem as a submodule of my git repository.
Moving forward, this gem is becoming part of my project: I'm adding features to it
that depends on classes of my projects.
I would like to keep this gem as a submodule (to be able to pull changes from
the main repository) but still be able to add code that rely on my project.
What's the cleanest way to achieve that ?
(should I put the whole gem submodule into my lib folder for instance ?
should I keep it referenced as a gem ? etc...)
should I keep it referenced as a gem
Yes, you need to keep it referenced as a gem.
One of the benefits of using external libraries is that they are maintained by a group of very clever people (most of the time). It would be highly unlikely that you're going to be able to keep the submodules you include up to date as much as the gem owners etc.
What you're best doing is either overriding specific parts of the gem (EG like how many people override Devise functionality with their own controllers), or to see about creating an API for the gem, which you can populate from your app.
For me, in development, separation is always better then binding. I would recommend to leave it as gem and develop in the separate repository.
I want to use googlecharts in my rails App, and I decided use it directly without using wrapper library.
Currently I download jsapi file from https://www.google.com/jsapi and rename it to jsapi.js, then move the file to vendor/javascripts/google/jsqpi.js.
Then require the file in application.js.
Now I can use the library I want only to know if this is a right way to use the third party library in rails.
Is there better way than this way?
That is perfectly acceptable. vendor/assets/javascripts is the correct location for third-party javascript files.
Sometimes you can find gems that include third-party javascript libraries and integrate them into the asset pipeline for you (e.g. jquery-ui-rails gem). This is nice because it makes you not responsible for handling the actual files and is easier on your version control software (a single line in your Gemfile vs entire files). You can also update the files with bundler. However, this tends to only be practical for really popular libraries. Sometimes you can find gems for the javascript library you are looking for, but the gem hasn't been updated in ages. Of course, you could always roll your own gem that includes the libraries you want.
Have you taken a look at googlecharts gem
its full of examples
So I installed Ruby on Rails(first time) and got down to starting a new project and a server. So as expected there was an error on running the Rails server command. Some gems needed to be installed, apparently. The bundle install command didn't work for some wierd ssl issue. So I decided to do it all
manually.
What strikes me as odd is that there's a gem for jQuery: jquery-rails. I don't understand the point of this, really. Why not simply download the jquery file and put it in public.
What's the point of having a gem here.
Is it simply convinience or is there another important reason behind it?
Jquery-rails does 2 things. First of all it bundles the appropriate version of jquery. I consider this only a convenience for jquery itself. For something like jquery-ui, jquery-ui-rails does a lot more: since jquery-ui is modular, that gem will serve to clients only the bits of jquery-ui you are using.
The other thing in jquery-rails is jquery-ujs. This is javascript that makes things such as passing the :remote => true option to form_for work. It used to be that rails itself contained a version of this for prototype, but with rails 3 this was extracted from rails to make it easier to use other javascript libraries than rails' previous default of prototype
I think this is a good idea, because it makes JQuery available as a versioned dependency.
If you need to update JQuery, you just have to change the version at one place in your app, and every page that needs it will use the new version.
And based on its homepage, there's also a test helper that you can use in your tests.
How am I supposed to use bootstap with rails 3.0 rather than >= 3.1 ? is there any plugin which supports rails 3.0 ?
I think all of the bootstrap gems require Rails 3.1 or greater. I recently had bootstrap on a 3.0.10 Rails app using the Less.js file that you download from their site: http://lesscss.org/. This is the simplest most basic way to use Twitter-Bootstrap; the file compiles all of your "my_file.less" files into css on the client side.
However, if you want to modify the variables (which is the real power of using this framework) than you need to compile it. You can take a look at this Less compiler: http://wearekiss.com/simpless. I've never tried that, but I hear good things about it and it works on Mac, Linux, or PC.
Probably the easiest thing to do - if you want to compile the code on server side - would be to upgrade your project to Rails 3.1.1 and just use one of the Twitter Bootstrap gems. This is actually exactly what I ended up doing. I was able to update my app to 3.1.1 and I used the Boostrap-Sass gem (just because I slightly prefer Sass).
If you decide to upgrade, follow this RailsCast: http://railscasts.com/episodes/282-upgrading-to-rails-3-1
It helped me a lot.
Ryan Bates also offers a video on how to incorporate Twitter Bootstrap into a Rails app: http://railscasts.com/episodes/328-twitter-bootstrap-basics.
Here's a link to the Sass version of Bootstrap that I am currently using: https://github.com/thomas-mcdonald/bootstrap-sass
Many solutions : you can upgrade to rails 3.1+, might be the better (not the easier, depending on you app) way. You can include the static files yourself if you don't intend to change anything that is handled at the less level. You can do it even if you intend to, but you'll have to recompile the files yourself (or find a way to automate it). Finally, there might be a gem out there that is compatible with rails pre-asset-pipeline, or an old version of a gem. You'll have to look for yourself if you absolutely want a gem.
I have features I would like to be portable between my own Rails applications.
I wonder if I should create a gem or a plugin for each feature I want to be portable (sharable).
They are just for Rails (for now) because they include css, html, js and image files.
But I have been wondering, the things provided with plugins could be provided with gems too but not the opposite? So maybe it's better to learn how to create gems, because then you I don't have to learn how to create both gems and plugins? And gems seem to be more popular these days.
But then, from what I can understand one gem is shared between all rails app in the OS. So that means I can not customize it for each Rails app right? In that case, maybe creating a plugin is better cause it should be allowed to customize (editing css, js etc) each feature and to have it stored inside the Rails app itself and not in the OS level.
Some advices would be appreciated!
UPDATE:
So gem works great with css, html, js and image files? In a plugin I think you can have a MVC, your own models, views and controllers. Quoted from Rails guides "Storing models, views, controllers, helpers and even other plugins in your plugins". Is this possible too in a gem? Eg. I want to add a extension that gives me a nice Shopping cart (with own migrations, mvc, asset files) that will be hooked into the current Rails app. Is this possible as gem or only as plugin?
You're right that gems offer a little more than plugins. Versioning and dependencies on other gems being the main ones for me.
One gem needn't be shared across everything using ruby. You can install multiple versions of a single gem and specify in your environment.rb that a gem requires a specific version. E.g.
config.gem 'my-gem', :version => '1.2.3'
Also you can freeze gems into your rails application so that you know you are working with a specific version.
You might want to look at the jeweler gem which makes creating your own gems easier.
UPDATE
To include CSS, javascript etc I think you'll need to make an Rails engine which can then be bundled as a plugin or a gem. I've not done this but there's some coverage here and here.
The push with Rails 3 seems to be towards gems and away from plugins as a lot of support has been added to make gems work as well or better than plugins ever did. A well constructed gem is a great thing to have and share between different applications, and also reduces the amount of testing you will have to do since you can test the gem thoroughly before integration.
For extensions to Rails that use CSS, HTML and other assets, it might be that you need to build an engine to bundle this all up and allow it to fit neatly into an application.
As of Rails 4, plugins will no longer be supported.
Gems are the way forward.