I want to create an app with Flex as frontend and Ruby on Rails 3 as backend. I have some experience with Rails but I've never used Flex before. So, I'm searching for any information about how to use them together.
I found that there are RubyAMF, WebORB, RestfulX... But the most of information about them is outdated. What is used now? What editors or IDEs are used (I'm using Redcar for Ruby and I don't have any idea if it is compatible with Flex)? What version of Flex is worth using in production (it's 4, isn't it)?
Also I found "Flexible Rails" book but it describes Flex 3 and Rails 2. Maybe someone knows more modern books?
Redcar is an editor, I'm not sure what you mean by "compatible with Flex".
In any case, there aren't any more recent Flex + Rails-specific books.
Using Rails as a service layer and Flex as the UI layer would be the only thing that makes sense (assuming it makes sense to use Flex on the client side at all, which is debatable).
Other than version-specific differences, this still holds true for Rails 3 + Flex 4.5, as far as I know.
Related
I see a lot of people asking about Blog Engines, but most of the questions & answers are rather old. Or if they aren't old most of the projects are old. I'm wondering if anyone knows of any Blog Engines that currently support Rails 3.1 or are at least being actively developed to support Rails 3.1.
I would also be interested in seeing any sample applications or blog posts written for Rails 3.1 Blogs. I am going to be adding a blog to one of my websites, and would prefer to simply use a Rails Engine or sample code if there are any good ones out there. I hate reinventing the wheel. Looking for something simple, and not too opinionated so I can modify easily to suit my own needs.
you might want to check out Refinery http://refinerycms.com/engines
doesn't look like they are 3.1 yet, but probably soon
https://github.com/resolve/refinerycms-blog
Your best bet would probably be to use Typo.
Typo is currently using rails 3.0.9. Rails 3.1.0 is still a release candidate so I don't know of any blogging apps using it right now. If you must use rails 3.1.0 then you may have luck grabbing the gem for 3.1.0.rc4 (the newest version) and using typo anyway. Chances are everything will still work.
Hope this helps.
Perhaps Enki is a good fit, currently at Rails 3.0 but there is a github branch with Rails 3.1 support.
http://www.enkiblog.com/
Interestingly BrowserCMS was recently made to be a mountable engine: https://github.com/browsermedia/browsercms/commit/6098699fed2e3dbd65815ac3a5ce0dd6acc103d2
Seem to have a bit of time and experience behind them. More akin to Concrete5 with an inline front end / in context editing facility for users, which can be a real plus.
Im looking into this now and Im getting to conclusion that the best way to do this would be mounting a rack-app(like sinatra) into your rails app, there's various basic sinatra blogs in github to start or copy, not to mention this is fully customizable and I guess very light-weight.. engines will likely have dependencies and may also break when updating gems, a rack app won`t
I wasn't able to find any satisfying solution with engines
other stuff I found:
mounting a rails app inside a rails app: http://blog.dynamic50.com/2010/02/22/rails-3-0-mount-multiple-apps-as-engines/ feels a bit weird(heavy?), but you could mount a fully featured app like enki...
http://planscope.io/blog/2012/03/08/mounting-a-blog-within-a-rails-3-application/ this blogpost talks about using Toto, it seems pretty nice, easy and simple... but the project is not being maintained and it doesn't seem to be able to support a lot of features...
I dunno about using git to post, it makes it really simple but I dunno if I'd like having non-code stuff in my commits
Monologue https://github.com/jipiboily/monologue . From their web:
It is a barebone blog engine for Rails. It is built as a Rails engine and with a focus on keeping very few dependencies to ease it's use in your project. You can also use monologue-markdown which will replace the default editor with a simple Markdown editor.
Seems like pretty active development also.
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 a Rails 2.3 application which I would like to extract into a plugin, or engine. The application has user authentication, and basic cms capabilities supported by ancestry plugin.
I want to extract the logic for the application into a plugin/engine so that I can use this code for future projects, with a different "skin" or "theme" if required.
I'm not entirely sure I actually understand the difference between plugin and engine concepts, so that would be a good first point.
What is the best approach, are there any good starting points, links, explanations, examples that I should follow. Also, with the release of R3 to consider, is there anything that I should be aware of for that, with regards to plugins etc.
I am going to start off by watching Ryan's http://railscasts.com/episodes/149-rails-engines
but obviously thats over a year old now, so one of the challenges I'm faced with is finding the most up to date and relevant information on this subject.
All tips and help gratefully received.
Actually, converting an application is pretty straigtforward. Just create a plugin-folder, put an app-folder inside containing all yor model-views-controllers folders, and that's it.
You will have to manage your migrations yourself though. Also you have to define rake-tasks to copy files to your public folder. I think the railscasts is still pretty up-to-date, if anything it is now easier in rails 2.3.
Good luck!
[EDIT: for rails3] Rails 3 engines are very clean and powerful. Check this gist by Jose Valim.
You will probably be better off focusing your engine on Rails 3, as opposed to trying to make it compatible for Rails 2 and Rails 3, due to the backwards incompatible changes. Here is a more up to date tutorial for Rails 3
also the book "Crafting Rails applications" by Rails Core member Jose Valim, has a good chapter on it. Int he shows how to use his tool EngineX which generates a Rails 3 engine structure, so you can more easily create engines for your Rails 3 projects. His gem devise is also a rails engine which is also nice, because you can easily customize it by copying the templates into the application directory, and allowing you to subclass the controllers that you want to customize more.
Writing a plugin is an entirely different process than writing an app, if you already have your app code it should be straightforward converting it into a plugin.
Consider that if you use third-party plugins in your app it could get pretty messy.
I am developing an application in using Ruby on Rails, mostly as an excuse to learn the language.
This is not intended to be a web-based application - and perhaps I have chosen the wrong language, but...
My understanding is, that in order to run an instance of this application on somebody else's computer, they would need to install ruby on rails, and a webserver (or webrick, perhaps), as well as my application code.
I am just curious if there are any other options for distributing my application as a standalone app, or perhaps just a simple way to package up a web browser and ROR together with my app for a simple, one-step install?
I have personally never needed to do this. But, I have ran across this tutorial http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/rails.html that I think will be helpful. The tutorial covers how to actually convert a rails app into a standalone exe file.
Note, Slingshot appears to be a dead project (see comments). I'll leave this answer here for historical purposes and the off-chance that it comes back
Joyent's Slingshot might be a good bet.
Joyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications like a standard desktop application, which work online and offline (with synchronization), have drag and drop, and interact with all the other desktop applications.
With Joyent Slingshot:
Create a hybrid Web/desktop application
Synchronize online and offline data
Use the same code for online and offline application(s)
Deploy and update your application easily
Drag into and out of application
Here are some further links to help with your evaluation and/or to help you get started:
Introducing Joyent Slingshot
Basic application walkthrough
Slingshot wiki
The way most people ship ruby programs, including Rails webapps, as a standalone exe is via rubyscript2exe. They describe how to package a Rails application at http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/distributingrubyapplications/rails.html. Ruby, Rails, and all the associated libraries will be included in the EXE file.
As others mentioned, Ruby is not necessarily Rails and if you really want an easy way to write a distributable GUI application in Ruby, Shoes is an excellent place to start looking.
Gears on Rails maybe?
You could always consider compiling your Ruby to JVM byte-code (via JRuby) or .NET byte-code (via IronRuby) to distribute to people who have those virtual machines and don't want to install a Ruby runtime.
You might want to check out Shoes for building desktop applications in Ruby. Rails really is tuned for building websites.
You can include Ruby on Rails by freezing it to the version of Rails you want to use in your project. They call this Freezing. The user will not have to install Rails to use your application. You can do this with any library you use in your project. If the project uses a library, just place it under the Vendor folder in your project. Then use a tool similar to what #Josh answered with to package it.
You will need a web server to run the project though. There is no way around this. Ruby on Rails is just like ASP.NET in this regard, in that it is a server side framework. The server runs the code and outputs the HTML to the browser by using the Rails framework.
Unfortunately, you may have picked the wrong framework to do what you want. Instead of Ruby on Rails, you may want to check out Shoes, which is a framework for developing GUI applications using Ruby.
You do not specifically say whether it is supposed to be a GUI application or not. From the other answers, I would guess so.
Therefore, you need to clarify what your goals are. RoR is a specialized framework for web applications. If your goal is to learn RoR, I'd say to get yourself some inexpensive web hosting and make yourself an app. If your goal is to learn Ruby, not necessarily Rails, then Shoes, IronRuby, JRuby, MacRuby and others may be good options to look at.