I am planning to build a website. I can build the front end with html,css and javascript with the help of twitter bootstrap and jquery ui. Actually i have done a bit of work and it looks good to me.
But I am short of knowledge in case of server side language, (just learning python and django in fact).
So is it advised to build by blog without the database things and all? or should i delay it by 3-4 months until i learn server side programming?
Can I do thing like searching posts, sorting them , comment on post with out the use of databases?
Is it easy to transform my blog to a database based one in later stage easily without taking it off the web?
ps: i dont want to use blogging platforms like wordpress.
you can make a website using static web pages. But that wont be really good enough for your users or readers. Besides that you really have to put a lot of time in manually writing the code for each page.
But if you choose to build a dynamic blog that will be better for the readers. You deploy functions like search , comment more easily.
Using a free and open source blogging platform like wordpress will cut down your task. It has ready made themes, plug ins available to get your tasks done and customize your site the way you want.Again it will be far more secure and attractive.
So my suggestion will be to go with wordpress.
And as far as the learning par is concerned you will learn more stuff while working with wordpress than building a static site
Related
I've been using Ruby on Rails since a little more than one year now and I've always do it in a casual way, I mean, everything in one place (front & back), using the standard .html.erb file populated by the associated controller method.
Otherwise, today in our project, I have the need to separate the front and the back end for multiples reasons (code maintainability / clarity, better architecture, more reactivity, etc...).
I've done plenty of researches, watch some conferences (1, 2, 3), but didn't find my solution yet. It looks like to be a question that comes often, but what is the best practice/tools to separate the backend and the frontend of a Ruby on Rails app?
I don't feel we need (yet) a huge JS framework like React/EmberJS/Angular/etc...
First I was thinking about something like Middleman/Jekyll and make the communication via JSON and API calls, but it seems like that it's not a good solution for dynamic website.
So is there a frontend framework that works well with a Rails API and which is easily maintainable and upgradable (add feature/extension to it like gems)?
Thanks for your insights.
A friend of mine wrote this great article/tutorial on Rails as a backend API.
http://blog.launchacademy.com/the-basics-of-building-an-api-in-ruby-on-rails/
As well as this tutorial on Rails/Ember.js
https://github.com/diegodesouza/Project-Planner-EmberJS
You can get an idea of how it's done and implement your preferred front end framework.
Hope it sheds some light on this question.
I have a similar setup as one of the commenters on the question.
I'm using Rails mainly for just the project structure, to define some page layouts, and for ActiveRecord.
I then have my JSON APIs defined using the Grape API framework.
I have a SPA, written on AngularJS that lives in the public/ folder. It doubles as my mobile app, made possible by phonegap. If my Angular app didn't double as my mobile app, I could've possibly just used the asset pipeline to serve up the SPA. To compensate for that, I have a separate build task written in Grunt to minify/uglify my JS/CSS assets before I deploy them out to production.
I also use Comfortable Mexican Sofa for my static content pages.
It took some trial and error to get things right, but overall I find that this setup serves me pretty well.
I have a really stupid question in my mind.
I have used Wordpress to create a website for long time, but I dont want to use it anymore. And now I am looking for little bit different approach. Otherwise, I am quite new in Ruby on Rails. I have read some books and I am not feeling in this matter so confident. So, here is the deal:
My friend asked me to create a simple website for his company. He wants only super simple static website which will contains these pages:
Home
Products
Contact
Each page will contain simple information and there is no need to implement contact forms and other basic functionalities. I also want to deploy this app on Heroku, because he has not a lot of money and we are looking for free hosting. Moreover, I think that the best approach in this matter will be some kind of CMS which will help him to edit the website.
The overview of final solution:
Static webpages with simple CMS
Using twitter bootstrap for basic layout
Deploy on Heroku
I appreciate every contribution in this matter.
Thank you
Everything you have said suggests that you should stick with WordPress. It's perfectly capable of presenting a non-blog static website (use Pages instead of Posts) and there are some excellent themes available. WP has, over the years really become a CMS that's also good for blogging. There are other tools like Drupal that may be appropriate.
I set up a WP site with almost exactly the same goals for some very non-technical people; with a little training they eventually learned how to manage the site, upload images, add content, grant permissions to others, and do a lot of other pretty cool stuff. I have been using Rails since 2007, but for that case, it was not the right solution.
Rails is a very (very!) sophisticated web development environment used to build complex and scalable dynamic websites. With power comes a level of complexity several orders of magnitude higher than WordPress. Even if you use refinerycms you still need to do a lot of complicated setup, and need to know a lot of stuff. Even if you're using Heroku and following a RailsCast like the one for refinerycms, you'll undoubtedly hit some wall where you really need to understand more ... Rails is alluring this way -- seems simple.
If you are using this a reason to learn Rails, and are willing to invest some time, then by all means go for it. But if you want a simple solution, it's not the way. Learning Rails is like learning to fly a plane, but harder.
For static pages with rails, you can use High Voltage gem. You can find the detailed usage of this gem in this blog post . Once you create the pages, then you can easily deploy your app as like normal rails app in the heroku.
a friend of mine wants to create a simple inventory database that can be deployed on the web.
He has had a lot of experience with Database tools like Paradox. Moreover he has experience with writing Macros and programs with Basic, and even a bit of C++ experience. He uses Windows and Mac OS X, though mostly Windows.
If the requirement of having a web application wasn't there I would recommend MS Access.
Currently I see these options:
A) Ruby on Rails
Pros:
easy to start out (even on Windows?!)
at least from a programmers point of view perfect to create simple CRUD applications
can be deployed at virtually every popular Cloud hoster
I could easily assist if there were problems
Cons
ActiveRecord is from my point of view too technical
Designing forms requires ability to fiddle around with CSS and HTML
B) VB.Net
Pros
he has experience with simliar programming languages
easy to create forms and possible to deploy CRUD apps on the web
Cons
can be deployed only at few hosters (only Azure?)
simple problems can be quite difficult to solve in VisualBasic
C) Cold Fusion, ...?!
Pros/Cons
I have no idea
I am happy to hear about your suggestions.
Thanks, Philip
I have yet to use it, but the http://www.force.com/ platform (which salesforce.com is built upon I guess) is supposed to make it easy to develop data driven apps for more like business analyst roles. There is a cost to host it, but one app isn't that much on a monthly basis and the 30 day free trial would let you figure out if it worked for you or not.
If you are looking for database application frameworks for people who are not software developers, you might look at LightSwitch. It is designed for that particular demographic.
As much as I like Ruby on Rails AND the .Net platform for database-driven apps, they are both designed for developers to use. Going to something designed for your task might just be what your friend needs.
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/lightswitch
Check out the examples on agiletoolkit, the php framework with jquery and php form examples. It's php with some jquery but to get a basic application up and running against a database, you dont need to know much php at all.
The five lines are the code shown on the left of the image are all thts needed to create a CRUD based on a database table with both a form and a grid with specified columns. It will open a jquery dialog for ADD and EDIT and uses AJAX to update the form.
It also has built in functionality to add one click sorting on the column headings, pagination so you dont get an endless grid on one page but get << < 1 2 3 .. N > >> style links to page through the results set and a search box to filter the results to a specified subset.
Note the colours are added by CSS and can be removed.
The second negative point for Rails ("Designing forms requires ability to fiddle around with CSS and HTML") could be easily mitigated with the use of a gem that generates forms (like formtastic or simple_form).
Apart from Rails I would suggest Monk which is a lighter-than-rails ruby-based web framework. Its components are loosely held together and there are many skeletons (web app templates) to choose from.
Pros
multiple skeletons to choose from
very light/minimal (a new developer will not get lost in the myriad of files and folders that Rails is)
as easy to deploy as Rails (is rack based)
Cons
does not seem to be as well-maintained as Rails
most Ruby stuff don't play well in Windows (AFAIK)
PS: on the second positive bullet of rails (and ruby) I would like to add Heroku which is a GREAT service for getting-started projects.
Building CRUD Apps using ZK Studio is very easy.
CRUD Apps can be built in 5 to 6 steps. Check it out.
Rails is the most innovative and easy approach to creating crud apps ever.
There are plugins like active_scaffold and hobo that allow you to create CRUD apps without having to write almost any code.
(A while back I read this great post: http://aaronlongwell.com/2009/06/the-ruby-on-rails-cms-dilemma.html, discussing the "Rails CMS Dilemma". It describes conceptual approaches to managing content in websites vs web apps. I'm still a beginner with Rails, but had a bit of a PHP background, and I still have trouble wrapping my brain around this.
A lot of what I run into is customers who want a website that is not 100% website, and not 100% web app... That is, perhaps there are several pages of business-to-public facing content, but then there are application elements, and the whole overall look is supposed to be cohesive. This was always fairly simple in PHP, as you just kind of dropped your app code into the PHP "script", etc (though I know there are plenty of cons to this platform and approach).
So I am wondering, what is the best approach in Rails for doing this?
Say you have an application with user authentication and some sort of CRUD stuff going on, where users collaborate on projects or something. Well, what is the optimal approach for managing the text/images of the "How This Site Works" and "Our Company" pages, which people may also want to view? Is it just simply having a pages controller and several text fields, with an admin panel on the back end that lets you edit those fields? Or is it perhaps a common approach to start off with something like Refinery, and then build on top of it for the non-content-driven areas of a site?
Sorry if this is a dumb question. It's just that I've read Hartl's book and others, and they never address this practical low-level stuff for a beginner... Sure, I can build a Twitter feed now, but what Twitter's "About" page (http://twitter.com/about)? I can't just throw text into a view and give that to a client... They want a super easy way to see the site tree, edit content areas, AND administrate/run their Twitter feed or whatever.
Thanks for your help.
I think you're looking for a CMS that runs as a plugin in your Rails application. If that's the case, I'd suggest that you try http://github.com/twg/comfortable-mexican-sofa
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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