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.
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 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 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.
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.
link text
My current project is in Rails. Coming from a Symfony (PHP) and Django (Python) background, they both have excellent admin generators. Seems like this is missing in Rails.
For those who aren't familiar with Symfony or Django, they both allow you to specify some metadata around your models to automatically (dynamically) generate an admin interface to do the common CRUD operations. You can create an entire Intranet with only a few commands or lines of code. They have a good appearance and are extensible enough for 99% of your admin needs.
I've looked for something similar for Rails, but all of the projects either have no activity or they died long ago. Is there anything to generate an intranet/admin site for a rails app other than scaffolding?
Active Admin (http://activeadmin.info/) was released in May of 2011, and looks like it's going to become the best Rails 3 option.
rails_admin appears to be the latest-n-greatest free project as of January 2011.
...best of all, there has been a lot of activity in the repository.
Scaffolding is the normal way to create an admin backend BUT there is a project called ActiveScaffold which may solve your problem.
Here is a roundup of a few options, including more than just ActiveScaffold.
ActiveScaffold is available for Rails 2.3.x :)
Just for someonse's info who have found this question one year later like me :)
ActiveScaffold is a good solution, but if you want a more configurable and powerful tool, I think Typus is a great solution:
http://github.com/fesplugas/typus
You have mainly two:
ActiveScaffolding: the most popular but be careful with rails 2.1
Streamlined
ActiveScaffold is by far and away the most configurable/easiest to integrate/most automagic scaffolding around at the moment.
It has built in ajax support, near seamless db introspection and it even plays nicely with legacy Oracle databases (which can be a real pain in Rails).
Try it: http://activescaffold.com/
Have a look at Casein (http://www.caseincms.com/), might be what you're looking for.
Having also tried typus, caseincms and ActiveScaffold over the weekend, I can't rave enough about admin_data.
It is
super-quick to install (Rails 3 is the gem, Rails 2.3 is a plugin branch,
no digging through trees on github),
unintrusive (all code is in the vendor/admin_data folder or the gem where it belongs),
requires no set-up and optional configuration is one block in one file in your app,
correctly (!) gets all model information from your model definitions (primary_key, foreign_key, relationships etc.),
including multiple databases, SQL Server connections via activerecord-sqlserver-adapter, and even composite primary keys, as everything is abstracted on top of ActiveRecord, if you model works, admin_data will work,
works great with legacy data for the above reasons,
uses your existing authentication solution which is called in the most wonderful DRYness in your configuration file.
It maybe less flexible or pretty than other solutions, but this plugin does many thingks right for quick admin panel setup.
The most common way to create a CRUD interface is to use Scaffold.
./script/generate scaffold_resource MyModel property:type property2:type2
This command would generate a CRUD interface for the model named MyModel (singular) with two properties. Properties is what's called columns in DB lingo. So you could have name:string age:integer active:boolean etc.
I can suggest you active_admin that is best
Active Admin main site