Basically, I would like to write a rails 3 app that
is embeddable in other rails 3 apps (basically some routes, a controller, and some views, no persisting models)
works standalone
can be bundled up into a gem and be launched from a command (this one is more a nice to have)
From what I have read, rails engines would totally solve my problem. The vast majority of what you get when you google it is either people complaining about a lack of documentation, or someone building a plugin, not really a pluggable app. Could anyone point me to better documentation/screencasts (even books if nessicary)
Thanks a bunch
Matt, I'm working on a rails forum engine and I had to figure a lot of this out so I extracted the foundation into a detailed example that covers a lot of common needs. It's generalized so you can easily adapt it. I don't have detailed documentation yet but I link to the sources that I used to figure this out, and I'm happy to answer questions about my source. Check it out:
http://keithschacht.com/creating-a-rails-3-engine-plugin-gem/
An Engine is really what you need and totally designed to meet your reuirements.
Engines actually work a lot better in Rails3.
A lot of the complaints from previous versions of Rails have been resolved in the latest version. I have used engines quite extensively in Rails 2.x and not found them to be all that bad to be honest.
Related
I am a somewhat experienced rubyist, but I am now starting to do rails development. I know rails is used to make "web applications" but what exactly does that mean? Do you build entire sites with rails or do you build a feature for a website in rails, and integrate it in to an existing website? (I know this question is kind of vague, but any answers to how ROR is used in the creation of websites would be much appreciated).
Generally speaking, you will build a full site with Rails, though you can integrate it into an existing website, as well. It is designed to provide a top-to-bottom solution for entire websites.
For standalone features or small scripts you just want to expose to the web, you might look at something like Sinatra or Camping.
What is Ruby on Rails?
I'm also build some rails applications in that I had entirely use rails to develop my web application. It's quite easy rather than using two or three languages. But when I developed I had to use Javascripts, CSS and Ajax to create more attractively
For me it's a great framework to build website and minimal knowledge is required although experience and knowledge of ruby gives you an upper hand.
I also feel that rails is good not only to build websites but to manage it.
Also the support community of rails is awesome and is complemented by guys like Ryan bates with their screen casts.
Also when we build a website using ror, we have the flexibility to concentrate on different features at different times or by different person.
This gets a great modular structure.
So you can design the basic functionality today and tell your colleague to get the views attractive using JS and friends without affecting your functionality.
Also the external support for rails (like gems and plug ins) is awesome and makes life heaven!
I would suggest that it's a great framework and the best feature is that it is a very easy to begin and learn but it always surprises you with new things.
Thus it allows you to learn a lot!
Hope it helps.
The website/web application distinction is made because there are many Rails apps in existence with no front end or 'website' to speak of. Using Rails, one could serve JSON amongst a cluster of compute nodes for data aggregation, or text to unix sockets for display on terminals. The uses for Rails are only limited by ones imagination, and you could even use Rails for single host interprocess communication if you desired. This might prove effective for a highly skilled rails programmer rather than learn a new tool to achieve similar results.
I'm fairly new in the Ruby + Rails scene. Although I have a very strong understanding of design patterns, data structures and algorithms - there's a ton of "must have" plugins that I haven't had a chance to run into yet. There's things for migrations, resource controllers and a myriad of other plugins that make developing for these platforms significantly easier.
Would anyone be kind enough to share links for some of the most commonly used ones that every savvy Ruby or Ruby on Rails developer knows about. Something that's so important, that it might even be considered to be merged into the core at some point.
Hope that's appropriate for this forum. I surely think it is.
The Ruby Toolbox is another invaluable resource for Ruby and Rails developers
Here is the link for rails top rated plugin.
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/top_rated
You can find all top rated plugin at github.
Example:-These are some most usable plugins
http://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip
2.http://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on
3.http://github.com/binarylogic/authlogic
RailsGems.org looks like it will be a useful site.
I am trying to help some people getting started programming on rails identify which version that advice found on web pages corresponds to, and am seeking advice and/or guides on how to do it so they don't have to rely on me and/or waste time trying outdated advice.
Narrative: I am helping some people get up to speed on rails development, and their stock response to running into problems is searching google for advice. They're using 2.3.5 and thinking of moving to 3. The problem they're running into is that there's a lot of advice out there specific to older rails versions (2.2 for example being popular) that isn't identified.
I can usually figure out when the pages are old pretty easily, but they can't (yet.) It seems like random web page authors don't identify which version they're using when they're using the current version, and not all pages are dated.
This seems to be a general problem that will get worse -- current unadorned advice is usually 2.3.5 and older unadorned advice is 2.2.x at this point, but people are moving / will be moving to version 3 over the next while and newbies will be stuck looking at a bunch of deprecated/incompatible 2.3.x advice without realizing which version it is.
Any advice / pointers / telltales?
Check out API Dock. It has an excellent, annotated, and more importantly, versioned documentation of the rails API.
When I started with Rails 2.x last year, I got some books that were talking on Rails 1.x
There were things that changed from 1.x to 2.x, such as the way scaffolding works or that a framework like streamlined stopped from existence. On the other hand, there were some concepts and points that stayed valid from Rails 1.x to 2.x For example, most tutorials and documents start on talking about the model layer, how easy it is to use ActiveRecord and how you have REST for dealing with basic CRUD operations.
In general, I think with such an active community, it's actually one of the strong point of rails that you get so many shifts in innovation so fast. Actually, it is one of the strong points of the open-source community.
Background
I am interested in getting to grips with some Ruby On Rails. I've got 4 years experience programming in C#, ASP.Net, ASP.Net MVC, SQL Server and more recently Silverlight etc. Obviously I've got a pretty good understanding about the various implementation routes that you can go down when writing web applications using C#, the issue is that I have literally no clue about Ruby On Rails, other than that Ruby is an awesome pure object oriented language and that Rails is a very quick way in which to build web applications using Ruby.
What I'm After
So essentially I'm after a session that fills in the blanks, and helps me to understand the various ways of building web applications using ROR. On top of this, i've found a few tutorials but they seem to be quite vague, so any documentation/samples would be very handy to help get me started.
More Detail
Popular IDE'S to use for development (I've heard RubyMine is good from JetBrains).
Possible database implementations to use (I know MySQL is an option but which version?)
Is HTML/CSS used to style the web apps?!
Interface plugins if used?
General route to producing a highly Web 2.0 site that encompasses a fantastic user experience and a beautiful interactive interface.
...You get the idea, I just need a bit of guidance getting clued up.
Help greatly appreciated :-D
I'd highly recommend starting by reading:
Programming Ruby (also available online)
Agile Web Development with Rails
You should start with the first one, but don't read it all the way through. Once you get the basics of Ruby down, you can switch to the Rails book, but feel free to switch back and forth as you get more familiar with both Ruby and Rails.
The books are both very well written, and they're actually fun to read as far as technical books go. They do a great job of explaining the basics to a total newbie and also really digging in deep. You'll have all of your initial questions answered within a few hours.
When I tried to get into Rails, I bought this Rails for .NET Developers. It was quite useful to get going. After that, the most value I found was watching railscast videos.
For an IDE, I use Netbeans.
Different people learn different ways, but one thing I find to be very helpful for getting a real "feel" for Ruby on Rails is screencasts. The Rails site has a whole section devoted to screencasts. For example, with the 15-minute-blog video, you can actually watch someone work on the blog app and see all the steps along the way. It's not necessarily more informative than, say, a book, but it can be easier to grasp when you're actually seeing it.
The official Rails Guides are kept well up to date -- begin with the Getting Started guide, Railscasts provide quick how-tos on lots of common tasks, and the Agile Web Development with Rails (3rd Edition) book is excellent if you want to sit down and read how it all works.
There's also tons of sample code on GitHub, where you'll find just about all the plugins available as well as lots of well-designed Rails apps that will show you all the best practices.
Regarding specifics you asked about:
Many Rails developers don't bother with an IDE (they just use text editors such as TextMate on the Mac). MySQL is popular for production but for local development, Rails is set up to use SQLite, which is quick and easy. Many developers are moving to a NoSQL datastore such as MongoDb because development is quicker without schemas and migrations. You'll use HTML and CSS but you may use Haml to abstract your HTML templating. For an interactive "Web 2.0" site (as you ask) you'll want to be become familiar with jQuery and CoffeeScript.
You asked the question back in October 2009 but I'm sure other people will continue to want suggestions for the best way to get started with Rails. I hope you've already become a Rails ninja!
i started ruby on rails a few days ago using http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book by Michael Hartl. so far so good.
This is my experience, I'm at the stage where I can build simple apps. I am comfortable with code, at least to go to the right sources.
Hartl Tutorial ... go through this at a steady pace, just to understand the overall basics. No way you can absorb everything there.
Why's poignant guide is great to understand how to read code through a story, making things enjoyable and memorable.
Agile guide to rails. This put eveything together, I went through the exercises but stopped near the end. I read what I thought I needed to know how to build something my work would use.
Using railscasts to supplement my app building.
I would recommend as resouces to use apis, irc #rubyonrails, and stack overflow. You would be surprised how people contribute and help you through problems you encounter.
Re: IDE
Most Rails developers use VIM. Or at least the better ones use VIM.
It's more powerful than an IDE. I know and use at least 5 languages and VIM works well for all. I use YADR. If you were with a team, sometimes using VIM or Emacs or Geanie are your best options.
Re: Books
You should read a Ruby book before anything. And by read, I mean, try the examples.
The best book I've read on Ruby on Rails is probably Ryan Biggs' book.
Engineering Long-lasting software would be a good book focused on teaching you some Ruby fundamentals for practical reasons.
Duplicate: Django or Ruby-On-Rails?
I have been reading on Ruby on Rails, and it seems like on some threads, some users like Django a lot too?
Can someone who have used both give some insight about using them, such as
ease of use
productivity
fun factor
deployment issues
or any other framework you'd highly recommend?
Both are excellent frameworks. Though, I've found Rails to be more suited for the agile developer. For the most part, you'll run some generators to get the files you need as placeholders for your code. Things will work right away, and you just build up from these conventions. It's really flexible and has a large community, lots of innovation and interesting practices are being put into Rails. It's development cycle seems faster paced than Django.
After only touching the surface with Django, it has some interesting differences. As far as I know, you don't get the schema migrations like Rails has out of the box. But you get an extremely simple CRUD mechanism for your models with the extensible admin interface, which is great for testing/managing content. The entire project is documented really well, from the Django Book to the vast amount of information on docs.djangoproject.com.
I personally prefer the Rails way of doing things. But honestly, you need to try them both to see what works for you, and since we're talking about two very good, yet totally different frameworks, it's a tough decision to make either way. So, if you already know Ruby or Python well enough, start with what you know and just go from there. Once you understand how one works, you'll be able to evaluate the smaller differences yourself. Hope that helps.