I have a project going on, and I am in charge of the front-end design, whereas my developers will work on the back-end with Ruby on Rails.
I do not know Ruby on Rails, and am designing front-end using XHTML, CSS, jQuery, 960.gs CSS Framework. My developer is supposed to take my design and connect the elements of back-end to it, with Ajax too.
What are the things that I should know while designing the template/view so that I won't kick my developers' asses with my design? How to help the connecting of elements painless? I understand I must avoid . Some Ruby on Rails developers also prefer Blueprint CSS Framework over 960.gs.
Any guidance? Thanks.
Generally the Rails templating system is quite flexible and will enable developers to create even complex designs. The CSS framework should not make such a difference. However if they are using Rails 2.x it is markedly easier to use Prototype instead of jQuery. However Rails 3.x is also agnostic to javascript library.
A relatively good overview is the official guide. You might also try out this tool for cutting up your views and layouts.
I can speak from the developer point of view.
The things that piss me off are too complicated css structures, keep it simple and abstract as you can.
The other things is naming classes and ids, in general try to find out what models the developer is using and name your classes and ids accordingly. E.g. for a blog with posts:
#posts .post for a post in the index view and #post for a post in the show view.
I never care what css framework the designer uses, as long as it works.
And lastely, if you design different html pages, be aware that we often have only one or two layouts, that's eg. /views/layouts/application.html.erb and we usually try to keep that number low as possible.
jQuery is find, ever been my preferred choice over rails' own prototype.
Related
I love HAML, however recently our projects have come under some scrutiny with regards to reliance on non-html structured templates. I thought I'd take it a step further by asking the question, "How can we use pure HTML design based templates in Ruby on Rails?"
The closest thing I've found so far is a very interesting project that has it's most recent update from 2010 called Kwartz from the author of Erubis.
Is there a project that upholds this pure HTML isolation for designers that is up-to-date and viable on Rails 3.2.x?
Your designers are correct that HAML does not have widespread HTML tool support.
A really excellent solution IMHO is Handlebars. It is simpler than HAML, and will work with more HTML tools because Handlebars emphasizes moving code out of the page template and into the controller. This also is good for writing maintainable pages with designers and also for security.
Handlebars is led by Yehuda Katz, who helped write Rails 3, is a core contributor to JavaScript, and is currently working on Ember.js which also leverages Handlebars.
http://handlebarsjs.com/
You are either going to do something with the templates, right? As in, the designer gives you the template, you strip out the parts that already belong to app/views/layouts/application, inject the necessary ruby to get your data into the view etc.
So what's the problem? Let the designers provide their templates in HTML, you convert them to HAML when using in the app, instead of converting them to ERB.
This is a bit of a weird meta-programming question, but I've realized that my new project doesn't need a full MVC framework, and being a rails guy, I'm not sure what to use now.
To give you a gist of the necessary functionality; this website will display static pages, but users will be able to log in and 'edit their current plans'. All purchasing and credit card editing is being handled by a recurring payment subscriber, I just need a page to edit their current plan. All of that will be done through (dynamic) XML API calls, so no database is necessary.
Should I stick with my typical rails/nginx stack, or is there something I could use that would lighten the load, since I don't need the Rails heft. I'm familiar with python and PHP but would prefer not to go that route. Is Sinatra a good choice here?
tl;dr: What's a good way to quickly serve mostly static pages, preferably in Ruby, with some pages requiring dynamic XML rendering?
If you want to stick with Ruby, Sinatra would be fine, as would Rails Metal.
If you're feeling a bit adventurous and want to get some useful experience with the technology that rails uses you could try building a Rack application. It's a pretty simple API to be able to respond to generic HTTP queries, and from there you can quickly build static file handling and XML processing. It's also considerably faster to start up and serve pages than rails.
http://github.com/cloudhead/toto is an example of a decent Rack based application.
If you know Rails, then why not just stick with it? That way you can use all authentication features, etc. that you're used to without having to learn another platform and incur the implementation risks that that includes. If the application ever grows beyond what's expected you're already on a solid base.
I have been spending some time creating what I called a framework.
It was aimed at the creation of quiz likes games. It was supposed to have two players syncronized and present them a question to solve, etc.
I would like it to be fully customizable so I tried to develop components that can be put in or out of the pages. In the end the elements became slim ruby methods to add a whole bunch of Javascript and CSS to the pages.
Still the Javascript needs to connect to Ruby so methods supporting it are created but they will only be present when the component is present. Some components depend on one another making everything overly complex.
And after this attempt I wonder, is there is not a better and easier way to make a framework aimed to one kind of application on RoR? Or is the concept flawed or RoR in some way flawed?
Ruby on Rails is a framework on its own accord and is "opinionated software". This means that the writers of Rails looked at what would make most sense for creating a web application to them. Many people support the original developers views and so use Rails for their projects as well.
I think your concept of creating a quiz is a good one, but first you need to understand the rails stack. Depending on what you need exactly, you can create either an engine, plugin or whatever.
What I have seen a lot is that you specify what you need in your controller. (How you do that is up to you). All that information is stored in a class variable and transferred to the view where you can render everything you need with some helpers. The hard part is making it all generic enough to be reusable.
But, maybe Rails isn't the right tool for you. Maybe you need something more lightweight like Merb or even Sinatra.
There is no 'flaw' in Rails. Rails is not the 10**1000-in-one tool Java is. It's a framework that tries to do one way very good in a particular way. I think Rails can be the right tool for you, but you need to be skilled enough to wield the tool :)
I've recently started working with RoR for some projects and I quite like the framework - however coming from an ASP.NET background I'm quite fond of the idea of being able to purchase & drop in reusable components/control such as those from telerik, without having to 'reinvent'.
I suppose it would be possible to maybe create my own using partials or plugins or similar, but I'm wondering if there is anything out there already, or perhaps alternatives which could be massaged into place, like javascript widgets etc?
I don't know of any commercial components or "controls", but there's thousands (probably, I haven't counted them) of plugins out there freely available, to do a great many things for you, some of which would probably count as "controls". Unfortunately, there's no one place to go and find them, and the quality is depressingly variable, but there are a number of plugin indexes like http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/ that might help in finding what you want while weeding out the dross.
Ext JS is a great GUI toolkit. I can't say that it entirely fits in with the RoR way of doing things, but if you write your controllers to return JSON it isn't too bad.
One of the big differences between Ruby/Rails and the .Net world is the fact that most of the available plugins are open-source and integrate at the code level. There is an incredible array of plugins for Rails, and it is very straight forward to write your own. Due to the nature of Ruby you can hook into any just about any part of the language and framework, giving you impressive extensibility.
I am not sure how Web Controls work, but it sounds like they are a "black-box" that provides an end-to-end solution for both UI and data-level operations ... ?
Many of the Rails plugins do provide both UI and data aspects. An example would be "restful_authentication" which provides you with both some basic forms for login and user registration as well as an authentication module and a Active-Record model. Again, this operates at a code-level, so will actually push the relevant code into your codebase when you install and "generate" the authentication modules.
As for "widgets", there is no equivalent in Rails, per-se, but there are a number of JavaScript libraries that provide similar functionality. I use and recommend jQuery UI, myself.
Dojo has a widget library which might meet your needs.
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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