I have to built a social networking site on Ruby on Rails. The features in the site may change from time to time; so we will need to add/remove features with ease. Moreover, we may be building another social networking site. Due to these reasons, we are thinking to build a basic framework for social networking sites in RoR with the feature to install or uninstall extensions to the framework.
I worked previously in Joomla! CMS and its architecture for adding/removing extensions is kind of what I am looking at. In a Joomla! installation there is usually an admin side from which you can add/remove/customize extensions.
I am new to RoR and finding it little difficult to decide how to do this. Any help will be appreciated.
UPDATE 2015: this was answered in 2009 a lot has changed
Plug-ins have been superseded by Gems and Engines
For all the information you need on Engines:
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html
Engines are a fantastic way of building encapsulated and reusable code for your rails apps.
Original Answer for Reference
On the development side Rails Engines and/or plugins is probably what you are looking for.
Rails Engines are small subsets of an
application that can be dropped into
any of your Rails applications and
handle common parts of the application
from scratch.
Say for example your social networking application has a wiki, blog, chatroom etc. You would more than likely want to create a wiki engine, blog engine and chatroom engine.
Engines allows you to re-use such functionality within different applications so you do not have to repeat yourself.
Take a look at: http://rails-engines.org/
Some support for ‘engine’ plugins has
been merged into the Rails core
codebase in Rails 2.3.
I would also recommend taking a look at some public projects say on github and see how people have used engines.
Take a look at some engines:
Wiki-Engine
Skinny-Blog-Engine
Other useful links for reading
Tips for writing Engines
Rails Engines, Railscast by Ryan Bates
The Russian Doll Pattern (PDF)
In functionality terms you could still have an admin area that could activate certain features ie. your blog or wiki by allowing users access to such areas with a permissions/roles system.
ACL9
role_requirement
restful-authentication
If you want to build a CMS which supports some kind of extensions like in Wordpress or Joomla then you will have to either build it and provide guidlines or at least look into how you would upload/install Engines/Plugins from a user perspective.
Not sure on the security implications of this
Redmine has put this kind of functionality into their awesome application. You may want to dig around the source code for tips and clues
Finally Adva_CMS has basically adopted this approach and have created a number of Engines for their CMS application
HTH
Engines are still a pretty solid way to go, the new location to get info on those is located here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html
But what you need is really more application specific. A lot of applications develop these things organically over time. They start out by hand crafting a few of these and then they re-factor them periodically until they find patterns that align with software design patterns and then they develop a plugin framework.
Are you going to expose your interface to end users? To third party developers? What parts of the application are controlled by these plugins? Is it just the presentation tier? Does it affect the data model? Consider the fact that when you publish any kind of external interface, you're developing contracts that you need to honor.
You might check out these design patterns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern. They will help you figure out how to manage your development process. If you're just working on plugins for internal use, then what's the real purpose of them? What makes them different than modules?
Related
I have e-commerce site using spree. What should be ideal blog solution please suggest. Since the blog has to be updated almost daily it should be like CMS with end customer able to do the same. Should I use spree-blogging-spree gem or maybe blog hosted separately on wordpress ? What would be little scalable and convenient for a zero tech customer?
By your own definition ("zero tech customer") I would avoid any solution involving coding or custom code. Blog is an area where dozens of very good solution exists "of the shelf", so I would go for a WordPress or equivalent. You could even get the hosting done for you.
Integration can be as simple as putting the blog on a subdomain, for example if your ecommerce is hosted at pikachu-go.com, you could have blog.pikachu-go.com to point to the WordPress instance.
This means that the blog & ecommerce are totally independant, which should be for the best. You'll have a bit of work to ensure visual consistency between both, but a good palette and a logo may be enough to start.
If for any reason you really need the blog to be part of the same codebase (against, I advice against that), you may want to have a look to blogs that can be added to your Rails application as Engine such as https://buttercms.com/rails-blog-engine/ or https://github.com/kiddsoftware/rails_blog_engine.
Per the doc:
Engines can be considered miniature applications that provide
functionality to their host applications
So this is a way to deploy it inside your Spree app without resorting to custom code.
In computing terms, an engine is something that is continually producing output based on input. But in Ruby, the term seems a little bit loose. The people who've created Refinery CMS have taken to calling gems that extend the functionality of their system, 'engines'.
Basically, what I want to know is, is Spree, the open source ecommerce cms written in ruby, an engine? Would calling it the 'spree engine' be correct?
As defined by Rails, an Engine is a lot like an application within an application. Spree is one of these, and there are others. Each engine has its own app folder with the same sort of structure you'd see in a top-level application.
You can combine one or more engines together into an application, then add your own functionality on top. That's what makes systems like Spree far more flexible than a fixed-puropose Rails app that you have limited control over.
Things that extend Rails are only truly engines if they are self-contained applications. Many gems add functionality that's much more specific than that, so are better termed "plug-ins" or "modules" depending on the phrasing.
It's actually pretty easy to build your own engine and can be useful for separating and re-using code across several different applications.
I think that there is quite good explanation in guide Getting Started with Engines.
Spree is actually comprised of many engines...
The overcooked version: Engines come kitted with (many of) the guts of a typical rails application, with a few bonuses: namespacing out of the box, generators for easily copying migrations, and the ability to mount it in another rails application.
From http://guides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html
1 What are engines?
Engines can be considered miniature applications that provide functionality to their host applications. A Rails application is actually just a "supercharged" engine, with the Rails::Application class inheriting a lot of its behavior from Rails::Engine.
Try to read this guide: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html and also this cast: http://railscasts.com/episodes/277-mountable-engines
I am wondering if there is a standard pre-built web application for Rails which has all the basic functionalities like user login, user profiles, profile image uploader, comments, search, maybe payments and a set of other usual web application features all bundled and ready to use and extend.
I like how Twitter bootstrap comes with a set of pre-built interface functionalities and styles, which you can start using and modify later. I am looking for something similar that can allow me to quickly set up a working application and go from there.
Does such a framework exist?
There are numerous examples out there.
However, there are two things you should really do:
Read the license to make sure you can use it they way you are thinking of using it.
Ensure you understand the design decisions and choices the original authors made. You will end up in a world of maintenance pain if you just copy cargo-cult style without understanding the tradeoffs others have made with their design decisions.
Any one of the links listed has enough to get you started. They may not have all of the features you listed but together they probably have all of your bases covered. You will have to put in some effort to get all those features working together though.
The RailsApps project is great because they all have tutorials that walk through the basic setup. They are also all built using the Rails Composer tool, which lets you pick and choose certain options for your app.
This question aims to understand RoR and frameworks in general. It looks like RoR never had any standard user authentication system. Was it just historical reason (just happened naturally as it did)... or could it be intentional? Because RoR is a website building tool, more often than not, user authentication is a crucial part of a website.
To put it into perspective, another question is, do other popular frameworks, Django, Symfony, CakePHP, have user authentication built in?
There is no reasonably generic way to do user authentication. Most frameworks leave it up to you to choose the plugin that most closely matches what you're trying to accomplish.
For example, consider these two situations:
a blog which has a single administrator with password-protected admin-facing tools
a site like YouTube which allows users to sign up and administer their own content
Both of these sites would require vastly different authentication systems; which of these systems should Rails cater to out-of-the-box?
The Rails core team wanted to ensure that Rails was open-ended enough to make anything you want. There is no one-size-fits-all authentication scheme, so the core team decided to leave it out. Rails is easily extendable via gems and plugins, so that is where they belong.
Some examples are Warden and the Rails Warden plugin, Devise, Authlogic, and Restful Authentication.
CakePHP has a built in Authentication component that is pretty straight forward and easy to implement.
Most of these frameworks you mentioned are toolkits, not complete products. You build these things yourself, or leverage plugins from the community. Django's admin plugin/module has authentication out of the box though. Drupal does too, as a matter of fact.
Authentication can be(and is in my opinion) a matter of taste and need. If Rails was including things like that, it would start to become a website and not a framework. The programmer has to be free to choose among various implementations. That is why gems are available.
I've been programming a little in Rails and CakePHP, and I can say that Rails doesn't need to provide a mechanism like this. The community is very very good, and there are many examples (already said, like Devise, Authlogic...) made by very good programmers. Of course, there are many tutorials online (and also, railscasts, which are simply awesome) to program a succesful set-up for your project. So, if we have all of this, why should we need something like cakePHP mechanism? It's OK, it works, but there's just a very good tutorial and that's all( and maybe enough..). So, in the end, if u have a nice community you shouldn't care about the core of the technology, there will be always someone else more experienced with your needs that will do it for you. And if you don't find it, do it by yourself and in the proccess you will find a lot of help! :)
Some ruby gems like jekyll, toto and webby offer out of the box blog-type integration into your ruby app. Another way of developing a rich web blog-type application is to build and model the application yourself using pure ruby and rails practices. (e.g creating an Article and User model). The first offers out of the box features the 2nd option offers more customization and control.
In people's experience on Stack Overflow, which would be the best route and what would people consider when making the decision to use a gem out of the box versus going alone?
All of the gems you mentioned take static, markdown/textile/etc files and turn them into HTML websites. They take different approaches to it, with jekyll spitting out the finished website for hosting, toto doing the converting and routing on request, and webby doing the same as jekyll mostly.
If you're using Rails, it's important to note that none of these will integrate into your application well. They're built to more-or-less operate on their own.
Generally speaking, if a gem has the functionality you need, use it. They are not equivalent to plugins you find for Wordpress and Drupal where they are typically low-quality, buggy, poorly documented, etc. More often than not, gems simply add a couple modules that you can integrate into your application how you like.
On the other hand, a basic blog is pretty quick and simple in Rails, especially considering you've got a handy walkthrough guide straight from the Rails documentation on how to do it.
If you're new to Rails and want tight integration with your app, it's probably best to bake your own blog features.
This will take some time to do, but its worth it to learn how things really work.
If you're more seasoned, just look at the gem's API and documentation and decide if it does what you want it to do and if you're comfortable with how to integrate it. If so, it'll save you time.
One other consideration: who will be using the blog? Is it for internal use, and programmers will be the ones updating it? If that's the case, then you can make it very easy by not worrying about a lot of aesthetic polish in the back-end. Conversely, if you're making an app that includes a blogging component for the general public you might want it to feel more polished. In this case a gem might save you a lot of time.
It depends on your application.