Assets - find a weird behavior recently and I'd like to understand the original issue

Hi the great community of Rails :slight_smile:

Okay… Recently I had a big problem with javascript (JQuery) in one
of my Rails 3.1 application.

The problem was that the behavior of my javascript animations were
acting in a very weird way, and the strangest thing was it happened
only in development for the exact same code as the one of the
production application.

What I tried: (if you’re in a hurry, just skip this part)

So I first thought it was because of an update in my development
environment, so I reproduced the exact same environment (gems
included) than the one I had in production. Problem was still there.

Then I thought the problem came from JQuery, that, somehow, my
development application was using the last JQuery version. So I read
carefully the released notes of the last version and updated my
Javascript code. That fixed some weird animations but not all of
them…

So… as I was trying to fix my code, I noticed that it wasn’t
updating all the code (just some parts) of my running application… I
even deleted one “carousel.js” file from my assets/javascripts folder,
but… the carousel was still there (and it shouldn’t) and the strange
animations were still there too…

What finally solved the problem: (this is the important part)

Then… I decided to delete all the precompiled assets from my public
folder (cause I did run rake assets:precompile in order to deploy my
application). And… It finally fixed all my problems… as if my
development application was rendering assets from both app/assets and
public/assets folders.

What I can’t understand is why? Does anyone have any clue?

I didn’t change anything in my environments configurations, they have
always been the defaults ones…

I’m just curious and I’d like to understand what happened here. So if
anyone can help, thanks :slight_smile: but this is not an “urgent issue” so…

Thanks!
Kulgar.