# Can a "facebook" application be written in RoR? **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [August 29, 2008, 3:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-a-facebook-application-be-written-in-ror/147222 "2008-08-29T15:44:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![ewagner](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/5fc32e/32.png) [@ewagner](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ewagner)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2008, 3:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-a-facebook-application-be-written-in-ror/147222/1 "2008-08-29T15:44:02Z")
(Disclaimer: I am new to RoR, coming from developing in [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET). I am looking to start my next project in an open source environment to 1) cut down on the costs of tools and hosting, and 2) to learn something new. The runners up for “something new” are RoR and PHP.) I’ve thumbed through RailsSpace a number of times so I know a community site CAN be written in RoR. What I’m more interested in is can the home page in say facebook, wherein there are numerous webparts doing different things, be written in RoR? From what I’ve seen, and what I’ve done using tutorials and books, is that RoR works wonderfully for CRUD style pages. One page to view customers, and one page to add/edit customers. But can one page be the host of multiple views driven by multiple controllers? (Yes, my MVC experience is of the newb level too. Sorry in advance.) ---
**Author:** ![ewagner](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/5fc32e/32.png) [@ewagner](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ewagner)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2008, 4:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-a-facebook-application-be-written-in-ror/147222/2 "2008-08-29T16:13:57Z")
Hi, ewagner wrote: > But can one page be the host of multiple views driven > by multiple controllers? Yes. You can use a layout that’s a composite of / renders partials for a set of MVC components. > (Yes, my MVC experience is of the newb level too. > Sorry in advance.) IME, the only ‘tricky’ part of maintaining the MVC pattern here is the approach you use to populate the partials when you display the composited page. One approach is to have a method in application.rb that grabs the content for each of the partials. That gives you an application-wide controller method feeding content to an application-wide view. There are, of course, other approaches and you should feel free to make use of whichever is most appropriate to your situation. MVC is a very good idea, but it’s not something that _has_ to be adhered to in every case. HTH, Bill ---
**Author:** ![ewagner](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/5fc32e/32.png) [@ewagner](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ewagner)\ **Post date:** [August 29, 2008, 4:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-a-facebook-application-be-written-in-ror/147222/3 "2008-08-29T16:39:11Z")
I’ve found an interesting discussion of this ‘problem’ with a potential approach on [http://www.railsdev.ws/blog/3/modular-page-assembly-in-rails/](http://www.railsdev.ws/blog/3/modular-page-assembly-in-rails/) Don’t forget to download the 10 page pdf at the top of the article, that’s the main part! I don’t think MVC stands in the way of building the Facebook home page. Even in Facebook, there is a main view that takes up most space (when you log in that’s the news feed). From there your layout pulls in many partials to fill the right column. If you’re very consistent in your layout, instead of having to fill in all the content in every action of your controller, you do that in your ApplicationController. Or in a more complex site with different main layouts, you can structure your controllers by namespacing them and put common code in the top of the hierarchy. But if you look at the Facebook site, it’s just the home page that is fairly complex because it contains infromation from a lot of different models (in RoR terms it seems to be calling many index actions from many controllers). But all other pages are very focused on what the user actually wants to do and can be easily handled in the simple MVC context. It’s actually quite good to build an application focusing on one main view, this gives the user also a sense of focus. An application with 4 views all of equal importance doesn’t seem right to me (except for the iGoogle type of dashboards…). ---
**Author:** ![ewagner](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/5fc32e/32.png) [@ewagner](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ewagner)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2008, 11:47am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-a-facebook-application-be-written-in-ror/147222/4 "2008-08-30T11:47:27Z")
Two resources that might help you with it are published and to be published by PeepCode and Pragmatic Programmers respectively. Here are the links: 1. Peepcode: - You will see that they have published a Rails on Facebook PDF. I haven’t had the time to look at it yet so I don’t know how much it will help you. [http://peepcode.com/](http://peepcode.com/) 2. Pragmatic Programmers: [Pragmatic Bookshelf: By Developers, For Developers](http://www.pragprog.com/titles/mmfacer/developing-facebook-platform-applications-with-rails) This book is about to be released. You may find these two resources helpful. Bharat ---
**Author:** ![ewagner](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/5fc32e/32.png) [@ewagner](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/ewagner)\ **Post date:** [August 30, 2008, 2:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/can-a-facebook-application-be-written-in-ror/147222/5 "2008-08-30T14:16:02Z")
Thanks everyone! The article deegee posted seems to go over what I’ve been looking for, a 3 column layout that can be filled from different sources. And the Rails on Facebook has given me some ideas as well. Thank you!