Ruby web controls

Rails
1

HI,

I Find rails great but theres lack of rich components, i mean any
components except standard html controls…
I cant build everytime my table with all features, we are crud right ?

So any component repository planned ?
Maybe rails isnt good solution for my requirements ?

So far im programming asp.net and im using components library from
www.telerik.com, see what im talking about.

pete

2

Hi Pete

Rails is simply a different kind of web framework from asp.net
AFAIK, there is a commercila ‘plugin’ for visual studio.net called
Ruby-in-steel by a chap named Huw.

I think It is easier for you to take it from there :slight_smile:

Once you have done that, you may want to check out the free Aptana
RadRails and Netbeans RubyIDE

CCH

3

yes i know all ides available for ruby, btw i use netbeans 6
currently.
what i mean is components repository. almost every app i make has a
trees, tables and so on. all of these are not available out of the box
so i wonder how do you guys manage to develop usable applications ?
im not asp nor java evangelist i just want to switch to framework
which works for me, not me for framework.

ok, everything seems to be easy with rails, but there must be rich
components set to let web developers build something really
competitive to other framework like asp or gwt.

4

It might be the pythonista inside me, but I think (and this is not a new
idea) that everyone labelling himself as “web designer slash developer”
should have enough knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JS to build such stuff
for himself. I have my own little “repository”, if you like that term.
Things I reuse from other projects. Makes life a lot easier.

But ok. Rails is all about things like “fun” and “magic”, and such an
expectation was… to expect. I guess something like this would make up
for a nice little engine, if anyone is up to share his repo. I’m not,
mainly beacause my rails mastery leaves much to be desired, and I’m not
going to mess around with stuff I don’t know enough about.

~Chris

El s�b, 03-11-2007 a las 09:39 +0000, Nowy escribi�:

5

…and then there are Rails plugins that do things and Ruby gems that do
other things.

Cheers,
Mohit.
11/3/2007 | 6:35 PM.

6

look at mygwt.net, they adopted widgets from extjs framework
(extjs.com).
i wonder why theres no attempts for rails, anyway thanks i can see now
where im standing.

regards

7

On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 01:07:45AM -0700, Nowy wrote:

I Find rails great but theres lack of rich components, i mean any
components except standard html controls…
I cant build everytime my table with all features, we are crud right ?

So any component repository planned ?
Maybe rails isnt good solution for my requirements ?

So far im programming asp.net and im using components library from
www.telerik.com, see what im talking about.

I developed ASP.NET for a couple of years, and I actually used some of
the
Telerik controls. (I’ll mention that I wound up debugging a bunch of
their
JavaScript for them, to the point where they considered my feedback so
valuable that they provided me with the unobfuscated JS source to make
it
easier for me to send them useful patches; the point being that the
availability of commercial controls is no guarantee of quality or
suitability, though Telerik’s controls definitely saved me development
time.) ASP.NET makes it easy to provide “web controls” in tidy,
encapsulated packages.

Rails doesn’t have the same facility for easily packaged reusable
components. The now-deprecated components feature was one stab at it.
Plugins, plugems, and engines are other attempts at it. None of them are
quite at the right level of simplicity and encapsulation, though they
are
definitely useful in many ways. (Where “right level” means the same
level
as ASP.NET controls; I’ve used good ones and understand what made them
good.) I think there could be a lot of value to a really good framework
for
reusable components, and might lead to a similar ecosystem of web
controls
that ASP.NET has. I might even try my hand at it in my copious (note:
sarcasm) free time. If anyone else is likely to have time to make the
effort before I get around to it, however, I would be happy to discuss
requirements (i.e. what it is about ASP.NET web controls that makes them
appealing, valuable, and usable).

If you want to understand a little more about the sweet spot that

controls inhabit and that components, plugins, plugems, and engines
miss,
read on. Otherwise, you’ve already read the meat of the post.

Plugins/plugems are most useful when they are of the cross-cutting
variety.
We’re talking about aspect-oriented things, like act_as_versioned and
the
like. This allows you to modify the behavior of disparate pieces of your
system in a simple way. The most popular plugins modify the behavior of
models or controllers, rarely both and rarely anything in the views.
Things
like WYSIWYG editor integration (e.g. fckeditor) is the closest thing to
ASP.NET web controls. Engines are really full-fledged mini webapps
embedded
in a Rails app to provide some particular functionality at a particular
URL, which encompasses more than an ASP.NET control.

A typical ASP.NET control provides a way of rendering some particular
data
to the user, interaction with that data on the client-side through
JavaScript, and a way of reconstituting that data on the server side
from
what is submitted back from the user. A Rails implementation would
probably
look like a view helper method that takes some data model as an argument
and another method that is used by the controller to reconstitute the
data
from part of the params hash.

pete
–Greg

8

Hi,

For my latest project I used DHTML Suite components. I’m mildly
positive about it (it does have some non intuitive behavior
sometimes), but it’s a start.

Regards, Bas

9

right, and this piece of functionality is what rails is missing - good
reusable view components. i wonder if there are plans to provide such
extension.

On 3 Lis, 13:34, Gregory S. [email protected]

10

On Nov 3, 2007 2:07 AM, Nowy [email protected] wrote:

HI,

I Find rails great but theres lack of rich components, i mean any
components except standard html controls…
I cant build everytime my table with all features, we are crud right ?

So any component repository planned ?
Maybe rails isnt good solution for my requirements ?

Pete,

I agree with you. We could really use some nice reusable component like
functionality for Rails.

That was one of the longer term goals of the MasterView project. I
wanted to
make it easy to package up complex functionality into simple directives
that
could be reused over and over across projects beyond the scope of
typical
helpers and plugins.

I have on my plate right now to implement some of the first of these new
advanced directives, so hopefully we’ll be able to start to roll out
some of
these in MasterView later this winter.

For more information on our project you can visit

http://masterview.org/

Have a blessed day!

Jeff

–
Jeff B., MasterView core team
Inspired Horizons Ruby on Rails Training and Consultancy
http://inspiredhorizons.com/