Posts tagged with: "rails 3"

For prototyping a new webapp, I like to get an HTML prototype on screen as fast as possible. There are a number of ways to achieve this, ranging from the heavyweight Rails, to the lightweight Sinatra. But even a barebones Sinatra app requires you to specify routes and layouts. When I'm focused on sketching out the markup structure and design, what I'm looking for is less distractions from setup. Theoretically, one could prototype everything with raw static HTML, but most designs usually share layouts and snippets that would be a pain to copy and paste between different files. Writing raw CSS is also possible, but once you've gotten a taste of Sass and Compass extensions, why would you want to? In this post I'll outline my bottoms up approach to getting a site design bootstrapped. I'll also cover how to get these prototypes up in a public area for feedback, and how these prototypes can be used as scaffolding alongside your development.

It's been close to a year since Rails 3 came out and I've had the pleasure of working on several Rails 3 projects since its release. Some existing gems became irrelevant with the release of Rails 3, while others lived. Additionally, we've seen many new gems come to life. I'd like to share a stack of gems that I've been using this year. Hopefully they will give people a bit of help while developing a new Rails 3 app.

Most of these gems have good documentation on their project wiki (every great gem should be well documented, right?), so I won't go into great detail about the mechanics. Instead, my aim is to introduce you to some of the gems I find most useful and separate them into meaningful categories, as a sort of reference guide.

I love the new constraints feature of Rails 3 routing. It opens up powerful new avenues for handling certain scenarios before a request is even delivered to the controller. One thing that bugs me, though, is that making a new class for any non-standard request-based constraint is kind of a pain. Rather than this:

This year at OSCON I had the pleasure of giving a talk entitled Upgrading to Rails 3. The talk served as a high level overview of the new features of Rails 3 that are both a boon for developers and something to watch out for when trying to upgrade your Rails 2.3 applications. I followed it up with a live-coding session in which I took a to-do application (built mostly by Intridea’s own Jeremy McAnally) from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3 in the space of just over 10 minutes.