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
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 
Once you have done that, you may want to check out the free Aptana RadRails and Netbeans RubyIDE
CCH
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.
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
..and then there are Rails plugins that do things and Ruby gems that do other things.
Cheers, Mohit. 11/3/2007 | 6:35 PM.
Chris Hoeppner wrote:
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
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 ASP.NET 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
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.
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
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
Have a blessed day!
Jeff