Ruby Component Web Frameworks Google Group

GUI on teh Rails

mike.pe...@gmail.com (Mike Pence) — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:18:59 UT

The days of a rich, GUI-like interface for Rails apps via stateful,
event-drive widgets is here.
Nick Sutterer is days away from putting Apotomo ([link]) up on
Github -- follow him there at [link]. I haven't
personally delved into the code yet, but form my discussions with Nick, he

Article wrt Cells on InfoQ

mike.pe...@gmail.com (Mike Pence) — Wed, 14 May 2008 14:27:35 UT

[link]
There is no doubt in my mind that Iowa's approach to stateful components is
the way to go. Cells handle the problem of modularity at rendering time, but
do not yet deal with modular dispatching of requests at runtime. I would
love to see Cells + Iowa in Rails. Once people 'got' what that enables...

Cells and RJS

mike.pe...@gmail.com (Mike Pence) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:11:35 UT

So, I am still trying to figure out the best way to integrate Cells
and Ext.js. I am using them together, but more with Ext as a richer
markup for fancier components, rendering to and using content from
divs, not really using them together as richly as I could.
What is the best strategy, I wonder, for integrating Cells and RJS? I

Cells article widely read

mike.pe...@gmail.com (Mike Pence) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:02:43 UT

Lots of traffic to
[link]
this week, including listings on the home page of wordpress.com and
del.icio.us. About 3,000 views for that article in the last 4 days.
There is a ton of interest in bringing components to Rails.

My Cells blog post

mike.pe...@gmail.com (Mike Pence) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:07:52 UT

Feedback welcome:
[link]
Best,
Mike Pence

Re: A new plugin that does much of what Cells does

gil...@gmail.com (Giles Bowkett) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:40:25 UT

Fear no JavaScript.
MVC was originally invented for GUIs. It's pretty much guaranteed that
at some point some people will switch to an MVC approach to GUIs which
preserves the "new" MVC of the Web while also sending templates out as
MVC JS. The advantage is you can send JSON to and from the server, so

Re: A new plugin that does much of what Cells does

wyhai...@gmail.com (Kirk Haines) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:37:01 UT

Okay, I have a strong bias here. I think it's ridiculous to fear
Javascript, and that people just create a whole new area of problems
for themselves by using tools written to avoid using js in order to
write js.
So, the way that I started using extjs with IOWA was to write all of
the front end client stuff directly with JS in static files, while

A new plugin that does much of what Cells does

mike.pe...@gmail.com (Mike Pence) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 03:56:05 UT

I have been working with Cells for a few weeks now, with great
success. A fellow Rubyist pointed this out to me,
[link]. It basically does
what Cells does -- in fact, it basically *is* render_component. It has
an advantage over Cells -- it does not require a new folder structure

Re: The Apotomo Concept

apoton...@gmail.com (Nick Sutterer) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:26:49 UT

this is great! i'll have a look at iowa, maybe we can share some
concepts!

i also love extjs - it's GUI development as i know it from Gtk or
wxWidgets, but much easier. wrapping an apotomo component ("widget")
in an extjs widget works great for me, still plenty of things to do,
but it looks as i this is the right direction. more on that later!

Re: The Apotomo Concept

m...@christophernelsonconsulting.com (Chris Nelson) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:18:52 UT

Nick,
This all sounds very interesting. I would love to see some code when you
are ready to show it. Any kind of example app showing how to use cells
would also be helpful for me. I tried looking at the website but it was a
little sparse.
--Chris

Re: The Apotomo Concept

wyhai...@gmail.com (Kirk Haines) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:53:34 UT

IOWA is one of the "old" Ruby web frameworks. Avi Bryant did the
original implementation in 2001. I took his version and developed it
into something production usable in 2002, and have been using it since
then. It's a component based Ruby framework.
The old documentation is at [link]

Re: The Apotomo Concept

apoton...@gmail.com (Nick Sutterer) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:50:17 UT

the tree concept makes it really easy to answer those questions. i'm
gonna write a cookbook for apotomo so i can demonstrate things (had
this idea last night, just before i fell asleep :-)

apotomo is thought for applications like gmail - i bet there's some
hierarchical components tree behind it.

Re: The Apotomo Concept

apoton...@gmail.com (Nick Sutterer) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:31:46 UT

wow, can you give me some link to IOWA? what is it exactly?
can you explain a bit more about your project?

right now, extjs widgets on the ruby side generate js code here as
well, but i managed to use some of extjs' ajax functionality along
with ruby. the prototype is in php, but it's no big deal to port it to

Re: The Apotomo Concept

mike.pe...@gmail.com (Mike Pence) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:59:09 UT

That would be really interesting to see, Kirk.

Re: The Apotomo Concept

wyhai...@gmail.com (Kirk Haines) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:25:17 UT

This is interesting stuff.
Some of these ideas my version of IOWA captures pretty well, and some
of them less well.
If I opened an IOWA repository for public access, would there be
interesting in working with it to expand on some of the message/event
passing ideas, and things like interfacing with extjs more intimately?