ruote vs ruote-kit for rails project

[Kiran Patil]

Hi,

To use ruote in rails project which is the best option ruote or ruote-kit ?

Thanks.

["Torsten Schönebaum"]

Kiran wrote:
> To use ruote in rails project which is the best option ruote or ruote-kit ?

That depends on your requirements. Route-kit is fine for exploring running workflows, see it as kind of admin frontend for ruote.

So, there's no need to use it, but it may be helpful, at least during development.

Cheers,
Torsten

[Steve Sexton]

Agree.  I've been in production with ruote + ruote-kit for a year and a half now.

We use ruote-kit for admin purposes, to look at the internals when needed.  Why build our own controller+views for this when there is ruote-kit?  It is at the wrong level of detail for our users though.

For regular users, we use ruote to launch the workflows in response to certain user actions (e.g. a registration/review process that requires multiple sign-offs), and we have a controller that provides a user-facing dashboard (index method on the controller) for the work.  The dashboard links to workitem-specific pages (edit method on the controller) using partials with filenames that are constructed from the process name, the participant and the a "task" attribute. 

HTH,
  Steve

[Danny Fullerton]

Also, keep in mind that ruote-kit main objective is to provide a RESTful interface to ruote. If you wish to decouple rails from ruote, this is very useful.

Steve, is it possible to see an implementation? If it's not open-source, could you provide snippets?

Regards,

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Sent from smartphone. Sorry for any typos.

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[Steve Sexton]

> Steve, is it possible to see an implementation?  If it's not open-source, could you provide snippets?

I wish!  I'd have to get permission from management folks who would need a lot of convincing.  It's not a battle I want to fight, which is why I had to describe it only at a high-level.  I don't think I'm doing anything especially clever that would make a code snippet useful.  At least, I don't think so.  My goal was to give an example, "here's one way to decide about ruote/ruote-kit in a rails app".

Your point about the REST interface is another way to decide, although I'm not convinced.  What does decoupling rails from ruote buy you, other than less gem dependencies? Doesn't your client code just end up duplicating the gem functionality with REST calls?

[Danny Fullerton]

On 13-11-15 12:01 PM, Steve Sexton wrote:

> Steve, is it possible to see an implementation?  If it's not open-source, could you provide snippets?

I wish!  I'd have to get permission from management folks who would need a lot of convincing.  It's not a battle I want to fight, which is why I had to describe it only at a high-level.  I don't think I'm doing anything especially clever that would make a code snippet useful.  At least, I don't think so.  My goal was to give an example, "here's one way to decide about ruote/ruote-kit in a rails app".

Your point about the REST interface is another way to decide, although I'm not convinced.  What does decoupling rails from ruote buy you, other than less gem dependencies? Doesn't your client code just end up duplicating the gem functionality with REST calls?

There's different reasons.

Our Rails frontend doesn't have the same SLA then the backend workflow engine. Tasks (e.g. email, automated actions like ssh commands) still needs to get triggered if the frontend is dead.

I agree, there's some sort of overlap between what's in Ruote and what's in Rails but here's how I came to see it: the backend (Ruote) has Participant's implementation (i.e. concrete actions performed by a participant) but Rails has the UI representation of those actions:

In our frontend, expression normally only show read-only information. In the context of an SSH participant it would be server, port, commands, etc. This is also true for any others expressions (e.g. if, wait, set, sequence), not only participants.

I said normally because the only exception for this is our web-form participant. In the backend (Ruote) this is implemented by a storage participant but the frontend represents read-write information (it modifies the workitem then proceed()) from an `almost standard` Rails model. We are using something we called ActiveRuote which implements ActiveAttr::Model (ActiveModel::Model in Rails >= 4) to behave like ActiveRecord (e.g. mass-assignment, validation).

This is still experimental but you get the idea.