I love the way GMail uses JavaScript for everything to create a very intuitive web application. It is one of my goals of SoapBX my online presentation editor and viewer to allow the same kind of flexibility.
One of the first things you’ll notice when you start editing your presentation is the realtime preview. Many other RubyOnRails applications are taking the XMLHttpRequest route for textile preview. I was certain that that wasn’t necessary and sure enough google to the rescue brings me Jeff Minards’s JavaScript Textile . Using this and plain jane dhtml for non textile parts, I have implemented a fast intuitive preview.
Now, do you think I would give up on using the latest cool thing XMLHttpRequest? Of course not. If you look on the presentation edit screen, you will notice that there aren’t any save or submit buttons. What happens is that once you finish a field that you have changed, the onblur event sends a request back to the server using XmlHttpRequest. This happens fairly quick and in the background. I have used the objects background color as a visual feedback to show that it is being updated.
The great thing about RubyOnRails is that I can spend time on cool stuff such as this and not all the application plumbing necessary in j2ee.
So what is missing? First of all I know that the style sheet looks like cr*P in IE. It is my priority now to get that working. Secondly I want to use XmlHttpRequest for the last two parts of the editing scree:
- New Slide
- Move Slide Up or Down
It shouldn’t be too hard, now I’ve grocked it for everything else. Deleting a slide does use XmlHttpRequest and dhtml.
Thirdly the Taging system is broken and I’m working on that.
Finally most of the basic account management stuff is missing. I only have a very basic change profile screen.
I am getting there. Thanks to the power of ruby on rails.
This entry was posted in the following Categories: Ruby
One of the big advantages with using J2EE was that it more properly handled the login / security than say PHP which was like swimming under the polar ice cap in a submarine with 50 year old cordite wiring...
How does RubyOnRails handle the login / security?
Posted by: Iang on January 24, 2005 06:28 AMRight now there are standard patterns, but no real shared code. I am working on a standardized login framework that I will submit to the Rails source repository.
My plan is for this to be configurable to support some kind os simple federated authentication system as well.
There is so much flexibility in the rails framework that I think it would be possible to create some sort of active security manager.
The other day I started playing with the OpenSSL RSA bindings. Which seems to work well, but is largely undocumented. Possibly the first big step in that department is for me to try to document that for both my own and others benefit as it is a standard ruby module in 1.8.2.
-P
Posted by: Pelle on January 24, 2005 06:44 AM