April 2009
Intermediate to advanced
479 pages
12h 55m
English
Content preview from Ruby on Rails® for Microsoft Developers
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
9.6. Alternatives
Rails is opinionated software, and as such ships with a set of sensible defaults. As you have seen throughout this chapter, Rails assumes that you'll be using ERb, Builder, and RJS templates, and that you're going to employ Prototype and script.aculo.us. But it's important to understand that you are not limited to these options. Should you prefer a different template engine, you are free to adopt one instead of ERb. Common choices are Haml (http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com) and Liquid (http://www.liquidmarkup.org). If you'd like to simplify writing CSS, you can also check Haml's sister project, Saas.
Regarding Ajax, more than 200 frameworks are out there. Prototype is one of the best and most popular, but should you feel inclined to work with a different framework, you can copy it over in public\javascripts, include it with javascript_include_tag, and then it will be ready for you to use whenever you like. Of course, you'd be using JavaScript, as opposed to comfortable Ruby wrappers, but you can always define your own Ruby helpers and perhaps share and distribute them with others as a plugin. In fact, many plugins for alternative JavaScript libraries exist or are under development at the moment.
One JavaScript library in particular has been gaining a lot of momentum: jQuery. It's very light, fast, powerful, and well written, and it's been able to catch the interest of many Rails developers. If you are among the legions of jQuery fans, you should use the jRails plugin ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.