RJS Templates for Rails by Cody Fauser
briefly reviewed by
LeeMcKusick
RJS Templates for Rails is a 56 page downloadable portable document file for sale from O'Reilly Media Inc. for $9.95.
A user review and ordering information at:
URL:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/rjsrails
RJS Templates for Rails is for a person who is developing a website using the Rails function group of the Ruby Programming language.
“RJS” means Ruby java script.
“RJS Templates” is a block of functions that you add to your website created using Ruby on Rails.
The templates enable the page generated for the user of the website to perform “multiple page updates in place without a page reload using Ajax.”
This essay assumes the user of RJS Templates knows how to invoke an Ajax processes within the Ruby on Rails programming environment.
The author of
RJS Templates suggests
Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas as the best available preparation for understanding how Ajax processes update a “page element”. The RJS Templates PDF extends the Ajax process that updates one page element to make it easy to update multiple page elements on the client web display.
What is “update multiple page elements”? The first example in
RJS Templates generates a web page with a text area for the user to type in text. The typed in text is added to the web page on the client side. With the RJS Templates example, the user can add more text and the page can be updated again. These updates are done on the client side.
A user review of this PDF by Senthilnayagam on the O'Reilly website at
http://oreilly.com/catalog/rjsrails/ says the code modeled in this PDF worked, and the guidance provided by this PDF was more productive than he found from extensive study of other Internet documentation.
About a year ago I downloaded Ruby and Rails and started up and ran the demo webserver and website in 2 evenings. I was fascinated and mystified. I mean mystified as I was wondering “how does it work”? So I bought Dave Thomas's
Programming Ruby.
What I have recently come to understand is one of the dicta of object oriented programming: Don't look under the hood.
This PDF is in the spirit of telling a production programmer what she needs to know: What dependencies must be satisfied first, Where you place the function calls, How you clean up afterwards, and What to expect when the code is correct.
RJS Templates for Ruby reflects the high speed and high programmer productivity reported for web site development using Ruby. The RJS Template functions have been coded but they are not well documented.
This PDF is available months ahead of a printed book. So this document is appropriate for the rapid pace of Ruby based website project development.
It looks like potential benefit of this essay is for the price of 2 burritos and a day of code copying and testing, you can skip 5 days or 2 weeks of digging for details. If you are building a Ruby on Rails Website in a hurry, this is a very attractive package of information.
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LeeMcKusick - 23 Jun 2006
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