I do not hide the fact that I like to try out new ideas by building lots of little applications. One thing I find myself doing is recreating many of the same pieces for each application. So I finally gave in and built a default template for the way I like all of my applications to start. There are other starter apps, but this one is tailored to my idiosyncrasies.

You can find the project, Basejumper, at: http://github.com/gdagley/basejumper

What is included?

Blueprint CSS (http://www.bluprintcss.org)

Say what you will about CSS frameworks, but they make my life a lot easier. From the website, it “gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.” There are official plugins for the framework, like “buttons” and “link-icons”, and other user created ones, like silksprite (http://www.ajaxbestiary.com/Labs/SilkSprite).

Authlogic (http://github.com/binarylogic/authlogic)

The way I think authentication should be done. Instead of copying a lot of authentication logic (encrypting passwords, remember tokens, etc.) into your user model, it is kept in the gem and is easily updatable. It has lots of configuration options to fit with your authentication needs and some really good tutorials.

In app/models/user.rb

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_authentic
end

Configatron (http://github.com/markbates/configatron)

This is great way to store application wide configuration and settings. By adding an initializer to load the config.yml, you can access configuration anywhere in the app.

In config/initializers/load_config.rb:

configatron.configure_from_yaml("config/config.yml", :hash => Rails.env)

And in config/config.yml

development: &local
    property1: value1
    property2: value2

test:
  <<: *local
  value2: test_value2

production:
  <<: *local
  value2: prod_value2

Searchlogic (http://github.com/binarylogic/searchlogic)

From the same folks who brought you Authlogic, there is Searchlogic. You will always need pagination. You may not think so now, but believe me, you will. So just start out with it enabled. What I really, really like about Searchlogic, is not just the pagination support, but how easy it makes building advanced search forms (including searching nested objects). And again, there is a great tutorial

log-buddy (http://github.com/relevance/log_buddy)

For the lazy debugger in all of us. How many times have you typed:

some_var = 'some_value'
logger.debug "some_var = #{some_var}" 

Now try this

some_var = 'some_value'
d { some_var }

which will log

some_var = 'some_value'  

micronaut and micronaut-rails (http://github.com/spicycode/micronaut and http://github.com/spicycode/micronaut-rails)

It just makes more sense to me. Like RSpec, only fewer calories. micronaut is a BDD framework similar to RSpec. In fact it uses all the same RSpec matchers, so there is not a new syntax to learn. And it adds metadata to the loaded examples that is useful for deciding which tests to run, exclude, document, etc. or building additional tools for your example suite.

The application currently has examples (a.k.a. specs) for most of the existing code. Adding new examples, should be quick and easy. To see it all, start with rake examples

beholder treasure map (http://github.com/spicycode/beholder)

I like continuous integration. I work for a company that likes continuous integration. Having continuous testing locally let’s me as soon as I break something.

beholder watches for files to change and then reruns the appropriate tests/specs/examples. Now I don’t have an excuse for not running the example suite, because it is always running for me.

active_form (http://github.com/nesquena/active_form)

Easy ActiveRecord validations for non-AR models (for those Contact Us forms).

comatose (http://github.com/darthapo/comatose)

Inevitably, every project wants to be able to manage the “static” content on the site. Comatose is a very simple CMS plugin. Nothing fancy, but that is great for these small projects. You can even style the admin interface to look more like your application (which I did), but the default styles could work just fine. It is possible to use the content in Comatose as an entire page or a partial across many pages. The app has a migration that creates some default pages and an example partial.

active_scaffold (http://github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold)

Fastest way to build a super simple admin interface. Or you could use it to build more complex admin. It is really quite flexible with its search, CRUD, and the ability to customize.

display_flash_helper (http://github.com/gdagley/display_flash_helper)

Shameless use of my own plugin to display flash messages. Nothing too fancy.

exception_notification (http://github.com/rails/exception_notification)

Because they happen and I want to know about them.

pretty_buttons (http://github.com/relevance/pretty_buttons)

HTML buttons shouldn’t have to look so bad. This plugin plays nicely with Blueprint CSS buttons plugin, too

semantic_form_builder (http://github.com/nesquena/semantic_form_builder)

HTML forms made easier and semantic. Also makes the forms easier to style.

seo_helper (http://github.com/relevance/seo_helper)

A few useful helpers for SEO purposes. Create page titles (h1) that match the html title (title), support for meta tags and easily add some breadcrumbs to each page.

Conclusion

Like I said before, it is tailored to they way I like things to start out. You can fork it and change it. I may not roll you changes back in, but that’s ok because now you have an starter app just the way you like it.

I have been gradually adding new features to my StagingTracks.com website. Really, it is a place where I can try out new things outside the office. I have upgraded the UI to be a little cleaner by using the Blueprint CSS framework. It was a easy way to normalize the CSS across browsers and easily implement a column-based layout. I also added Twitter notifications when new shops, clubs, and shows are added and reminders for upcoming shows each week. Does the model railroading community really need all of this? Probably not, but it helps me keep my skillz sharp.

Finding Shops, Clubs, and Shows on your iPhone

When I built StagingTracks a few years ago, I did it because I was traveling and wanted to easily find the model railroading community wherever I was. As it has grown over the past few years, so has technology. While it was possible to navigate the StagingTracks website using a browser on the phone, it was not optimal. Since this is my little sandbox for experimenting, I wanted to see how difficult it would be to add an optimized iPhone interface.

Native app or Web app?

I spend my daylight hours developing web applications for others, so it made sense that I should reuse the infrastructure that I already had in place. I didn’t want to learn iPhone SDK and all that is involved with that right now and I had recently come across the iUi javascript and css framework. iUI can give web applications a native iPhone application feel, so I just needed to see how to incorporate it into my “legacy” Rails application.

Resources

A quick Google search for iUI and Rails turned up Ben Smith’s excellent iPhone on Rails article.

iPhoney

Reading through the article, I downloaded iPhoney for quick testing without an iPhone. Be sure to use the iPhone User Agent in the iPhoney menu.

Local Subdomain for Testing

I was going to serve the iPhone version from the subdomain iphone.stagingtracks.com, so I needed to setup something similar in my local development environment. Fortunately, this was very easy with the Ruby Ghost gem found via Robby Russell’s Get to know a gem: Ghost.

sudo ghost add iphone.localhost.com

We needed to add the .com so that the call to the request.subdomains will pick out the iphone portion.

iUI Framework

After downloading the iUI framework from the project site, I moved everything into its rightful place.

public
  - stylesheets
    - iui.css
  - javascripts
    - iui.js
  - images
    - iui
      - copy all of the .gif and .png files into here

Because I moved the images into the /images/iui folder, I needed to update the image locations in the iUI css. A quick find/replace and I was ready to go.

Application changes

I won’t go into all the details since Ben’s article hit most of the high points. Here are the few additional bits that I came across as I was adding my iPhone interface.

Basic approach

The basic approach to adding the iphone interface is to update the controller to render the iphone partial without the layout (since everything is AJAX) and then create an iphone template.

In posts_controller.rb change from:

def show
  @post = Post.find(params[:id])
end  

to

UPDATE:: format.html should come before format.iphone. For some reason it was working for browsers that were not IE. Weird.

def show
  @post = Post.find(params[:id])
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.iphone { render :layout => false }
  end
end  

iphone template posts/show.iphone.erb:

<div class="panel" title="<%= @post.title %>" selected="true">
  <h3><%= @post.title %></h3>
  <%= render :partial => 'post.html.erb', :locals => {:post => @post} %>
</div>  

Search Button

Since one of the more interesing features of StagingTracks is the ability to search for organizations near you, I wanted that to be prominent. By adding a “button” link to the toolbar, it now shows up on every page.

In application.iphone.erb:

<div class="toolbar">
  <h1 id="pageTitle"></h1>
  
  <%= link_to "Search", search_path, :class => 'button' %>
</div>

Dynamically Growing Lists (a.k.a pagination)

Since I already had paging in place for the blog posts, I wanted to be able to reuse that, if possible. Turns out that was pretty easy to add as well. I needed to separate the post_items into a separate partial so that I could return the next page of <li>'s to replace the “More news…” link (notice the target for the “More news…” link is “_replace”).

In posts/index.iphone.erb

<ul title="News" selected="true">
  <%= render :partial => 'post_items', :locals => {:posts => @posts} %>
</ul>

In posts/_post_items.iphone.erb

<% posts.each do |post| %>
  <li><%= link_to post.title, post %></li>
<% end %>
<%= content_tag :li, link_to("More news...", posts_path(:page => posts.next_page), :target => "_replace") if posts.next_page %>

A quick change in the posts_controller.rb from:

def index
  @posts = Post.latest.published.paginate :page => page, :order => 'published_at desc'
end

to:

UPDATE:: Same change to the ordering of format.html and format.iphone.

def index
  @posts = Post.latest.published.paginate :page => page, :order => 'published_at desc'
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.iphone do
      if page == 1
          render :layout => false
        else
          render :layout => false, :partial => "post_items", :locals => {:posts => @posts}
      end
    end
  end
end

Styling Form Select Inputs

My search form has a dropdown for choosing the country that you want to search. By default, this did not look very nice. Since it didn’t need a label, I just left it out in the form and added some additional CSS.

In search/index.iphone.erb

<% form_tag(search_path, :class => 'panel', :title => 'Search')  do %>
  <h2>Find Local Shops, Clubs, and Shows</h2>

  <%= content_tag :p, flash[:error], :class => 'error' if flash[:error] %>

  <fieldset>
    <div class="row">
      <%= country_select :search, :country, ['United States', 'Canada'], {} %>
    </div>  

    <div class="row">
      <label for='search_city'>City</label>
      <input type="text" value="" name="search[city]" id="search_city"/>
    </div>

    <div class="row">
      <label for='search_state'>State</label>
      <input type="text" value="" name="search[state]" id="search_state"/>
    </div>
  </fieldset>
  <%= link_to "Submit", "#", :class => 'whiteButton', :type => "submit" %>
<% end %>

And in my extra iphone.css (anything else that I needed to add to iui.css)

.row > select {
    box-sizing: border-box;
    -webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
    margin: 0;
    border: none;
    padding: 0;
    height: 42px;
    background: none;
    font-size: 16px;
    width: 100%;
}

.error {
  font-weight: bold;
  color: #8a1f11;
  margin-left: 14px;
}

Conclusion

All told, I probably spent less than eight hours over a couple of nights adding a simple iPhone interface to my existing application. I still want to look in to modifying the CSS more to have it look more like the regular StagingTracks website, but that can come later. This was a fun little experiment.