{ height: 1%; } - Ruby on Rails and User Interface Design: AjaxScaffold News and Roadmap

AjaxScaffold News and Roadmap

Richard White — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 16:53:00 +0000

AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold

First of all, thank you to everyone who’s checked out the plugin and provided valuable feedback, we are listening. I will add that the plugin release has reenergized my passion for AjaxScaffold, which honestly was waning due to the upgrade problems associated with code generation.

And now, the news:

I will no longer be doing point release blog posts. We’re keeping the CHANGELOG current and you can always monitor the package in Rubyforge so you’ll know when these bug fix releases come out. Scott or myself will continue to do posts on major updates, such as the upcoming 4.0.0 release, but I’m no longer comfortable with { height: 1% } turning into a rolling AjaxScaffold changelog.
A number of your have asked about using associations in the plugin and rightfully so, we’ve been slack for not updating the old generator based article on adding associations. We’ll try and push out a similar post on using associations with the plugin version in the near future. After the next release making associations easier to manage, in both the table and in the form, will be our top priority.

The next release of the plugin will have a number of important changes that you should know about ahead of time:

We’re jumping on board the new CRUD standard for Rails and realigning things so that an AjaxScaffold can mesh with something like SimplyRestful that’s now in Edge Rails. This means that the current list method will now be moved to index, all actions will use respond_to instead of request.xhr?, and the show/create/index/update /destroy methods will support returning XML/YAML/JSON. I’m using all this stuff now in SlimTimer for the upcoming API and it works great in concert with the SimplyRestful stuff.
We will no longer support multiple ajax_scaffold definitions in a single controller. It doesn’t fit the new CRUD model and it’s not asking too much for you to use multiple controllers.
And much more…

What’s also gotten us excited is that the project is recieving increased corporate sponsorship in the form of companies paying for development of new features and bug fixes and/or support agreements. I’m not at liberty to disclose who these wonderfully forward thinking companies are but AjaxScaffold is being used in the “enterprise”. If your company is interested in either a support agreement or subsidizing development shoot me an email.

Also, remember that we have a wiki page of people that are using AjaxScaffold, but that list need not be limited to public facing sites, if you’re company is using AS internally we’d love to hear about it. Add your company information and maybe a short blurb about how you’re using AS to the wiki page.

"AjaxScaffold News and Roadmap" by Richard White

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 17:05:28 +0000

@Brittain: It’s really very simple. Index was redirecting to list and now it just calls it directly and we’ve added a show method. Everything else is just adding plumbing to the render portion of the actions to support xml/yaml/json.

@Andreas: Language support is something that has been briefly discussed but not given must of a priority. I’d want to know a) how many people in the community (read on the forum) need this and b) what does it do to our code complexity.

@Dr Nic: Thanks

@toddyb: That’s what a lot of our corporate sponsors are using the project for so I definitely agree.

"AjaxScaffold News and Roadmap" by toddyb

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 20:36:41 +0000

I’m looking forward to the next release that incorporates associations. In the enterprise space, rails with scaffolds (plain, extensions and ajax) and visualize_models plugins may be a viable way forward to allow for early “executable specifications” over long-drawn out BDUF.

"AjaxScaffold News and Roadmap" by Dr Nic

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 21:08:53 +0000

Congrats on the sponsorship. AJS is a wonderful project – you’ve helmed it well!

"AjaxScaffold News and Roadmap" by Andreas

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 20:07:33 +0000

Is there a way to use custom names (or even translations) for the tables/models when using the plugin? Our data model is in English, but that is a bit unfortunate for our German users.

"AjaxScaffold News and Roadmap" by Brittain

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 18:36:06 +0000

Will there be documentation on converting an existing scaffold (we have 7 generated with 3.1.x) into this new restful model?

In all the hurry to follow DHHs RESTful lead, I’ve seen very little doc or examples addressing the subject of existing code…

Thanks.