sinisterchipmunk
commented
13 years ago I haven't even begun to define how this will happen, because Jax itself is still being designed. There are, however, a few things that I can see happening:
- The Jax-Rails adapter will be a separate Ruby gem from Jax itself. This is because not all Jax users will want to use Rails, and working both Rails and non-Rails support into the gem would be dangerous (read: fragile).
- Jax will hook into the Rails #to_prepare step, so that the project can be rebuilt at every request without needing a Jasmine server to run.
- Jax will hook into the Rails rake tasks to invoke unit tests without needing any other special setup.
- Jax projects will (probably?) live in "app/jax", and Jax will take care of copying the necessary files into public/ as needed. This keeps resource files, etc. safe from prying eyes.
- There will, of course, be Ruby-side helpers. Ideally, there will be a JaxController that you can inherit from, moving a lot of code from Javascript into Ruby. I'm not sure how viable this will be at the moment, but I did some very similar things with my original webgl project ( http://github.com/sinisterchipmunk/webgl ).
- This isn't really a Rails thing, per se, but Jax will automatically convert known file types (MD2, MD3, BSP, etc) into JSON using Ruby. Since this is done server-side, it will add no JS client overhead (except to retrieve the corresponding JSON files).
- One possible Rails-specific addition would be an engine controller to do the conversions on-the-fly and cache the JSON. This would keep the application directory cleaner than a "vanilla" Jax app would.
- Jax will almost certainly be able to use the Rails database to load resources, instead of storing them on the filesystem. It will likely support both file-based and DB-based resource management.
That's all I can think of right now. REMEMBER: this is really more of a wishlist right now. For the time being, I just want to release Jax v0.0.1, and I'll work on Rails adapters once Jax reaches, say, v0.1. Or someone else can start sooner than that, if they want.
throw some bones !