== Welcome to SproutCore Sample Applications
This is a samples application package for building a SproutCore applications. To get started, edit your JavaScript application in the clients directory (we've already created one for you.)
== BEFORE YOU CONTINUE
If you just cloned this samples directory using Git, you need to run the following two commands to get the latest version of SproutCore JavaScript:
git submodule init git submodule update
== Getting Started
To try the samples, start the SproutCore Dev Server by running from this directory:
sc-server
This takes all the same arguments as mongrel. You can now test any of the following sample apps:
http://localhost:4020/contacts http://localhost:4020/demo http://localhost:4020/hello_world http://localhost:4020/photos http://localhost:4020/sample_controls http://localhost:4020/twitter
You can also view the SproutCore docs or run the unit tests:
http://localhost:4020/sproutcore/-docs (click Rebuild Docs) http://localhost:4020/sproutcore/-tests
== What Goes Where
Here is a brief description of the various parts of the SproutCore app:
clients: Each folder in the clients directory contains a single-page application you can load in your web browser. By default the URL to reach each application is the /directory-name. You will do most of your editing here.
frameworks: Each folder in the frameworks directory is a SproutCore library that your client applications can use. No HTML will be generated for these frameworks, but any JavaScript, CSS or other images you place in here will be accessible through your web browser.
public: This directory contains any other static resources your other apps needs to be able to use. If you have static HTML or other basic files you want to have access to. If you start your server in production mode, cached output will also be saved into this directory.
lib: Any ruby files you place in this directory will be automatically loaded when the sproutcore server start or when you do a static build. If you write any custom view helpers, you can place them here.
setup.yaml: This is a config file that you can use to set various load options for the clients and frameworks in your app. The default options are specified in the default: group. You can override the default for specific frameworks or clients by naming them.
== Using Frameworks
Frameworks are automatically available in your app. You can also name frameworks available anywhere in your load path (including those installed in gems).
The SproutCore gem comes with the latest versions of prototype, sproutcore, and sproutapp frameworks installed. All you need to do is indicate that you require them.
== Deploying your SproutCore App
Normally you will use the sc-server to host your application while you are developing your code. Once you are ready to deploy, however, there are two ways you can do it:
==== 1. Use sc-server in production.
The SproutCore server can be run in a production mode that will simply generate and cache web-optimized versions of all of your resources upon request. For a low-traffic or newer site, this approach is an easy way to get your code into production. You just replace your directory with your latest files and the sc-server will start serving the new resources.
==== 2. Do a static build
In general, however, loading all of your resources through a Ruby-app is not the best, especially when you could use a high-speed server such as lighttpd that is optimized for serving static content.
If you want real speed, do a static build of your content and serve it through lighttpd or apache. Do the static build, just run:
sc-build
This will place a directory in tmp/build that contains all of your resources pre-compiled and ready for static serving.