Subject: [ANN] Rails Engines + Login Engine
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rails
Date: 2005-11-01 23:56:42 GMT (2 years, 35 weeks, 5 days and 13 minutes ago)
(apologies for the repost, the list seemed broken when I sent this last...) http://rails-engines.rubyforge.org/ ... at which you can digest all manner of propaganda and rdoc.... well, docs. You might particularly want to watch the demo movie: http://rails-engines.rubyforge.org/movies/engines_intro.mov (36MB Quicktime, soon to be revised and re-encoded into a smaller file) http://www.lazyatom.com/media/video/engines_intro_h.264.mov (16MB, QT 7 only) Any mirrors of this would be *greatly* appreciated! Below is the hype: What are Rails Engines? ================================= Rails Engines are a way of dropping in whole chunks of functionality into your existing application without affecting any of your existing code. The could also be described as mini-applications, or vertical application slices - top-to-bottom units which provide full MVC coverage for a certain, specific application function. Why do I want this? ================================= Rails Engines are advantageous over normal generators because the do not insert any code into the /app directory, but remain isolated within the plugins directory of your application. Furthermore, you can override individual controller actions and views/partials within your application as needed, whilst leaving the original Engine files intact. OK, I need an example ================================= As an example, the Login Engine (heavily based on the Salted Login Generator, all kudos to those guys) provides a full user login subsystem, including: * controllers to manage user accounts; * helpers for you to interact with account information from other parts of your application; * the model objects and schemas to create the required tables; * views for all the controller methods * stylesheets to enhance the views; * and any other library files required. ... it's basically everything you need to add a simple login mechanism to your Rails app. How do I get such devilry? ================================= Engines can be distributed using the same mechanisms as regular Rails plugins (since to the Rails plugin system they appear to be almost the same thing). If you are developing engines yourself for use across multiple projects, linking them as svn externals allows seamless updating of bugfixes across multiple applications. The Rails Engines plugin and all other engines should be listed on the Plugins page in the wiki, so that the bleeding-edge script/plugin command can be used to install them painlessly. Currently they are hosted on the OpenSVN servers at https://opensvn.csie.org/rails_engines/plugins, although a more permanent, svn-savvy home would be make me very very happy.... </beg> http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/Plugins Comments? ================================= This is a very first release of a plugin which tries to do something quite sweeping, so there are bound to be bugs! Please submit all your comments, etc either directly to me (james.adam@...) or at the RubyForge project page: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rails-engines/