Topic Archive: MVC

From JSP to Ruby on Rails: First thoughts on front-end coding conventions

Brian Dillard, Monday, November 10, 2008 @ 4:00 pm

Now that I've got a few Ruby on Rails projects under my belt, I finally feel qualified to comment on Rails front-end coding conventions. As a UI specialist coming to Rails from the JSP world, I find a lot of room for improvement in the RoR approach to view-layer code. I love working on the non-view aspects of RoR projects, but I find I've got to do tons of cleanup at the ERB layer. Expect to see some open-source components from Pathfinder to help ease this pain. In the meantime, let me articulate my pain points:

Code organization

If I'm filling a front-end role on a Rails project, most of the files I need are in /app/views and /public. I dig that. Likewise, I appreciate the underscore naming conventions for partials. However, I wish /layouts weren't just another subdirectory of /app/views. Layouts are inherently different from standard view templates. A better hierarchy within /app/views would help drive this home. Likewise, I wish partials and full templates each had their own directory within a specific controller's view folder. That would help keep directories manageable on big projects. The /public directory, on the other hand, offers just the right amount of organization.

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GWT, Remote Models and the Need for Better Replication Algorithms

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, April 17, 2008 @ 1:41 pm

PESSIMISM, n.

A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the  observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his  scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile.

-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

I frequently crawl through the various GWT project hosted on Google Code, as well as the few that aren't (like the almost venerable GWT Widget Library). One type of solution that is emerging is what I would call model synchronization libraries. These build on top of the GWT-RPC mechanism and allow a synchronization of an object model on the client-side with a corresponding one on the server-side.

Right now there are two major choices available:

• hibernate4gwt - Number one with a bullet. Elegant and powerful library that allows you to ship domain objects back and forth between the GWT client and the Java server, persisting changes, all at the cost of extending one class: LazyGwtPojo. There are two basic flavors -- stateless and stateful -- with a couple of different subflavors to support a variety of development use cases.
• Gwittir - Developed by the two dudes who wrote GWT in Practice, this library provides domain object bindings without forcing a dependency on Hibernate (should we add "Hibernate infected" to our lexicon along side "Maven infected?").

It's clear why these libraries are gaining in popularity. The whole idea of writing applications in GWT is to have a commonality of language and domain model. You want to be consistent and not have to navigate the OO/RPC boundary every time you modify or retrieve your client-side model. (An additional alternative worth mentioning is IT Mill Toolkit 5, which as a server-side ajax framework with it's widgets realized in GWT, already has the client-server synchronization baked in.)
 

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