Rails + Spry = Rapid Development

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Fast Prototyping
Most of the engineering work are repetitive work - i.e. 90% of the time doing 10% of the work, the 90/10 rule. The engineering tools are advancing along to help the engineers cope with those grunt work. There are quite a few ready and stable frameworks for web development: Rails (short for Ruby on Rails), Python, Flex,... We like Rails for its unique approach of SCAFFOLD that allow us to do fast prototype from data model.

ERD is such a widely used definition/documentation, even Microsoft Visio allows you to reverse engineer an existing database and generate the ERD automatically! Here is the ERD used in the Rails tutorial

MCV Rail based framework
Model: ERD -> Control: Scaffold -> View: basic CRUD


Click to view the enlarged picture.

Sample site

tochern/123456

The Lynda Dreamweaver CS3 Beyond tutorial can be downloaded:
Ch1
Ch2
Ch3
Ch4
ch5-
ch6- Ch5-6 Exercise File
Ch7
Ch8
Ch9
Ch10


Applying the AJAX effect without sweat
Again the 90/10 rule, Spry widget offers a designer to create AJAX interactive GUI without knowing the javascript programing.

Integration?
To pursue a more integrated flow of development is really in the future tense
I have not explore more on the Rails - Spry integration. However, I know that Adobe has integrated their own FLEX and Spry via XML.

Blue Print
Here is my interpretation/observation how Rails and SPRY can help us to rapid prototype our biz application:

User input (CRUD) = Rails Scaffold = mySQL -> XML data set -> SPRY Browser Widgets

The above approach creates the input access using Rails scaffold, and let the designer display the output with the Spry effects separately.