/batman-rails

Easily use batman.js with Rails 4

Primary LanguageRubyMIT LicenseMIT

Batman::Rails

Easily setup and use batman.js (0.16) with Rails 4

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'batman-rails'

And then execute:

$ bundle
$ rails generate batman:app

Layout and namespacing

Running rails generate batman:app will:

  • create the following directory structure under app/assets/batman/:

        - models/
    - views/
    - controllers/
    - html/
    - lib/
    - app_name.coffee # initial setup & requires

  • create a controller & route to server your batman.js app from / and serve HTML

  • configure the asset pipeline to precompile app_name.coffee

Generators

Batman-Rails provides 3 simple generators to help get you started using batman.js with Rails. The generators will only create client-side code (CoffeeScript).

Model Generator

rails generate batman:model

This generator creates a batman model inside app/assets/batman/models to be used to talk to the Rails backend.

Controllers

rails generate batman:controller

This generator creates a batman controller for the given actions provided.

Scaffolding

rails generate batman:scaffold

This generator creates a controller, helper and model to create a simple crud single page app

Usage

Created a new Rails application called blog.

rails new blog

Edit your Gemfile and add

gem 'batman-rails'

Install the gem and generate scaffolding.

bundle install
rails generate batman:app
rails generate scaffold Post title:string content:string
rake db:migrate
rails generate batman:scaffold Post title:string content:string

You now have installed the batman-rails gem, setup a default directory structure for your frontend batman code. Then you generated the usual Rails server side scaffolding and finally generated Batman.js code to provide a simple single page app.

Precompiling Views

In production, you may want to send all your HTML templates with the first request rather than sending them as-needed. batman-rails includes a view helper to do this. Add it to your application layout:

    <%= batman_define_views %>

It will gather HTML from app/assets/batman/html and interpolate them into JS code to preload Batman.View.store. If your HTML is in another directory, pass that directory as an option:

  <%= batman_define_views(path_to_html: "app/assets/templates/">

Now it will gather HTML from app/assets/templates!

Contributing

  1. Fork it
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create new Pull Request