Tech Archives
ZANGA
That totally doesn’t scream “cheap Xanga ripoff” right? I mean, “x” is so 2000. So I just so happen to be talking about my old Xanga this morning (coughwheremytumblrnameisfromcough) and then what do you know, we’re doing a journal app today!
And so it was. It was the first time we were taking a rails project from “rails new” through to the static page, to the js router/views/templates, and it was pretty glorious. All the pieces are coming together, even more so than last Friday with just naked AJAX calls. Now the entire site is one big edit-able asynchronous-able view. I mean, we got to do fancy edit! With input boxes popping up ON THE FLY! Whizzing onto the page practically! I almost got whiplash!
This…is…spinal tap?
But actually, today Backbone started making sense. After getting our hands dirty with the models, views, and router in JS, I’m like, “ohhhh that’s where this is going.” I finally saw the forest instead of the trees!
The lecture in the morning was also very helpful. Basically, at this point, Rails is just in charge of rendering 1 full page, the static root page. All the other components are populated by JS views and perform small server calls only when needed, and thus the site is mostly this fragmented AJAX loop. That’s what they mean by “single page site.” Kewl.
AJAX actually stands for something?!
And here I thought they just really liked that one Greek hero from the Iliad. (There was one, right?) But maybe that’s partially why they branded it that way; I mean, Asynchronous Javascript XMLHTTPRequest kinda has backronym written all over it.
It’s pretty cool incorporating it into our Rails projects. Now everything (Rails, HTML/CSS, and JS) is coming together! At this point, in theory, we can build the apps we see all over the internet these days. (Granted, we haven’t yet spent time to make anything really polished yet, but that’s what the capstone project is for!) It’s a lot of moving pieces (updating views, models, js files/events, routes, and controllers) but I actually find it not terrible to keep track of because of how CONCRETE it is: if I am on so-and-so page, wouldn’t it make sense that the views are in so-and-so folder, the js scripts are named so-and-so, etc etc? So I’m having a pretty good time orchestrating everything.