BoilerPlate — easy data-centric applications on Rails

BoilerPlate is a framework on top of Ruby on Rails that is intended to make development of data-centric applications as easy as possible. See below for some more details.

BoilerPlate is still very young, but I hope that starting with this release it has matured far enough to be useful to other developers. I appreciate your suggestions for improvement and comments on the code.

If you decide that BoilerPlate by itself is not what you need, have a look nevertheless. There’s quite a bit of reusable code inside.

To get an idea how it looks and feels, please go to

www.schuerig.de/michael/boilerplate

There you get to see some screenshots and static generated pages with client-side functionality intact. I am sorry, currently I’ve got no opportunity to host a live demo.

Changes

New in Version 0.2

 * Mostly internal reorganization and unit + functional tests
 * TreeNavigator for choosing an object in a tree structure.
 * Navigation through the result of the last list query.
 * Unit tests for the JavaScript code.
 * A generator (script/generate bp_scaffold) for creating "BoilerPlate-enhanced" scaffolding.
 * Improved abstraction. User code can get really DRY.

Requirements

• libgettext-ruby - get it from ponx.s5.xrea.com/hiki/ruby-gettext.html; there’s also an official Debian package
• ruby-json - available as a gem from RubyForge

Installation

• Unpack the tarball/zip.
• Create a new MySQL database user named "boilerplate" with enough rights to create and use databases.
• Create and populate a MySQL demo database by running +script/create_and_populate_demo_db+.
• +script/server+
• Point your browser to localhost:3000

The Good

• It looks pretty nice on the right browsers. Firefox, Konqueror, and hopefully Safari.
• High level of abstraction. A lot of things can be done quasi-declaratively.
• Forms

 * User-friendly display of conflicts from optimistic locking.
 * Mostly declarative client-side validation. NOT NULL and length constraints are directly take from the database.
 * Widgets for calendars, popup choosers of associated objects, many-to-many choosers.
 * Marking of changed fields.

• List views

 * Drag & drop of columns.
 * Filter criteria per column.

• Rudimentary support for "What’s This"-type help messages.
• Easy creation of enumeration types without the need for manually writing model classes.

The Bad

• Internet Explorer mangles the page layout into an unusable mess.
• Validation messages need more work.

The Ugly

• Currently requires a (included) patched version of Rails SVN HEAD.
• Some heavy, though transparent, extension of Rails functionality.

The Missing

• Packaging as gem and debian packages.
• Multiple filter criteria per table column.
• Saving of query definitions in the database.
• Generator to copy BoilerPlate assets into an application created by the Rails application generator.
• Improved scaffolding that adds suitable widgets to _form.rhtml.

If I had a wish: What I’d like to have in Rails

Obviously I hope that my patches make it into Rails proper so that BoilerPlate works with a plain vanilla Rails.

A Plea for Help

I’d really like to get BoilerPlate to work on Microsoft Internet Explorer. The JavaScript code already does work, but my attempts at getting the layout right have been frustrated so far. I highly appreciate any help that improves BoilerPlate’s cross-browser support.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all the helpful people who answered my questions on

• the Rails mailing list
• comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html
• comp.lang.javascript
• comp.lang.ruby
• de.comm.infosystems.www.authoring.misc
• de.comp.lang.javascript

Author

I’m a software developer located in Bonn/Germany. If you’d like to get an idea of what I do and what I’m interested in, please visit www.schuerig.de/michael. Available for hire.

License

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html