WriteLessCode Blog

Better Separation of Concerns in Netzke Core with Ext.Direct

2011-02-28T23:00:00Z

In Russia, spring conventionally started today, on the 1st of March (the rest of the world may need to wait until the 21st), so, let me celebrate this with a new blog post about a nice feature that found its way into the recent 0.6.6 release of Netzke Core. Among other improvements, it incorporates some great work of Paul Schyska: he re-implemented the components client-server protocol using Ext.Direct. The main result of it are multiplexed remote calls between the client and the server side of a component. Not only consecutive remote calls from a component get wrapped-up in a single actual call, but also calls from different child components in a composite component, being fired in a row, will be multiplexed into a single call to the server! The response from the server will carry back personal responses for each of the components participating in the communication, and for each individual call. This tutorial will show how we can benefit from this feature, making our code even more modular.

Testing Ext JS/Rails components with Cucumber and WebDriver in Netzke

2011-01-26T23:00:00Z

If you're maintaining an open source project, a peace of mind is impossible without a decent test coverage. I've been successfully testing Netzke using Cucumber and Selenium/WebDriver (with some complementary RSpec tests as well). In this brief blogpost I will show you an example of a typical test scenario in Netzke Basepack, along with the code for a Cucumber step that communicates to the Ext JS component being tested. At the end, you can enjoy a little video I recorded of running complete Cucumber test suite on Basepack - I just thought it looked fun!

Sencha Touch/Rails Components With Netzke, Part 1

2011-01-12T23:00:00Z

Update: Netzke currently dropped support for Sencha Touch.

Netzke 0.6 is out: what's new

2010-11-01T23:00:00Z

About 7 weeks ago I joined the development team of a Berlin based company called Familien Service to help them start with a long-term project where they would use Netzke as the basis for a fairly complex CRM-application. Thanks to constant feedback from their really talented guys, as well as random help from other contributors on GitHub, Netzke has made some significant progress, resulting in that a week ago, after presenting Ext JS and Netzke":http://www.slideshare.net/netzke/rails-ext-js-and-netzke at "Ruby and Rails european conference in Amsterdam, I released the version 0.6.0 of both netzke-core and netzke-basepack. In this post I'd like to highlight the most important changes that found their way into the release.

One-to-Many Associations in Netzke

2010-06-26T22:00:00Z

Let's say we have a grid listing clerks, and we want to be able to assign a boss to a clerk (yes, my "favorite setup":http://demo.netzke.org/grid_panel). A traditional way to do this is by using a combobox listing available bosses as options. Netzke does it for you automatically when it detects a foreign key between the model's attributes. However, sometimes we want to be in more control over how one-to-many associations are handled in Netzke grids and panels. This tutorial will show you how to configure the following:

ExtJS/Rails CRUD Application in 7 Minutes

2010-06-13T22:00:00Z

This post will lead you through simple steps of creating a task manager web application with Ext JS, Ruby on Rails, and Netzke It will take you approximately 7 minutes to build, and if you're beforehand curious whether it's worth following, go straight to the last section but one (by far the biggest in this tutorial), where I discuss the results. The goal is to create a web application that will allow you to add, edit and remove TODO tasks, as well as mark them done. In addition to that, you'll be able to sort and search the tasks, edit several tasks at once, and more. You may start you stopwatch now, and let's get to the job.

ExtJS and Rails with Netzke: Virtual Attributes in Grids and Forms

2010-06-10T22:00:00Z

This blogpost will focus on how Netzke lets you specify and configure a model's (virtual) attributes mapped to columns (in grids) and fields (in forms). The way it was done before passed through several iterations of improvements, and finally I can say that I found an approach I'm currently happy with. It's very flexible, but at the same time the resulting code is readable, concise, and simply looks very habitual. Which problems is it solving? 1) Imagine, you want to render some HTML code in a grid cell (a link, an icon, etc). You could easily declare a method right in the model and use it as a virtual attribute. But it totally doesn't feel right to put this into your model, as it's about presenting the data, not the data itself. 2) Besides, different widgets may need different "representational" attributes for the same model - how would we handle that? Mix them in, in some way, into the model all together? Doesn't feel right either, especially if there are naming conflicts. 3) Also, different widgets may need to render the same attribute in a different way (e.g., with different formatting). Well, all this is now covered in Netzke. Read on.