'WebControls' for Ruby on Rails

Question

I've recently started working with RoR for some projects and I quite like the framework - however coming from an ASP.NET background I'm quite fond of the idea of being able to purchase & drop in reusable components/control such as those from telerik, without having to 'reinvent'.

I suppose it would be possible to maybe create my own using partials or plugins or similar, but I'm wondering if there is anything out there already, or perhaps alternatives which could be massaged into place, like javascript widgets etc?

Answer 1

Ext JS is a great GUI toolkit. I can't say that it entirely fits in with the RoR way of doing things, but if you write your controllers to return JSON it isn't too bad.

Answer 2

I don't know of any commercial components or "controls", but there's thousands (probably, I haven't counted them) of plugins out there freely available, to do a great many things for you, some of which would probably count as "controls". Unfortunately, there's no one place to go and find them, and the quality is depressingly variable, but there are a number of plugin indexes like http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/ that might help in finding what you want while weeding out the dross.

Answer 3

Dojo has a widget library which might meet your needs.

Answer 4

One of the big differences between Ruby/Rails and the .Net world is the fact that most of the available plugins are open-source and integrate at the code level. There is an incredible array of plugins for Rails, and it is very straight forward to write your own. Due to the nature of Ruby you can hook into any just about any part of the language and framework, giving you impressive extensibility.

I am not sure how Web Controls work, but it sounds like they are a "black-box" that provides an end-to-end solution for both UI and data-level operations ... ?

Many of the Rails plugins do provide both UI and data aspects. An example would be "restful_authentication" which provides you with both some basic forms for login and user registration as well as an authentication module and a Active-Record model. Again, this operates at a code-level, so will actually push the relevant code into your codebase when you install and "generate" the authentication modules.

As for "widgets", there is no equivalent in Rails, per-se, but there are a number of JavaScript libraries that provide similar functionality. I use and recommend jQuery UI, myself.