The Rails View: Creating a Beautiful and Maintainable User Experience

by Williams, Bruce; Athayde, John

• ISBN13: 9781934356876
• ISBN10: 1934356875
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-04-06
• Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc

Summary

Working in the View layer requires a breadth of knowledge and attention to detail unlike anywhere else in Rails. One wrong move can result in brittle, complex views that stop future development in its tracks. This book will help you break free from tangles of logic and markup in your views as you pick up the practical skills you need to implement your user interface cleanly and maintainably.You'll discover how to build up solid, sustainable layouts and popular interface elements with semantic HTML5 and CSS3, and when you can responsibly generate markup and use advanced presenters... all without leaving the designers on your team out in the cold. Widen your appeal with responsive design, and discover how new progressive enhancement techniques can take you beyond the "weakest link" approach of the past. Master the asset pipeline introduced in Rails 3.1 and use Sass and Coffeescript to make your interface code shorter and more enjoyable.You'll create elegant, well-structured views that are a joy to build on. You'll appreciate its comprehensive, objective guidance in a realm full of subjective opinions.What You Need:All examples in the book assume Rails 3.1 and Ruby 1.9.x are installed. Detailed information on how to install these for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux is included in the book.

Author Biography

JohnAthayde is a UI/UX Design type who comes from an architecture (of the building variety) background. He is a senior designer at LivtngSocial. Bruce Williams is a longtime speaker, trainer, designer, and book contributor in the Ruby and Rails community. He is a senior developer in RJD at LivtngSocial.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Creating an Application Layout	p. 1
Creating a Basic Layout	p. 2
Setting Up a Boilerplate	p. 6
Building the Page Frame	p. 14
Adding a Sidebar	p. 23
Adding Navigation	p. 28
Displaying Notifications	p. 36
Validating Our Code	p. 39
Testing Internet Explorer	p. 41
Wrapping Up	p. 47
Improving Readability	p. 49
Choosing a Templating Language	p. 49
Standardizing Coding Practices	p. 51
Simplifying Complex Output	p. 56
Working with Models	p. 63
Displaying Conditional Content	p. 65
Adding Model DOM IDs for JavaScript	p. 69
Cleaning Up	p. 71
Wrapping Up	p. 72
Adding Cascading Style Sheets	p. 73
Using the Asset Pipeline	p. 73
Learning SCSS	p. 76
Adding Sprites	p. 88
Using Web Fonts	p. 92
Wrapping Up	p. 98
Adding JavaScript	p. 101
Using JavaScript from Rails	p. 101
Testing Ajax	p. 110
Wrapping Up	p. 117
Building Maintainable Forms	p. 119
Using Semantic Form Tags	p. 119
Building Custom Form Builders	p. 132
Looking Toward the Future of HTML5 Form Elements	p. 140
Wrapping Up	p. 142
Using Presenters	p. 143
Presenting a Record	p. 144
Presenting Multiple Records	p. 153
Using Presenters for Serialization	p. 158
Wrapping Up	p. 161
Handling Mobile Views	p. 163
Building a Flexible Layout	p. 164
The Next Level with Responsive Design (©media queries)	p. 168
Using Mobile-Specific Templates	p. 174
Using jQuery Mobile	p. 179
Wrapping Up	p. 188
Working with Email	p. 189
Building a Mailer	p. 189
Handling Email Templates	p. 191
Testing Locally	p. 195
Testing Across Clients	p. 196
Wrapping Up	p. 206
Optimizing Performance	p. 207
A/B Testing with Vanity	p. 207
Performance Testing and Maintenance	p. 214
Wrapping Up	p. 228
Where Do We Go from Here?	p. 229
The Rails View Rules	p. 233
Bibliography	p. 235
Index	p. 237
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.