#assetpipeline

[cappygamedev-blog]

From a beta go a golden!

It’s been a long and fun 5 weeks that’s for sure! And I’m really enjoying the process that we took to get to where we are now. A lot of the other students have done some really crazy and wonderful things! It's really cool to see what everyone else has been up to! It's definitely really inspiring!

I can’t wait for the post mortems tomorrow!

Heres a little sneak peek to my game and what it looks like ;)

[codeblocks]

Gems & Libraries in Rails 3.2

Getting up to speed during my first week on the new job. My first task has been upgrading the versions of Ruby and Rails for the main website. To handle some of the common tasks across web applications, we use an in-house gem. While testing the upgrades, I noticed that some of the JavaScript libraries called in the web app weren't being pulled out of the gem. It took some digging to discover why, but here's what I found.

The libraries were previously located in the public/ directory of the gem, which the asset pipeline doesn't check. The asset pipeline will only check the app/assets, lib/assets, and vendor/assets directories.

Solution: hop to the terminal and git mv the directories to lib/assets. Reload the server and the page, check the console, and boom—no more file not found errors.

On the HTML/HAML side, the library is still called in the app with = javascript_include_tag 'jquery-1.10.2.min.js' and we use = javascript_include_tag 'application' to grab all of the other, site-specific stuff. Same with the stylesheets helper. If you know of a more efficient way to do work the asset pipeline in Rails 3.2.17, let me know!

Still more cleaning and tweaking and wrestling of RefineryCMS to do. & don't forget: Friday is Tie Day.

(If you work in the command line, the tree tool is pretty dang awesome, if only for the visualization: brew install tree to get it, so you can see your directories like a tree.)

[devnuggets-blog]

semicolons in SASS can cause 500's

The Rails asset pipeline seems to choke and not give you a proper stack trace if you introduce a semi-colon into your sass. Weird. 

[allthingsror-blog]

Asset Pipeline

What is a manifest file ?

why is it commented ?

why are the commented lines throwing an error ?

How is this whole thing a part of the asset pipeline ?

what is a directive ? Directives test if variables exist or not.

why does it begin with //= ?

Terminology

master.css

master.js

Fingerprinting

Well basically, it is a set of directives

[fivetool]

Flatstrap in the pipeline

I'm a huge fan of Twitter Bootstrap. Being able to build a quick basic responsive scaffold for a Rails project is a huge help during the prototyping phase. For those projects where there isn't a separate budget for a mobile stylesheet, Bootstrap's responsive features provide developers with the capability to add some screen dimension-dependent behaviors. Bootstrap is easy to add to Rails with the gem twitter-bootstrap-rails. The gem provides some generators and view helpers that help integrate Bootstrap's features such as modal dialogs and breadcrumbs with Rails.

Non-designers don't use this term, but occasionally I get a response that Bootstrap-based prototypes are a bit too "lickable". For occasions when I need a design with more of a flat aesthetic but you still want the structure and JavaScript plugins from Bootstrap, there's LittleSpark's Flatstrap. Flatstrap is the latest Bootstrap with the rounded corners and gradients removed.

This weekend I pushed out the first version of flatstrap-rails. Flatstrap takes advantage of the helpers and generators of twitter-bootstrap-rails, but includes the Flatstrap CSS in the Rails 3.1 asset pipeline. Give it a try for those Rails projects where you want a flatter look.