UJS Rails Plugin - Home

UJS Google Group

2006-10-17T09:12:00Z

UJS has started to get a lot of attention recently and we’ve found we’ve been getting tickets filed on trac that are more like support requests/help rather than real bugs.

For that reason, we’ve set up a UJS4Rails Google Group. Feel free to ask questions, suggest features and discuss how you are using the plugin.

Embracing buttons

2006-10-03T14:23:00Z

In his RailsConf UJS presentation, Dan was quite clear about the appropriate use of links and buttons – only use links for GETting resources – not for POST, DELETE, PUT or any other HTTP verb that implies some kind of destructive behaviour.

The problem with this however is that it requires you to litter your page with ugly forms and input buttons. However, there is a HTML element that can come to your rescue; the button element.

Unlike submit buttons (created with the input element) they are much more flexible in terms of what you can put in them and how you can style them. For instance, did you know you could use semantic markup inside the button?


<button type="submit">Click me <strong>now!</strong</button>

For more information on using the button element, check out Aaron Gustafson’s excellent article on Digital Web Magazine entitled Push my button.

UJS at RailsConf Europe

2006-09-18T13:33:00Z

It seems that there was alot of interest in UJS at RailsConf Europe. So much so that I ended up doing my presentation twice. I’ve added my slides and the example application to my site so go over and download them if you are interested. Towards the end of the presentation there’s a hint to some of the new features we’ll be adding to UJS over the next few releases.

There were some great questions and some great feedback both during and after the presentations so thanks for all of your support. I’ll also be presenting at The Ajax Experience in Boston at the end of October so hopefully I’ll see you there.

Luke has also has written up some of his thoughts about UJS and the conference over on his site so check that out too. In the meantime, be sure to keep posting bugs and enhancements to Trac. Version 0.4 will be out soon as well as more tips and articles.

Release: UJS Rails Plugin 0.3.2

2006-09-05T20:21:00Z

A small bug sneaked its way into the last release, so we’ve patched it up and put together this small maintenance release.

As usual, the changelog reveals all:

FIXED: Error when trying to convert nil from hash (ticket #8)
FIXED: Got tests running inside a Rails app
UPDATED: Refactored BehaviourScriptConverter

The other change here is that you can now run rake test:plugins from within your Rails app and the UJS tests will pass. You can also switch to the plugins directory inside vendor/plugins and run rake to run the tests.

Release: UJS Rails Plugin 0.3.1

2006-09-04T15:26:00Z

Fresh out of Textmate, as Dan would say, is UJS Rails Plugin 0.3.1. Don’t be fooled by the point release; this release contains no new functionality but some important bug fixes.

There are two major fixes in this release. The first is that the module name that was used throughout much of the source code has been changed from UnobtrusiveJavascript to UJS. This change, as I mentioned in a previous post means that UJS is now compatible with Edge Rails. There was one change to the API as a result. In your routes.rb file, change the following line:


UnobtrusiveJavascript::routes

To this:


UJS::routes

The other biggest fix is an issue that both Dan and I have observed in production apps we are working on that use UJS. For some reason, on a server restart, the server would mysteriously hang, with no apparent error being logged. We eventually traced the problem down to serializing our own BehaviourScript class to the session (early releases of UJS just used a hash) with Rails being unable to find the class when loading the class from the session on server restart. The problem was fixed by converting BehaviourScript objects to hashes before session storage. All reports seem good so far; this does appear to have fixed the problem. If you are still seeing some strange issues, please file a bug on Trac.

As well as the above, there are also some other small fixes. Thanks to everybody who filed bugs in Trac. Here is the complete changelog:

FIXED: Issues with Rails edge have now been resolved. Have changed the UnobtrusiveJavascript module to UJS. This has one API change – use UJS::Routes in routes.rb
FIXED: Major issue when restarting server (server just hangs) due to serializing of behaviour scripts to the session. Objects are now converted to and from a hash before serializing to the session. All reports suggest that this has fixed the issue. Please raise a ticket if you get any more weird errors.
FIXED: remote_function was incorrectly quoting JS (ticket #3)
FIXED: :external => false now works for apply_behaviours (ticket #5)
FIXED: element.replace_html inside Ruby behaviour block wasn’t working, this is now fixed (ticket #4)
FIXED: behaviours_url now works correctly when using mongrel url-prefix (ticket #6)
FIXED: Resolved some documentation issues

The API docs have also been updated. If you are using the “current” tag all you need to do is run an svn up, otherwise the new release can be found at http://source.ujs4rails.com/tags/rel-0.3.1.

Barcamp presentation on UJS

2006-09-04T08:20:00Z

I was able to attend Barcamp London this weekend, where I gave a presentation on Unobtrusive Javascript with Ruby on Rails and the UJS For Rails plugin. Thanks to those who turned up.

If you were unable to make Barcamp, you can download the slides.

Dan also did a good presentation on Low Pro, the Prototype extension that powers UJS For Rails. Low Pro will have its own website soon, but in the meantime, check out the write-up on Dan’s site.

Edge Rails support coming soon

2006-08-31T15:41:00Z

As we mentioned in the announcement for the 0.3 release, there were some issues preventing the plugin (and other plugins) from working with Edge Rails due to the reworked dependencies system. It is for this reason that we advised freezing to edge revision 4727.

There was some discussion on the Rails core mailing list and a trac ticket for these dependencies which has now been closed. It seems that the dependencies system is starting to stabilise and as a result, I’ve just checked in some changes that gets the plugin working with the latest Rails Edge (revision 4887 at the time of writing).

As you can see from the changeset, the UnobtrusiveJavascript module has now been renamed to UJS. For some reason, the new dependencies system was getting confused by the UnobtrusiveJavascript module, which had files residing in (from a Rails app point of view) /vendor/plugins/unobtrusive_javascript/lib/unobtrusive_javascript. Renaming the module was easy enough and fixed the problem. There is only one API change as a result of this update: your UnobtrusiveJavascript::routes declaration in your routes.rb file will need to be changed to UJS::Routes. If you are running off of the plugin’s trunk, you’ll need to make this change right away.

For those not running on the trunk, expect a point release with the above changes plus some other bug fixes in the coming days.

Announcing UJS Rails Plugin 0.3

2006-08-21T13:28:00Z

Dan and I are pleased to announce the biggest release of the Unobtrusive Javascript for Rails plugin – now simply known as UJS. This is a big release in many ways – we’ve got some important bug fixes in here, some great new helper functionality and most importantly: caching.

Here is the changelog for 0.3:

FIXED: Problems with rake:unobtrusive_javascript:install (ticket #12 on old trac)

FIXED: Problems with back button (result of caching feature) (ticket #10 on old trac)

Refactored a lot of the code and increased test coverage significantly

NEW: Out-of-the box caching using HTTP ETags and advanced behaviour caching

NEW: Apply multiple behaviours at once with apply_behaviours

NEW: Behaviour helpers to easily and unobtrusively apply scriptaculous effects

UPDATED: Updated lowpro.js library

UPDATED: Added :external option support to tag_options

NEW: :prevent_default option to cancel original event behaviour such as link following and form submission

The other big change is that the Subversion repository has changed location, as has the place to report issues with the plugin: the plugin now has its own dedicated Trac.

The plugin repository is now located at:

http://source.ujs4rails.com

The latest version of the plugin now has its own tag, which should make it work with Rails’ built-in script/plugin script:

http://source.ujs4rails.com/current/unobtrusive_javascript

Finally, you can report issues on the UJS Rails Plugin Trac:

http://trac.ujs4rails.com

You can also find updated RDoc documentation at http://docs.ujs4rails.com

Important Note: If you are running on Edge Rails, the plugin will only work if you freeze to revision 4727. This is due to issues with the new Rails dependencies system. The plugin works fine on Rails 1.1.6.

If you’ve not yet used the plugin, now is the time to check it out. Grab the latest release and get started!

Welcome to the new UJS Rails Plugin website

2006-08-17T15:50:00Z

As the development of the Unobtrusive Javascript plugin for Rails continues, Dan and I felt it would be good to put up a dedicated website for the plugin – welcome to that very website.

On this website you will find documentation, installation instructions and other resources. We will also post news of new releases and tutorials, tips and tricks showing you the variety of ways in which you can use the plugin.

The major change is the name of the plugin – from now on it will be referred to as the UJS Rails Plugin.

If you have any suggestions for articles or tutorials that you would like to see on the website, please drop us an e-mail. Please report any issues or feature requests on the UJS trac. As you’ll see we are using a customised Trac template – if you come across any major issues with this, please report those too.

Note for IE users: we are aware that there are some display issues in IE. We aim to have these ironed out over the coming days. In the meantime it is recommended that you use Firefox or Safari.

If you are yet to check the plugin out, grab the latest version from Subversion and follow the Quickstart Guide.