Skip to main content

jMaki on Rails For Dummies

Posted by arungupta on May 17, 2007 at 2:33 PM EDT
Craig announced jMaki on Rails. Here I provide detailed steps to read data from a MySQL database and display it in a jMaki-wrapped Yahoo DataTable widget.
  1. Download NetBeans 6.0 M9 (Full version) and configured to install only "Base IDE", "Java IDE", "Web and Java EE" and "Ruby" modules. A cutting-edge build can be obtained from the hudson build.
  2. Download and install jMaki plug-in in NetBeans update center.
    1. In NetBeans 'Tools', 'Plugins', select 'Downloaded', click on 'Add Plugins ...'.
    2. Select the downloaded .NBM module, click on 'Install'. This will install the jMaki plug-in and restart the IDE.
    3. To verify, go to 'Tools', 'Plugins', select 'Installed'. It should show 'jMaki Ajax support' with '1.6.9.7' version number.
  3. Create a new "Ruby on Rails Application" Project, lets say named 'jmaki_ror'.
  4. Create a new controller by right-clicking the project, select 'Generate ...', select 'controller', specify the Name as 'jmaki' and Views as 'yahoo'.
  5. jMaki-enable the Rails app
    1. Open a command prompt and go to your application directory. Make sure you have a SVN client configured on your machine. Then invoke the following commands:

      script/plugin source http://jmaki-goodies.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/rails_plugins
      script/plugin install jmaki_core
      script/plugin install jmaki_yahoo

      The first step adds the plug-in registry to the list of registries used for searching plug-ins. The second two steps install the core and yahoo plug-ins.
    2. Expand 'Views', right-click on 'layouts', select 'New', select 'Empty RHTML (Embedded Ruby) file ...'. Enter the 'File Name' as 'standard'. This will add 'standard.rhtml' in layouts sub-tree. Enter the following fragment before <body>:

      <head>
        <%= stylesheet_link_tag "jmaki-standard", :media => "all" -%>
        <%= javascript_include_tag "jmaki" -%>
        <%= jmaki_setup -%>
      </head>
    3. Within <body>, add the following fragment:

      <%= @content_for_layout %>
    4. In 'Controllers', 'jmaki_controller.rb', add the following fragment before 'def yahoo' line:

      layout "standard"
  6. Configure the MySQL database
    1. Create database using the command: 'mysqladmin -u root create jmaki_ror_development'. You need to make sure that the database name in this script is changed to match the project name.
    2. Right select the NetBeans project, select 'Generate', select 'model', specify the arguments as 'grid', click 'OK'. This will generate, in NetBeans project, Database Migrations, migrate, 001_create_grids.rb.
    3. Open 001_create_grids.rb, change self.up helper method such that it looks like:

      def self.up
        create_table :grids do |t|
          t.column :company, :string
          t.column :price, :float
          t.column :change, :float
          t.column :percent_change, :float
          t.column :last_updated, :string
        end
      end 
    4. Right-select NetBeans project, select 'Run Rake Target', 'db', 'migrate'. This generates the database table. Execute the following query to insert data into the table:

      insert into grids values (1, 'A Co', 71.72, 0.02, 0.03, 'Jan 1, 2007, 10:00am' );
      insert into grids values (2, 'B Inc', 29.01, 0.42, 1.47, 'Feb 1, 2007, 10:00am' );
      insert into grids values (3, 'C Group Inc', 83.81, 0.28, 0.34, 'Mar 1, 2007, 10:00am' );
      insert into grids values (4, 'D Company', 52.55, 0.01, 0.02, 'Apr 1, 2007, 10:00am' );
  7. Add jMaki-wrapped Yahoo DataTable widget
    1. In NetBeans project, in 'Views', 'jmaki', 'yahoo.rhtml', drag-and-drop 'Data Table' widget from the 'Yahoo' category of jMaki palette.
      1. Until the jMaki data model for grid and data widgets is consistent between Java and JRuby, you need to replace the generated code in 'yahoo.rhtml' with the following:

        <%= jmaki_widget 'yahoo.dataTable',
            :args => {
                :columns => [
                    { :title => 'Company', :width => 200, :locked => false },
                    { :title => 'Price', :width => 75, :renderer => 'usMoney' },
                    { :title => 'Change', :width => 75, :renderer => 'change' },
                    { :title => '% Change', :width => 75, :renderer => 'pctChange' },
                    { :title => 'Last Updated', :width => 85, :renderer => 'italic' }
                ]
            },
        :value => @table_data
        -%>
      2. '@table_data' is defined in 'jmaki_controller' in 'def yahoo' as:

        def yahoo
            @table_data = []
            Grid.find_all().each do |data|
              @table_data << [ data.company, data.price, data.change, data.percent_change, data.last_updated]
            end
        end
  8. That's it, run your app and view the page at 'http://localhost:3000/jmaki/yahoo'. Now jMaki-wrapped Yahoo DataTable widget is picking data from the MySQL database. 

And as a next step, you can WAR'up this RoR application and deploy it on GlassFish V2 using these instructions.

Technorati: jmaki rubyonrails ror netbeans mysql glassfish

Related Topics >>
Blog Links >>

Comments

jMaki on Rails For Dummies

by samuell - 2010-12-14 10:23

I feel lucky I found this resource, I don't know if the instructions are for dummies or not but I am looking forward to implement the software on my system. I just hope I'll be able to handle the registries, I've downloaded a drivercure just in case anything goes wrong. Thanks for sharing!