Photo by Steve Ganz

DHH has mentioned during one of his talks that the javascripts folder of any project has an unfortunate tendency to become a “junk drawer” of sorts. The plethora of javascript frameworks and plugins combined with a lack of built-in module support makes this kind of inevitable.

Over the last couple of months I started feeling this way about the current project we are actively developing, Salesguide. While Rails’ MVC design has kept us reasonably disciplined in our server-side code, there is a distinct lack of conventions for javascript.

I will be giving a presentation at the Omaha jQuery Meetup for their Sept. 1st meeting.

I’ll be giving a brief introduction to RESTful web services using Sinatra, followed by a demonstration of how my plugin jquery.rest makes things easier.

Whether you’ve never touched a RESTful web service before, or you’re an old pro who wants a better way, this meetup is for you! Hope to see you there.

We’ve been writing a lot of AJAX code with jQuery talking to our Rails backend, and lately we’ve been noticing a lot of duplication happening. There are several things that you need to do for Rails all the time that add up to a lot of tedium. Here’s a small jQuery plugin we developed to make this easier and DRY up our code.

jQuery.rest project at Github

Needed Functionality

We were presented with a project that would require an overlay “bubble” object to appear with a functional form inside. The purpose of this bubble is to allow a user to enter more information than the single node would allow. We like simplicity in user interfaces, so we didn’t want to clutter up the U.I. with anything until the user actually needed to use it.