I am planning to create a website that has front end and back end. I was wondering how the FE communicates with the BE.
I saw a project that uses Xampp to run the front end and sinatra for the back end. It needs to start apache, then the backend is fired using the rackup command. I assume the backend runs under Webrick.
Can someone explain how these two ends communicate with each other? If there is a good tutorial for this, I will appreciate it.
Sinatra is a popular option for API-only backend applications. We use Grape with Sinatra or just Sinatra without any dependency.
I have two app examples that can help you:
https://github.com/katgironpe/sinatra-grape
https://github.com/katgironpe/simple-sinatra-mvc
Webrick or Puma can be used with Sinatra, but it's not impossible to run a Ruby app on XAMPP. I did that several years ago. The front-end is probably just consuming the Sinatra API.
You can use Ember CLI project. It can get complex with other options like Angular.js and React.js. Or if you like, just use jQuery.
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While developing JavaScript apps, I usually create an API app, totally separate from the UI app. For the API, I usually use Sinatra.
I'm developing a JavaScript app that will use a WebSocket service I build. I'd like to use Ruby (em-websocket for now) and ActiveModel for data models. I want to keep this really lightweight, like a Sinatra app is for a RESTful API.
It seems my WebSocket service will simply be a ruby script invoked via "ruby web_socket_service.rb". I'd like to be able to use various gems (like activerecord, capistrano, and nokogiri) with this WebSocket service. What's the most typical way of accomplishing this?
Would I be better off creating a standalone gem to contain my models and the WebSocket service script and then host my WebSocket service from that? Or maybe simply include the gems and models directly in the script via "gem 'name'? Or, is there some special library or framework commonly-used to tackle this?
Look at a Rails app. That's the approach I would take if your WebSocket service starts to grow towards a medium-sized app. I.e. bin, lib, Rakefile, and a Gemfile for your gems and bundler.
For smaller apps you can still use a Gemfile and bundler to manage the included gems. This locks gem versions so you won't have conflicts if you deploy to other servers. And then just put everything into one or two script files, similar to Sinatra.
Creating standalone gems is really only useful for libraries or application parts that are reusable across many applications. This doesn't sound like that sort of thing.
Is there a framework for Ruby for CGI that provides similar functionality as Ruby on Rails (mvc)?
Also, The server where the app shall be used on does not support FCGI, only plain old CGI.
Ruby comes with a CGI module, but it isn't a MVC at all. It makes it easy to extract parameters from a HTTP request passed to the app, encode and decode the query params, etc. It relies on a web server to handle routing the request to the right page, so there's quite a gap between a MVC and a CGI.
There are alternate MVCs for Ruby. Sinatra is very easy to use, and Padrino is built on Sinatra, putting it between Sinatra and Rails. I like using Sinatra at work because it's good for fast prototyping and in-house loads are nowhere close to what we'd get on an internet facing app.
As far as the server not supporting FCGI, a MVC doesn't really care. Put its server on a different port, then reference that port when you want something to talk to Sinatra. For instance, if you tell Sinatra to use 8088, your URLs for Sinatra served pages would be something like: http://host.com:8808/url/path/to/object. Load your Sinatra based app on the web server and start it up. It'll run concurrently with the normal web server.
I've got a non-RoR but ruby webapp in the works.
So far, I've just been using requests, hacks, and mod_ruby; but I'd really like to try out Mongrel--which seems to work really well for RoR sites.
I looked at the examples given in GitHub, and none of them does dynamic changing of content w/o having to restart Mongrel like you can do in RoR under dev mode.
How can I do this? (Just using load doesn't work.)
I use Sinatra with a Mongrel backend; hello world really is as easy as it says on the front page. I actually started with Sinatra, and then changed the server from webrick to mongrel after experimenting around with which gave better performance.
See this question for how that testing worked out.
Many people have asked about Rails hosting on this site, but I'm not familiar enough with the back end of things to know if there's a difference.
I want to host some Ruby CGI 'webservices', basically just ruby methods that take parameters from a POST request, access a MySQL db and return data.
I've looked at RoR and it seems like overkill for this, from what I can tell it's for speeding up the development of data baesd CRUD sites, which is not at all what I'm doing.
So my question is, does this affect the hosting provider I choose? Does anyone recommend a good Ruby host for CGI operations? I'm not familiar with FastCGI, mod_ruby, Passenger, Mongrel etc. and what they mean for performance, scalability etc. I just want to host my ruby scripts with reasonably good performance, and all the info out there(and here) seems to be focused on rails.
First, if you want lightweight, Sinatra is usually my first pick. Pair it up with rack and Passenger for best results. It's not CGI, but realistically speaking, CGI is rarely a good match-up with Ruby.
Here's the "Hello World!" Sinatra app from the main page:
require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
get '/hi' do
"Hello World!"
end
Hard to get more lightweight than that.
As for providers, anybody that supports Passenger (mod_rack) should be able to handle Sinatra. I'm a big fan of Slicehost personally, but they're a VPS host, which means you need to be able to install and manage the entire stack yourself. If you don't mind paying a tiny bit extra for the infrastructure, Heroku makes installation and deployment dead simple, so long as your needs don't exceed what they provide (sounds like they won't). In the unlikely event that you're only using 5MB or if you're using an external storage mechanism like Amazon RDS, Heroku may actually be free for you.
Update:
Passenger is an Apache module that allows Rack applications to be run inside of Apache.
Rack is a middleware layer that separates the web server and the web framework from each other. This allows web frameworks to run on any web server for which there is an adapter.
Sinatra is a lightweight web framework that runs on top of Rack.
Once Passenger and Rack are installed (gem install rack, gem install passenger) you just need to edit the Apache vhost to point at the config.ru file for your Sinatra app and create the required directories as per the Passenger docs and you'll be good to go.
I think you might want to look into Rack. It allows you to do the kinds of things you're talking about and shrugs off the weight of frameworks like Rails or Merb. Rack applications can be hosted at a place like Heroku.
If you use Webrick you can implement a servlet and service http requests using ruby. Now I have code that does everything that I want but I would like to move to Apache. Is there a way to modify the .htaccess file to send all the requests through a ruby handler?
you should check out phusion passenger. It lets you easily deploy any ruby Rack based web app in apache. You can then use rails, sinatra, waves, etc from apache.
You're asking for mod_ruby.
That was abandoned years ago in favor of running the Ruby code in a separate process under Mongrel, and just using Apache mod_proxy (or another web server acting as a proxy).
And now that Passenger is available lots of people (including myself) are adopting it instead of Mongrel, because it's simpler.
Just accept that you did it wrong the first time and bite the bullet. Rewrite your code as a Rack service, and run it via Passenger.