Roar mailing list, wiki and future plans
I am happy to see people starting to use roar in development. As it is used, some great questions, ideas and problems have emerged. To collect all these, I’ve added a mailing list and set up a wiki. Please do visit these—contributions are most welcome!
- http://rubyforge.org/mail/?group_id=2958—Mailing List
- http://wiki.nanoware.com/roar/—Wiki
I’ve also put what is on my radar in the rubyforge tracker. Please add any feature requests, patches or bug reports there.
Longer term, I see the future direction of roar moving more out of the automated admin interface game, and more into the generic interface game. Basically, this would mean splitting the plugin into at least two parts—the core, and the admin interface templates. I think for many applications, the layer provided by roar provides for some unique advantages. The indirection provided by roar core may add initial development effort to the first usage, but can dramatically speed up reapplication of the same pattern. Plus, by sharing those contributions back to the community, everyone will benefit. Similarly the emphasis could shift away from the admin interface as provided, to more of an emphasis on use contributed templates. I would love to see an interface based on dojo/yui/jquery, or an interface that was designed by an actual designer.
However, those are just some of my thoughts, and are mostly just blue sky dreams right now. Right now roar provides a useful featureset out of the box due to its evolution from the use cases that I needed to tackle. In the same way, roar will continue to evolve up and out (while maintaining as much simplicity as possible) based on your input and requirements.
Tumblelog, the roar demo
I wanted an app to showcase some of Roar’s capabilities, so I put up a tumblelog.
Roar 0.5, the Peter Gunn edition
I was showing some of the cool new stuff in Roar to Bryan, and all he keeps saying is, “You don’t believe in release early, release often, do you?”. Guilty as charged—but I’ve been cooking up some pretty sweet things in the meantime. This release inspired by Peter Gunn, Hellecasters Here goes with a laundry list of some of the things that roar can now do that has me pretty excited: du du du du du du du du…
Roar screenshots
Getting started with Roar
I recorded a short, introductory screencast, to getting started with Roar. It takes you from creating a rails app, installing the plugin, to writing your first admin interface in under 5 minutes.
Roar is coming
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 |
class PostsController < ApplicationController roar do per_page 5 order "published_at DESC, created_at" filters do search :text, [:title,:body] recent_dates :created_at end table do edit :title column :status date :published_at delete end form do text_field :title text_area :body select_field :status, :choices=>Status.to_select check_box :published, :name=>"Published?" end end end |
