In this blog post I'm going to present a few things. Most of all I'm going to demonstrate how I would implement nice, structured front-end code in an already existing traditional Rails application. I'm going to do this using Backbone but it's probably unlike how you may have seen Backbone used before. Finally I'm also going to present the technique I use to integrate this in with your Rails application. Importantly I think that we should be adopting sensibile application defaults in addition to the defaults that Rails provides us. By adopting our own per-application defaults we can avoid writing lots of code.

On front-end libraries/frameworks

Before I get started I'd like to state that Backbone is a library and not a framework so most comparisons between Backbone and Ember or Angular aren't really relevant. But I would like to demonstrate why I chose Backbone instead of Ember or Angular since it's such a commonly asked question…

The first (and hopefully annual) RubyConf AU was held in Melbourne in late February and as the title "suggests" it was pretty awesome. 380 Ruby and Rails geeks descended upon the Jasper Hotel for 2 days packed full of top quality talks, by amazing speakers. On the day preceeding the conference proper there was a full day of workshops.

Workshops

I attended a Code Retreat with Corey Haines. If you haven't been to a Code Retreat then you absolutely have to go. I felt like I levelled up as a developer several times in a single day and I'm very keen to go along to more. Basically the idea is that in pairs you do several 50ish minute programming spikes attempting

Working in Tank Stream Labs (a great new co-working space here in Sydney) I come into contact with plenty of entrepreneurs looking to start their own Next Big Thing. Sometimes they have plenty of technology experience in the founding team, but often it's "business" people looking to start a great new technology-based startup. They're eager to learn anything about creating an online business. So rather than explaining everything to them in person, my hope is that I can direct them to here and give everyone a nice easy list of tech things you should have covered in your new startup.

These tips fall into a few key areas but here goes!

Owning your stuff

With the very recent and extremely serious Rails security vulnerability there have been more than a few people around asking how they update their Rails apps in order to be safe. Luckily Rails makes the update process relatively easy for any simple apps. If you have a large app with a large team, you probably shouldn't be getting basic advice from a blog on the internet anyway!

How to Update

I'll be assuming you're running Rails 3.2.x.

1. Open your Gemfile
2. Make sure there's a line like: gem 'rails', '~> 3.2.0' in there.
3. Run: bundle update rails
4. Run your test suite (you do have a test suite... right?!)