Rails Development for iPhone with rails_iui
I've been doing some web development for iPhone and Mobile Safari lately, not least because of a series of articles that will be showing up in IBM DeveloperWorks soon.
I was using the iUI toolkit, which contains a number of CSS styles and JavaScript event handlers to make iPhone Web apps look and feel somewhat like native iPhone applications. As I was working with iUI, I realized I was building up a library, so I converted everything to a Rails plugin: rails_iui.
Get the plugin from github: git://github.com/noelrappin/rails-iui.git
Right now the plugin is primarily interested in doing a few things:
It contains a rake task to download iUI, move it's files to the Rails public directories, and change the CSS image URL's accordingly.
There's a controller class method acts_as_iphone_controller, calling that sets up a before filter that captures the Mobile Safari user agent string and sets the request format to iphone for use in respond_to blocks. For testing purposes you can call the method as acts_as_iphone_controller(true), and all calls will be treated as iPhone requests.
There is a module of helper methods that are wrapper methods or combinations of iUI CSS classes. Included are:
A method for creating the iPhone toolbar at the top of the view.
Methods for creating the iPhone list structures from a list of elements that know their associated URLs, including a grouped list in the style of the iPod application
Rounded rectangle classes
A form helper for the iPhone toggle button, as seen in the settings page.
A method to specify an Ajax callback when the phone changes orientation
The short term goals for the project are to tighten the code a bit and improve documentation and testing. Longer term goals are to augment iUI's JavaScript handlers with something a bit friendlier with Rails, particularly in handling history and back behavior.
So take it for a spin, let me know what you think. Hope you find it useful.
Please check out my book, Professional Ruby on Rails.
