= ExtJSWithRails


ExtJSWithRails is a Rails Plugin that tries to ease the creation of ExtJS (http://www.extjs.com/) applications. It 
includes various little Helpers:
* a generator to create the skeleton of an ExtJS application
* extensions to Models and Controllers
* utilities to distribute JavaScript code over many files and combine them in one file
* integration of JSLint Javascript Syntax checker and yuicompress JS compressor (both require Java!)
* rake tasks to build and check the produced JavaScript files
* a script to call these tasks automatically (like autotest but without testing)
* growl integration


== Installation and Setup

To set up the plugin to automatically build and check your JS Application, be sure to install the Plugin into your Rails 
application's vendor/plugins directory. After installing, run the rake task js:setup to copy the neccesary files into 
your Rails Application.

  rake js:setup
  
This will create script/js_autobuild, config/ext_js_with_rails.yml and the directories public/javascript and 
public/javascript/src


== Configuration

For most Rails applications, the default setup should be fine. The deefault configuration file 
(config/ext_js_with_rails.yml) looks like this:

  --- 
  root_dir: public/javascript
  app_name: app
  
Currently, the following options are recognized:
_root_dir_:: the root directory of all your JS stuff (relative to RAILS_ROOT). This can be used if 
             you don't want to expose your JS Files to the whole world and hide them behind a 
             controller with some kind of authorization
_app_name_:: the basename of the resulting JS Files (<app_name>.js and <app_name>-min.js) (defaults to _"app"_)
_main_file_:: the name of the main file (which includes all other files). (defaults to _"main.js"_)
_src_dir_::  the name of the directory containing the source files (defaults to _"src"_)


== Usage

To build and check the JS Files, the following rake tasks are available:

js:dist:: Builds the Application File
js:lint:: Checks the JS Files with JSLint
js:minify:: Minifies the Application file with yuicompressor

If you are as lazy as I am, I created script/js_autobuild which does a js:dist and js:lint automatically whenever a JS 
source file changes. This is done via a slightly modified version of rstakeout by Geoffrey Grosenbach 
(http://nubyonrails.com)

== The JS Files

All JS Files are parsed by ERB, so you can do all tricks you can imagine with ERB. The only drawback is that JSLint will 
complain about the ERB Tags, because they are not valid Javascript. Any hints on changing the recognized Tags? Anyways, 
there is a special include method, which... includes a list of files. So in your main.js, you'll want to do something 
like this:

  <%= include Dir.glob("app/*.js") %>


  



Copyright (c) 2008 Michael Siebert, released under the MIT license