David Andrew Thompson
2006-Aug-03 21:15 UTC
[Rails] [Plugins] Create Example Apps for Your Plugins
Fellow Railers, May I throw out an idea for plugins? Let''s begin to put sample applications together for our plugins as a standard practice. This would be beneficial for a number of reasons: 1. Nothing teaches better than a real world example. 2. A working application leaves little room for excuses in not being able to get a plugin working. 3. Apps can help demonstrate best practices in coding 4. (etc., etc.) It is as simple as creating a folder with the plugin titled "application" which holds the example application. There will be no overhead to the user''s app even if the application is never accessed. And they can delete the application folder should they choose to. I have beaten my head against several walls trying to work through documentation written by people who often times forget that their audience may be approaching Ruby for the first time. It is not enough to simply demonstrate the basic ruby idioms for new users. Just because the author can whip out the ruby console and run through the usage from there does not mean that the average end-user will be able to make the transition into usage of the plugin in the view and controller layers of their Rails apps. Ultimately it is up to the author to make this happen, but I just wanted to put in my two cents Blogged here: http://dathompson.blogspot.com/2006/08/create-example-apps-for-your-plugins.html Dave -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Andrew Thompson http://pecatores.blogspot.com http://dathompson.blogspot.com
Neat idea. I think I''ll do just that for a couple of my plugins :) On 8/3/06, David Andrew Thompson <dandrew.thompson@gmail.com> wrote:> > Fellow Railers, > > May I throw out an idea for plugins? > > Let''s begin to put sample applications together for our plugins as a > standard practice. > > This would be beneficial for a number of reasons: > 1. Nothing teaches better than a real world example. > 2. A working application leaves little room for excuses in not being > able to get a plugin working. > 3. Apps can help demonstrate best practices in coding > 4. (etc., etc.) > > It is as simple as creating a folder with the plugin titled > "application" which holds the example application. There will be no > overhead to the user''s app even if the application is never accessed. > And they can delete the application folder should they choose to. > > I have beaten my head against several walls trying to work through > documentation written by people who often times forget that their > audience may be approaching Ruby for the first time. It is not enough > to simply demonstrate the basic ruby idioms for new users. Just > because the author can whip out the ruby console and run through the > usage from there does not mean that the average end-user will be able > to make the transition into usage of the plugin in the view and > controller layers of their Rails apps. > > Ultimately it is up to the author to make this happen, but I just > wanted to put in my two cents > > Blogged here: > > http://dathompson.blogspot.com/2006/08/create-example-apps-for-your-plugins.html > > Dave > -- > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > David Andrew Thompson > http://pecatores.blogspot.com > http://dathompson.blogspot.com > _______________________________________________ > Rails mailing list > Rails@lists.rubyonrails.org > http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails >-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://wrath.rubyonrails.org/pipermail/rails/attachments/20060804/1010dd88/attachment.html