Real-time Web Apps with Volt in Ruby

[dhaivatpandya]

Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/real-time-web-apps-volt-ruby/

Volt is a slick, new Ruby web framework that aims to blur the line between client and server code. The basic idea behind the framework is that you can write your client-side code (which is usually Javascript) in Ruby using Opal, a Ruby runtime within Javascript. In addition, Volt provides some nice ways to relay data between the client-side and the server-side. If you’ve used Meteor before, Volt is a very similar idea, but there are many portions of Meteor which Volt doesn’t have. I think Volt has some real potential. As web apps become more and more client-side heavy, it is a pain to have to switch mental context between Javascript and Ruby. It’s even more of a pain to figure out how to flow simple pieces of data between the client and server. Volt can help you get there quickly.

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[ryanstout]

Thanks for the article on volt One thing, in your demo code, when you change to using store, you need to either reference store directly in the views:

store._bookmarks

or you need to set the controllers model to be :store

class MainController < Volt::ModelController
  model :store

  ...
end

Also, Volt has realtime updates like Meteor. We do things a bit different implementation, but the end result is the same, updates are pushed to clients and the DOM updates when the data changes. Let me know if there’s anything I can help clarify.

Again, thanks for the great article!

Ryan (volt framework creator)

[dhaivatpandya]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the compliments. I had the controller model setting in my code but didn’t include it in the article - I’ll get it changed right away.

The point I was making about Meteor was just pointing out the differing implementation; as far as I know, Volt does not have a small implementation of MongoDB running in the browser. I can reword it to make that more clear.

Thanks,

Dhaivat

[estebanrules]

Volt looks very interesting. I have held off building anything with it so far, but I’m definitely going to follow this tutorial and go from there. Great article.

[alpop]

One funny thing I get - when I enter www.google.com for the url, than the actual url I get in the bookmarks list is localhost:3000/www.google.com. Any idea as to why this happens?

[dhaivatpandya]

@estebanrules Thanks!

@alpop If you add the “http://” at the beginning of the url string, that should enter it correctly. Otherwise, it is rendered as a local, relative path which is why it opens as “localhost:3000/www.google.com/”.