Nice is a light-weight engine which puts some magic into JS/AJAX driven Rails pages with the aim to ease the development of rich and interactive restful web applications.

Go here for an example and a detailed description.

This gem was tested with Rails 3.2 but should also work with Rails 3.1 which introduced the Asset-Pipeline used by this gem. Furthermore, the current version uses JQuery to manipulate the DOM tree, so you should have the appropriate files in place. Although, it is easily possible to replace this by other frameworks (see Contribution Section)

1. Add Gem dependency to your Gemfile

   #.Gemfile
   
   gem 'nice'

2. Run

   bundle install
   

3. Add Middleware

   #config/application.rb
   
   config.middleware.use Nice::Middleware

4. Require Gem javascript in your applicaton.js manifest

   //app/assets/javascripts/application.js
   
   //= require nice_jquery

The idea is to combine all views of one controller into one layout file exactly as it was already possible with rails and make heavy use of yield() and content_for tags to include view specific content. The convention of rails is to put a file named after your controller inside the app/views/layouts/ folder. Such a file could look like this

-# app/views/layouts/books.html.haml

- content_for :content do
  %div
    .one{"data-state" => "get_books"}
      %h1 Only visible in state index
      = yield(:container1)
    .two{"data-state" => "get_books_show"}
      %h1 Only visible in state show
      = yield(:container1)

= render :template => 'layouts/application'

-# app/views/layouts/application.html.haml

\#{content_for?(:content) ? yield(:content) : yield}

• The content_for tag will make sure the following context gets rendered in the application layout file (see Rails Guide for a deeper understanding of nested layouts).
• .one{"data-state" => "get_books"} is HAML code to generate a DIV block with a HTML5 attribute data-state. This is the key part: The value of the data-state attribute marks the state in which the annotated element should be included. This attribute can also hold a list of space-separated state names.
• = yield(:container1) is a placeholder where content from the view file will be inserted at runtime.
• The last line is part of the nexted layout design and just makes sure that this books layout page gets rendered inside the application layout.

There is one golden rule when programming with this state engine:

All elements bounded to one or more states (meaning that they are annotated with a data-state attribute) must live in the layout file but not in a view!

This restriction is imposed by the way how the middleware calculates reference points for elements but should normally not effect your workflow - just keep it in mind.

All links in your application should now use the :remote => :true attribute to ensure the requests will be sent using javascript by default.

Nice offers the ability to make your state changes even smoother by using either JS and/or CSS. Every element inside a data-state with data-state-transition="default" will be animated using the corresponding transition configuration. By default, a linear fade-in over 200ms is used, but you can override or configure any other property animation. You need to provide your configuration by creating some JS functions. I recommend using coffee-script and name the file nice-transitions.js.coffee:

class this.NiceTransitions
	@default = 
		duration: 1000
		easing: "linear"
		properties:
			opacity: 0.0
	
	@fade_slow = 
		duration: 2000
		easing: "linear"			
		properties:
			opacity: 0.0
			
	@slide_top =
		duration: 1000
		easing: "swing"			
		properties:
			"top": "-200px"

The body class gets the always a CSS class with the following naming convention assigned: state-{current_state_name}. You can use this to configure your styles per state like this:

.state-get_basic_a{
	.set2, .set3{
		opacity: 0.4;
	}
}

Nice is still in early stages and there is truly a lot to do. If you feel intrested and want to contribute, please don't hestitate to start work on one of the following features or enhance existing ones.

• state annotation via HTML5 data attribute data-state
• elements can belong to more than one state annotated by space separated list
• naming convention for state names follows the appropriate REST route: method_controller_action
• if an elements exist in the current and the following state it can be optionally left untouched with the data-state-update property set to no. Default is true.
• automated Browser history management
• javascript code for DOM manipulation is separated and can be replaced to use other frameworks easily (just remove nice_jquery requirement in application.js manifest and put your own methods in place. Hava a look in Nice-GEM/lib/assets/javascripts/dom_jquery.js.coffee and Nice-GEM/lib/assets/javascripts/dom_jquery.js.coffee for the signature to implement)

Nice is a middleware which processes all HTML and JS requests by either removing non-state specific content from the rendered page or generates JS code to manipulate the DOM tree client side.

• css class manipulation and css3 transition support
• test cases
• customization of state names
• customization of HTML5 attribute names
• add more js events which can be catched by application
• preloading of states (for elements which do not require updated backend data)

This project rocks and uses MIT-LICENSE.