Onesie¶ ↑

• github.com/jbarnette/onesie

A Rack middleware to make URLs in one-page webapps easier.

In a couple of recent projects, I’ve needed to avoid full page refreshes as much as possible. In the first, I wanted to keep an embedded music player active while the user was browsing. In the second, I just wanted fancier transitions between pages.

It’s possible to do this in an ad-hoc way, but I very quickly got tired of hacking things together. Enter Onesie.

Onesie congealed from these requirements:

• I want a one-page web app,

• But I want the back button to work,

• And I want search engines to still index some stuff,

• And I (mostly) don’t want to change the way I write a Rails/Sinatra app.

If someone visits http://example.org/meta/contact, I want them to be redirected to http://example.org/blah/#/meta/contact, but after the redirection I still want the original route to be rendered for search engine indexing, etc.

When Onesie gets a request, it looks to see if under your preferred one-page app path (“blah” in the example above). If it’s not, Onesie sets the current request’s path in the session and redirects to your app path.

If a request is under the one-page app path, the “real” request’s path is retrieved from the session and used for subsequent routing and rendering. This means that, as above, a request for

http://example.org/meta/contact

Will be redirected to

http://example.org/blah/#/meta/contact

But still render the correct action in the wrapped app, even though URL fragments aren’t passed to the server.

This is a terrible explanation. I’ll write a sample app or something soon.

require "onesie"

# in config.ru, after any session support
use Onesie

# in Rails

unless Rails.env.test?
  config.middleware.insert_before ActionDispatch::Flash, "Onesie"
end

$ gem install onesie

Copyright 2010 John Barnette (code@jbarnette.com)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.