Hackatron

At Hackatron we’re working on a project based on Goliath, an open source version of the non-blocking (asynchronous) Ruby web server framework powering PostRank.

Goliath is great at serving APIs, but what’s the most clever way to consume that API?

We decided to use a javascript framework to build an heavy client to interact with the API and we choose Backbone.js to achieve this goal.

We love its simplicity and its REST compliance but you must include a lot of javascript files in your pages. This could degrade performances due to an high number of requests, but it’s also a pain for developers when you must add a new script tag for every new piece of software you’re developing. A simple workaround is to put them all in one big file but this is not a real solution, it’s ugly and we won’t do it this way.

A clever way to include a lot of javascripts and stylesheets in your web app is to make it using Sprockets.

Sprockets is a Ruby library for compiling and serving web assets. It features declarative dependency management for JavaScript and CSS assets, as well as a powerful preprocessor pipeline that allows you to write assets in languages like CoffeeScript, Sass, SCSS and LESS.

We’ve released a draft version of this integration and hopefully we’ll release soon a gem that does this for you with a couple lines of code.

Keep reading Hackatron’s blog to stay up to date.