Overview

AppKit is a rails engine for quickly building data based applications. Applications that are primary for finding, editing, and visualizing data. These applications can be rapidly built using a simple DSL without the need to write views, controllers, or any real logic.

AppKit makes a number of assumptions for your project.

• The application’s flow will use basic restful actions. This means that the interaction with the data will be in the form of creating, editing, deleting, listing, and viewing record data.
• The application’s visual appearance and branding is not important. AppKit will automatically generate the visual apperance of the application. Although the views themselves can be overridden, visual customization goes against the purpose of the framework.
• The models within the application are not separated by modules. Currently AppKit does not support handling models that exist in their own module.

How it works

AppKit automatically generates restful controllers and views, based on a simple DSL and your model layouts. It builds controllers exactly how you would using standard rails paradigms. It will build a restful controller for each of your models with actions and views for INDEX, EDIT, NEW, CREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE. These controllers or individual views can then be overridden to extend functionality. The DSL also allows for minor functionality to be added with only a few lines of code.

When should I use AppKit

AppKit was built to generate data aware application extreamly rapidly. Its intended use cases were transient internal tools that needed to be up quickly but might not stick around too long or quickly prototyping an application to have something in use while developing a more robust system.

If I prototype with AppKit will I be locked into using it?

Negative ghostrider. AppKit is built to be overridable. You can slowly override the controllers and views with your own custom code. Once Everything has been overridden you can simply remove AppKit from the project. This allows you to have a functional application up in minutes and in use while developing a more custom solution.

Getting started

AppKit was built to quickly generate web based data applications. It is excellent at prototyping or building transient internal tools.

Adding AppKit to a project

After creating a new rails application simply add AppKit to your Gemfile and run the install generator.

Edit the file Gemfile in the root of the application directory and add:

gem 'app_kit'

After the gem has been included in your Gemfile then run bundler and the installation generator:

bundle
rails g app_kit:install

This will do a few things. First an initialization file will be created located at PROJECT/config/initializer/app_kit.rb. Second, a migration will be created for storing users. Finally, A line will be added to your config/routes.rb to mount the AppKit engine at /.

Creating a user

You will need to create a new AppKit user to be able to login to your application. The easiest way to do this for the first time is from the rails console.

rails console
AppKit::User.create(
  first_name: 'John',
  last_name: 'Doe',
  password: 'some passphrase',
  password_confirmation: 'some passphrase'
)

This will setup your first user so you will be able to login. AppKit uses Devise to handle authentication.