We’ve talked before about our plans for a visual designer for Ruby On Rails. We call this the Visual Rails Workbench and it will form part of the forthcoming update (v 1.2) of Ruby In Steel Developer (free to registered users). To give you some idea of what we’ve been up to, here is the first public screenshot...
Here we are designing a page using the mouse to move and resize elements. We have also created some styles using the Properties panel. Along the bottom of the workplace you can see buttons to toggle between ERb (‘native Rails’ view format) code and the HTML ‘Page Designer’. The Page Designer automatically assembles valid HTML pages from ERb Layouts, Views and Partials and subsequently disassembles the component parts after the visual design has been done.
I should say that the design workspace is just one element of the Visual Rails Workbench. We have a number of additional tools to help to navigate through ERb templates, to drag and drop components and to import and export pages to and from external HTML editors. We’ll be fleshing out the details here in the Blog over the next week or so...
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