bill-transue / pushable

Ah, push it pu-pu-push it real good. Your ActiveModels' changes to Backbone.js clients that is.

Pushable

Ah, push it, pu-pu-push it real good!

Push changes in your ActiveModels to Backbone.js clients' models and collections.

Overview

At this point there are three ActiveModel events that can be pushed out to the Faye server, creation, updat-uhh-ion, and deletion. They can pushed to two channels, collection channels and instance channels. For example if you had a family model and it has_many member models you might have a Backbone family collection, when a new member was born, you're family Backbone collection would be notified via the collection channel, but other families don't need to be notified of the new member. So you can scope a model's collection channel by defining a collection_channel method in both the ActiveModel and the Backbone collection. Similarly you could customize the instance channel used with instance_channel methods. As usual the code speaks for itself:

class Family < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :name
  has_many :members
end

class Member < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :name, :family_id
  belongs_to :family

  push :create  => :collections,
       :update  => [ :collections, :instances ],
       :destroy => [ :collections, :instances ]

  def collection_channel
    "family_#{family_id}_members"
  end
end

class Family extends Backbone.PushableCollection
  channel: -> "family_#{@id}_members"

  url: ->
    if @id
      '/families/' + @id + '/members.json'

  model: Member

  initialize: (members, options) -> # members is actually options if not initialized with members
    try
      @id = (members || options).id
    catch TypeError
      throw "MissingFamilyID"
    super()

class Member extends Backbone.PushableModel
  channel: -> "member_#{@id}"

  url: ->
    if @isNew()
      "/families/#{@family_id}/members.json"
    else
      "/members/#{@id}.json"

Starting the Faye Server

Start a Faye server instance with...

rake faye:start

This rake task supports the following options:

• verbose=true
• port=9292 9292 is the default
• key=server.key For an SSL key
• cert=server.crt For an SSL certificate

Todo

• Write some specs
• Flesh the docs out more, an example app even