On 10/16/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Gonzalo Garramuno</b> <<a href="mailto:gga@filmaura.com">gga@filmaura.com</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br>After trying masterview for a week, I've gone back to using plain rails<br>.rhtml files.</blockquote><div><br><br>Sorry that it didn't prove to be a success for you. <br><br>The big win is for people who work with designers that want to manipulate their pages in a WYSIWYG tool like Dreamweaver or NVU. The fact that they work with it directly in their editor, update the pages, save it and have it quickly be available to users (roundtripping through out life cycle of project) is the main feature over other templating techniques.
<br><br>If .rhtml works best for you, then go with that. Everyone's needs are different.<br><br>I appreciate you taking the time to mention things we can improve though, that will help as we continue to refine the project.
<br> </div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">The reasons or problems I found with masterview were:<br><br>a) Extremely slow updates sometimes. I'm on an AMD4400 Dual and
<br>sometimes some refreshes would take like 10 seconds in development mode,<br>compared to the 2-3 seconds with .rhtml files.</blockquote><div><br><br>I haven't seen anywhere near that sort of delay on my machines many of which are less powerful than that, but there would have to be some delay in a refresh if you have changed files, since it has to parse and generate rhtml before the actual rhtml is used, thus there will be some overhead, but only when things have changed and new rhtml needs to be generated.
<br><br>Also just to clarify for future readers, the extra overhead is only when regenerating rhtml files, after they are regenerated and cached, system should perform identically to rhtml only site. It's also recommended for production to have MasterView generate the rhtml to the file system to save memory and one can even deploy the rhtml to a production server without even having MasterView installed, it isn't needed once the rhtml is generated.
<br> </div> <br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">b) Updates would not happen and the only reason you'd know is by having<br>
to switch to the admin page to see what went wrong. Rails already has a<br>notice mechanism. Why not use it when a page cannot be created due to<br>some syntax or other conflict?</blockquote><div><br><br>As Deb confirmed, we are looking at better error detection and reporting.
<br><br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">c) Lack of use of layouts. Masterview uses some main page for the<br>layout page, and I found that to be extremely counter productive. For
<br>one, I could never remember which one was it. And any change on it also<br>often lead to out-of-sync issues, forcing you again another visit to the<br>admin page.</blockquote><div><br><br>Just to clarify for other readers, MasterView can use (and generate) layouts, but the issue Gonzalo is referring to is the fact that when you are having MasterView generate a layout, one file will be generating the layout and the other files are importing the layout. The importing into the other pages is so that you can get a true WYSIWYG view of all of your pages, not just pieces.
<br><br>So if a layout changes, you have to click rebuild outdated files from admin screen or use a rake task to do this. We did not want to make this part automatic, to make sure that you deliberately wanted to do this and only the developer would know when is a good time to do the rebuild (in case they were editing files).
<br><br>As Deb mentioned, there are many ways to organize your files, we typically put the layout in with the list template (which is typically the default view), but one could organize in many other ways including just naming a view as something_layout.html and then having all the other views import it.
<br><br>Also note that rebuilding the html templates is only necessary if you want the changes to the layout to appear in your other files when using them in a WYSIWYG editor, you do not need to rebuild in order for the changes to be used across all the views at runtime. So rebuild is only needed so that designer's templates are in sync, if you don't care about that then you can skip rebuilding altogether or do it whenever it is convenient.
<br><br>We are also going to research if we might be able to leverage Dreamweaver's abilities for rebuilding layout used across pages.<br><br></div>Thanks for taking the time to document your troubles, it will help us improve the project for others. I wish you all the best in your endeavors.
<br><br>Blessings,<br><br>Jeff<br><br></div>-- <br>Jeff Barczewski, MasterView core team<br>Inspired Horizons Ruby on Rails Training and Consultancy<br><a href="http://inspiredhorizons.com/">http://inspiredhorizons.com/</a>