Eric Wagoner gave a demo of the Joyent’s newly released offline Rails application toolkit, Slinghot. He’s had access to Slingshot for a couple weeks ahead of the public release, and shared his early impressions with us tonight. These are rough notes from his presentation.
- A local Slingshot app is distributed as a DMG on OS X, which is a
full-stack Ruby VM plus your Rails apps. Lots of files. I mean,
lots.:
$ find Radiant.app | wc -l -> 8087 - Server side, Slingshot uses a plugin that generates a
‘sync’ controller. This controller has several actions:
- sync.up
- sync.down
- sync.log
- These toss XML back and forth between the server and client app, containing the changed Models and some metadata.
- Synchronization conflicts are handled in your application’s domain. This is important to note - Slingshot is not a silver bullet for the age old offline/online synchronization problem. However, it lets you solve this problem however your application needs.