React + Flux Backed by Rails API

I’ve been working on a frontend for a project we are developing here at Fancy Pixel. We are embracing what looks like a good habit: slicing what would be a monolithic Rails app in a lightweight backend serving APIs and a frontend consuming them. We did this in the not so distant past using Angular.js. It was all fine and dandy, until it wasn’t. There’s something about it that doesn’t sit right with me, I wouldn’t go in detail, since many others already did, but let’s just say that there’s too much magic involved for my tastes (says the guy using Rails). Magic is fine as long as I can figure out how to tinker with the internals when things go down south. With Angular the effort seems too much, but that’s just personal taste really. Also I can’t deny that the major structural changes introduced in 2.0 were the last nail in the coffin. I wanted to try something new, something that would enforce a solid architecture of our apps, letting me control the single cogs in the engine. React got a lot of good press in the past months, so I took the chance to dive in. In this three-part post you’ll find pretty much everything I learned by writing a frontend using React, with a vanilla Flux architecture, consuming an API written in Rails.

Read the full article here

Small Updates

I’m about to close week 4 of the “One icon a day” challenge, sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s tough, but I’m glad I started this project. Adding some spice to the mix I also started recording what I do, mistakes and brain farts included. You can find the videos in this Youtube playlist.

Fun With iBeacon

You probably know already what iBeacon is, but just to reiterate, iBeacon is the Apple way of saying Bluetooth 4 Low Energy. At the cost of sounding like a mindless drone, by ‘the Apple way of’ I mean ‘it just works and shows a lot of potential’. An iBeacon is a simple B4LE device that keeps broadcasting its presence. Other B4LE devices can sense when they reach the beacon without draining the battery (hence the LE) and making the user scream in agony. “Oook, what do I do with it?”. The best thing you can do is locating a user without the GPS, which means locating a user inside a building. The cool thing is that it’s fast, it takes seconds to detect a beacon and to react to its vicinity (or lack there of), and it works within the reach of Bluetooth technology (let’s say around a 50 meters radius). I should also mention that it works fine with Android too. (Update: look at the end of the post for the sources of the Android version) This week an Estimote developer kit arrived in the Fancy Pixel’s offices, so we took the chance to play around with it.

Rails Test Setup

Here’s how I usually setup my test environment on Rails. I’m using mainly RSpec and Capybara, so nothing new under the sun, but this should provide a mindless copy and paste to get you (mainly me) started.