What's the easiest way to make this work well with the asset pipeline assuming I wanted to make a single page app hosted in the same project? Or should I just not do that?
edit: thanks, guys!
edit: thanks, guys!
This works out awesomely for a few reasons. First, our deploys for our mobile app is just rsync. No fancy cap scripts. Second, its super easy to put the mobile app behind a CDN.
One wrinkle in this approach is how to deal with dependencies between the Rails API and a completely separate JS app. We hack around that be packaging up our mobile app as a rubygem so that we can manage the dependencies through bundler.
I highly recommend this approach. Its a great way to separate out an API team from a front-end app team. All of our future apps are going to be written this way, including an HTML5 rewrite of all of our visualizations (from flash).
We plan on writing up a bunch of blog posts on the workflow, so stay tuned :)
That said, I don't think that it's ideal for heavy JS apps. Lots of possible work that could be done in this area.
Rails-api churns out JSON, JS consumes it. I can think of performance being an issue.
What are the other issues?
Also, the pipeline has been re-written for Rails 4, but historically it's been kinda slow and buggy.
For an example of what I'm thinking about, rake-pipeline-web is interesting.