Supporting Mobile Devices in Ruby on Rails

Question

What is the best way to develop a rails application that has special views for different mobile devices? Basically I'm looking for something like this ASP.NET MVC solution: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MixMobileWebSitesWithASPNETMVCAndTheMobileBrowserDefinitionFile.aspx

Answer 1

Two articles that use the iPhone as an example of serving up a different view based on a mobile sub-domain or a by detecting the user-agent. Essentially you'll create a different view using something like viewname.iphone.erb or viewname.mobile.erb and set the request.format variable to iphone or mobile respectively.

iPhone subdomains with Rails

iPhone on Rails - Creating an iPhone optimised version of your Rails site using iUI and Rails 2

Answer 2

You might be looking for mobile_fu. It's a plugin that automatically changes the Rails format from :html to :mobile for Nokia, Blackberry, iPhone and Palm users. You can then just provide an {action}.mobile.erb to complement {action}.html.erb and it will render the mobile view. If you need something more fine-grained, it allows you to do:

is_mobile_device?

and there's various other helper methods

Answer 3

I found this railscast extremely helpful for this situation: http://railscasts.com/episodes/199-mobile-devices

Hope it helps somebody out.

Answer 4

Ernie Miller wrote a post about how to provide mobile templates for your views. What's nice is that his approach doesn't force you to provide a mobile template if it isn't required. Instead, rails will fall back on your main template if the mobile version isn't found.

Answer 5

I recently wrote an article about this which you might find useful:

http://www.arctickiwi.com/blog/2-mobile-enable-your-ruby-on-rails-site-for-small-screens

Hope that helps

Jonno

Answer 6

I just saw a really illuminating video on this: http://www.engineyard.com/video/12678746 . There is a lot more to a decent mobile web experience then directly porting pages.

Answer 7

You might want to try Mobvious - https://github.com/jistr/mobvious

Detects mobiles vs. desktops + tablets, or if you want, detects mobile vs. tablets vs. desktops.

It also has support for manual selection by users (overriding the detection) if you want to allow users to manually switch interface versions.

And there is an extension mobvious-rails that adds some helpers to your controllers, views and CoffeeScript.