Easymarklet

The easiest way to create bookmarklets for your rails app.

Visit "Foo vs Baz" for demos and explanations of several types of bookmarklets.

Also, see the source code for "Foo vs Baz".

Installation

Add this to your Gemfile:

gem 'easymarklet'

Then run:

bundle install

Types of bookmarklets

Easymarklet supports several types of bookmarklets.

• Bare Bookmarklets Bare bookmarklets are very simple and best suited for just redirecting the browser back to your app. They generally don't have any UI.
• Simple Bookmarklets Simple bookmarklets allow for a basic UI and easy stylesheet inclusion into the consumer page. Communication back to your app is limited.
• XDM Bookmarklets XDM Bookmarklets use easyXDM to allow cross domain communication between your bookmarklet and your app. The UI is still fairly basic.
• Iframe Bookmarklets Iframe bookmarklets allow for cross domain communication and enchanced UI by displaying the UI is an iframe so that additional CSS and JS can be used safely. Note : If the iframe is directed to a new page (such as by clicking on a link) the XDM communication channel will be lost.
• DLux Bookmarklets DLux bookmarklets include a 'buffer' iframe that will keep the communication channel open but still allow your UI to navigate to a new page. This is the easiest way to take advantage of existing page flows within a pop-over bookmarklet.

Examples

Foo vs Baz is a collection of working demos with walk throughs.

• Bare Bookmarklets
• Simple Bookmarklets
• XDM Bookmarklets
• Iframe Bookmarklets
• DLux Bookmarklets

Generating a new simple bookmarklet

Run something like this:

rails generate easymarklet:simple foobaz

Then in a view template you can link to your bookmarklet using the easymarklet_js helper.

<%= link_to "Foo Baz!", easymarklet_js('foobaz_bookmarklet.js') %>

The resulting link will contain a small snippet of javascript that will load your bookmarklet code into the current page and execute it. Place some instructions for your users near the link that tells them to drag the link into their bookmark bar.

See the Simple Bookmarklets wiki page for more info.

Generating a new XDM bookmarklet

To enable cross domain communictaion between your site and other pages on the 'net we need to be able to generate a fully qualified URL to your bookmarklet code. To set the correct host you should add this to each of your confing/environment/*.rb files. Adjust the :host accordingly. :port is optional.

config.action_controller.default_url_options = {:host => 'localhost', :port => 3000}

The port can also be supplied as a parameter in the bookmarklet.js file - this will override the value from the rails application. This is useful if you have middleware changing the port that the browser sees (e.g. nginx to implement ssl)

XDM bookmarklet code acts as a consumer for data or a service that is supplied by the provider, a page on your app.

To generate your bookmarklet run something like this:

rails generate easymarklet:xdm barbaz_xdm

Then link to the consumer in a view:

<%= link_to "Bar Baz!", easymarklet_js('barbaz_xdm_consumer.js') %>

See the XDM Bookmarklets wiki page for more info

Generating other bookmarklets

See Foo vs Baz for more examples.

This project rocks and uses MIT-LICENSE.