onesie

A Rack middleware to make URLs in one-page webapps easier. In a couple of recent projects, I've needed to avoid full page refreshes as much as possible. In the first, I wanted to keep an embedded music player active while the user was browsing. In the second, I just wanted fancier transitions between pages. It's possible to do this in an ad-hoc way, but I very quickly got tired of hacking things together. Enter Onesie. Onesie congealed from these requirements: * I want a one-page web app, * But I want the back button to work, * And I want search engines to still index some stuff, * And I (mostly) don't want to change the way I write a Rails/Sinatra app. If someone visits <tt>http://example.org/meta/contact</tt>, I want them to be redirected to <tt>http://example.org/blah/#/meta/contact</tt>, but after the redirection I still want the original route to be rendered for search engine indexing, etc. When Onesie gets a request, it looks to see if under your preferred one-page app path ("blah" in the example above). If it's not, Onesie sets the current request's path in the session and redirects to your app path. If a request is under the one-page app path, the "real" request's path is retrieved from the session and used for subsequent routing and rendering. This means that, as above, a request for http://example.org/meta/contact Will be redirected to http://example.org/blah/#/meta/contact But still render the correct action in the wrapped app, even though URL fragments aren't passed to the server. This is a terrible explanation. I'll write a sample app or something soon.