Ruby on Rails gives us a ton of helper methods to make our life easier. But these method are pretty tightly tied into the Prototype / Scriptaclious librarys. To use the lighter jQuery library, you were forced to ignore the helpers and code your JS by hand. Now it’s easy to add jQuery functionality to your Rails projects.

Enter jRails .

jRails is a drop-in jQuery replacement for Prototype/script.aculo.us on Rails. Using jRails, you can get all of the same default Rails helpers for javascript functionality using the lighter jQuery library.

- Install instructions below -

How to install To install the jRails plugin:

./script/plugin install git://github.com/aaronchi/jrails.git

Then copy the javascript files in the plugin folder to your javascripts directory.

How to use

Just install and go! Once installed, the previous Prototype/script.aculo.us helpers will be replaced by jQuery ones. In order for them to function correctly, just include the appropriate javascript files in the head of your page.

<script src="/javascripts/jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/javascripts/jquery-ui.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/javascripts/jrails.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

You can also use the Rails javascript_include_tag helper with :default to load them automagically.

<%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>

You can get the full scoop on the jRails Website