Widgets in Rails

I have a business that I outsourced all of the tech for. Its essentially a widget on an external site, with a management panel on our domain selecting whats shown on the widget. Lets say its a manual "relevant news" widget.

I think I can code the rails part, but how would I do the widgets part? Can someone point me in the rig开发者_如何学JAVAht direction? The widget would need to be JavaScript and copy/pastable.

(More context, having to use the old system thats in PHP, and it breaks my heart having to ask the outsourcers to help me with every little thing, so I'm looking to rebuild it)

EDIT: how much of this is still valid? Its posted from 07 - http://www.igvita.com/2007/06/05/creating-javascript-widgets-in-rails/

Thanks!

Geoff

you could create a json api using https://github.com/fabrik42/acts_as_api (imho, this is the easiest way to create an api)

and then create your widget in pure javascript or jquery.

If you need to authenticate, you'll need to send an api key with your requests, and also on your server side check the request.domain with the api key you have given that domains webmaster.