Render Ruby object to interactive html

Question

I am developing a tool that discovers network services enabled on host and writes short summary on them like this:

init,1
└── login,1560 --
    └── bash,1629
        └── nc,12137 -lup 50505
{
    :net => [
        [0] "*:50505 IPv4 UDP "
    ],
    :fds => [
        [0] "/root (cwd)",
        [1] "/",
        [2] "/bin/nc.traditional",
        [3] "/xochikit/ld_poison.so (stat: No such file or directory)",
        [4] "/dev/tty2",
        [5] "*:50505"
    ]
}

It proved to be very nice formatted and useful for quick discovery thanks to colors provided by the awesome_print gem. However, its output is just a text. One issue is that if I want to share it, I lose colors. I'd also like to fold and unfold parts of objects, quickly jump to specific processes and what not? Adding comments, for example. Thus I want something web-based.

What is the best approach to implement features like these? I haven't worked with web interfaces before and I don't have much experience with Ruby.

Update:

Maybe I didn't write my willings clear enough.

I think I want something that behaves like Chromium's chrome://chrome/settings/ (or better, of course). Is there maybe an erb template or manual showing how to implement that? I thought this is a thing needed often enough.

Answer 1

Try using a Rack middleware to pygmentize things: https://github.com/bry4n/rack-pygments

Edit per Walter's suggestions:

You've got serializable Ruby objects and it sounds like you want to render them to web pages. I'd recommend starting with something like Sinatra for the web framework, Pygments for the code coloring/highlighting, and from there perhaps handroll a little jQuery plugin to make indented code blocks collapsible.

Notes: I recommend Pygments because I like it and because Github uses it. The Rack middleware above is intended to allow you to automagically pygmentize code at the server level by adding a tag to the code block you'd like to see marked up.

Answer 2

Sinatra would probably be the lightest approach.

Rails brings more overhead, but is also very easy to use and deploy. If your app will be expanding and be incorporating things like users and logins, it might be better to tackle Rails.

Both should work fine, and there are lots of coding examples and tutorials for basic applications using each.

Answer 3

This is the kind of processing you usually perform on the client-side (that is: inside the web browser) with AJAX (HTML, Javascript and CSS). There are many libraries that can do this job out there. Search for AJAX foldable tree, AJAX table and so on. JQuery and other well-known libraries have table/tree widgets you can use for this.

Have a look at these AJAX table/grid widgets, for example:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1503810/what-javascript-table-widgets-are-available

Most likely, you will have to package your data as a JSON or a XML hierarchycal structure before sending it to your AJAX viewer. JSON and XML will allow you to easily share your data with other people, as well. They are both largely recognized as standard data exchange formats.