I promised last week to touch base again today and I’m happy to report that the CloudKit gem is available for the brave amongst you to browse and use. I say this because there are several working pieces that are of value right now while the completed gem will take a few more days before being worthy of an “official” release and a push to RubyForge.

http://github.com/jcrosby/cloudkit/tree/master

Here’s what the code straight out of GitHub can do right now after a “rake local_deploy”:

• Generate a small, fast RESTful web app that supports OpenID and OAuth out of the box using Blake Mizerany’s killer Sinatra DSL (more on this later).
• Generate a GWT UI and REST client skeleton for those of you who dig that sort of thing. (A similar jQuery skeleton generator is in the works.)
• Generate RESTful resources with migrations plus ActiveRecord models that have their RESTful routing and authentication baked in.

Things that are extremely close and may be available by the time you read this:

• A rake task for running the app using Adobe AIR.
• JavaScript/ActiveRecord model synchronization stolen from my GWT on Rails project.

Other items in the works that won’t likely be ready when you read this but will appear rapidly, piece by piece, prior to the gem release:

• Desktop application updates.
• Automatic desktop schema migrations that match the server side counterparts.
• Automatic data/resource synchronization between desktop clients and server side storage.
• Transparent offline/online detection and management using the Application Context (a.k.a. MCP) mentioned in the previous post.

I’ll continue these frequent updates as the pieces roll out.