Engineering Blog

In my first post I explained the advantages of creating your own App in Rally. An App is a customized view of Rally data that is served in an IFrame. Apps can create interesting ways to interact with Rally data and internally we use them to prototype new features and ideas that are not quite ready to be a portion of the full product. In this post I will explain to you some of the tools that can be used to help you get started on your first App.

One of the challenges facing new App developers is how to organize their files. It is usually easier to develop an App by breaking out the different language sections into their own files. This is because Editors and IDEs tend to be more efficient when working on a file that contains purely HTML, CSS or JavaScript rather than a mixture. Unfortunately Rally expects Apps to be in one contiguous blob of text when it is pasted into the custom App tab. In my experience it can be error prone trying to copy the contents of each style and script tag from an outside file into a single page HTML file.

One of the ways that we circumvent this problem while we develop Apps internally is through the App Development Starter Kit. The starter kit can be found alongside our other tools in our developer portal. It combines each of the separate CSS and JavaScript files together into the one centralized HTML file. This file can be easily copied into Rally to create a new custom App. Once you have the starter kit, making a new App is a breeze. All you need to do is run rake new[APPNAME] and all the files that you need to start your new App will be combined into that contiguous blob the Rally tool knows and loves.

In part two I will show you how to create an App that shows you all of the work items that have been changed in the past day.