> How did you handle getting your browser to talk to a server running on a different port? (Cross-origin requests).

https://github.com/cyu/rack-cors

I used that gem recently, and it fixed my issue. Just added the dev, prod hostnames explicitly in the origins list in my application.rb.

I didn't have to do anything special to allow CORS, and now that I think of it I'm not sure why, because it's been necessary on other SPA projects I've been involved with. Maybe because both servers are localhost. That would be a good thing for me to figure out and include in the post. I'm kind of learning all this in public.

> How did you handle getting your browser to talk to a server running on a different port? (Cross-origin requests)

Having run such things on entirely different servers, never mind localhost ports, what I needed to do was set the Access-Control-Allow-Origin http header in the rails controller (same principle applies to other frameworks). One simple guide is here: http://madhukaudantha.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/access-control-...

Slightly ruined by that dreadful blogger interface, but there you go.

I wrote about using Rails + AngularJS in a CORS way -- http://dojo4.com/blog/angularjs-service-rails-api

Hopefully it helps you!

>I have to say though, Rails used to be known for "convention over configuration", but when I've tried to use it lately

>I've found it becomes almost as complicated as configuring enterprise Java projects.

Do you have any specific examples of where you were having troubles?

> How did you handle getting your browser to talk to a server running on a different port? (Cross-origin requests).

He's using grunt-connect-proxy to proxy the API requests through the grunt server so there are no CORS requests in this setup.

You could just run the api on /api via an nginx proxy, that way it uses the same domain. I.e. catch all the traffic coming in to /api and route it to the proxy for you rails app.