Rails project needs help

November 30th, 2005 I'm currently working with a few people in the UK, US and canada on something which will hopefully be a very cool Rails project. The project is reasonable advanced and already has a good codebase, workable demos and graphic design material behind it. At the moment i'm looking for some talented Rails developers/AJAX wizards to help out with the coding side of things. If you feel you could help out and want to find out more please contact me . stueccles at gmail.com Thanks Stuart Eccles

No Safari in Google Analytics

November 28th, 2005 I added "Google analytics":http://www.google.com/analytics support to liverail.net as soon as it started. Unfortunately new subscriptions are closed as they increase capacity (look. see. this is what happens when you give things away for free) What they don't seem to tell you is that the analytics reports don't work for Safari on the mac. The reports just dont appear. I think a few people are waiting for their reports figuring it is a Google problem, try "Firefox":http://www.getfirefox.org/. That works just "fine":http://www.liverail.net/files/googleanalytics.png

The Rails Console

November 28th, 2005

Lets face it, some of the Rails documentation can leave you a bit flustered. I mean you read the book, you read the articles you even dig through the wiki. But unfortunately some of the best stuff is just hidden away from view waiting to surprise you.

One of these little gems is the Rails console. by simply running


script/console

from your rails application directory you are dumped into an IRB session letting you run all the code of your application straight from the command line.


>> site = Site.find(1) => #Site:0x260aa80 @attributes={"id"=>"1", "short_name"=>"pensiondemo", "site_name"=>"Allen's Pension Demo"}>

Truely great. Now you may know this but do you know that.

1. You can use the TAB key to get autocompletion of all the methods on your objects in the IRB session.

2. You can dynamically reload code just type


load 'site.rb'

for instance and load your changed file.

3. Or reload it all with a quick


Dispatcher.reset_application!

4. You can pipe in a file with some Ruby code already prepared.


script/console < ruby_file.rb

The joy of IRB, learn more here. All that we wait for is the IRB enabled IDE for Rails…

LiveRail on Typo

November 22nd, 2005 A little self-referential information on this blog for you. Liverail.net runs on the "Typo":http://typo.leetsoft.com/trac/ bloging engine. Typo is a "RubyonRails":http://www.rubyonrails.org blog application. The site is a hosted on a "TextDrive":http://www.textdrive.com/ hosting account. TextDrive supplies Ruby and Rails with the hosting, as it should with some of the Rails core behind the hosting platform. The site is hosted using "Lighttpd":http://www.lighttpd.net/ behind an Apache proxy with "FCGI":http://www.lighttpd.net/documentation/fastcgi.html Rails process for the blinding speed. This is a pretty standard production set-up for production Rails applications but isn't so easy to set-up. I used "this guide":http://manuals.textdrive.com/read/book/9 plus some information from around the web but you would have thought TextDrive would make it much easier to set-up a Rails/Typo site by now. How's Typo? Well first of all, i've used a few blogging engines in my time (JRoller/TypePad/Blogger) and this baby has got to be one of the best. Simple easy admin interface, great RSS support, easy-to-use Themes, good caching performance, good Spam filtering support. Not only is it a well written Rails application but a great Blog. You could no better than using the Typo code base for learning Rails by example. I think my main problems with Typo is a lack of markup help (i can never remember the Textile markup) and a lack of meta-tags support. Now i know meta-tags arn't what they used to be but it would be nice. It also lacks any kind of analytics support, but this would be hard as it relies on pre-cached page files for pure performance. A big pain but i've added some "Google analytics":http://www.google.com/analytics/ headers which i'll talk about some time.

Ruby on Rails

November 21st, 2005 So what’s with "Ruby on Rails?":http://www.rubyonrails.org For those that have been sleeping in the back of the class, it’s a new web development platform. "Ruby":http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ is the language, "Rails":http://www.rubyonrails.org in the framework. The excitement revolves around claims of productivity improvements, the chance to develop new web applications far faster than a J2EE platform, more productive, scalable and succinct than a PHP/Python/Perl implementation. Ruby is an "open-source interpreted scripting language":http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/20020101.html which is completely object-orientated. It is platform independent, features closures, exception handling, mix-ins, multi-threading and runtime code improvements. In other-words it’s probably the most flexible advanced language available to your modern programmer. Rails in the framework for developing web applications using the Ruby language. Its one of the most complete frameworks around featuring MVC framework, an ORM database mapping function, HTML templating, AJAX, testing framework, Web Services, Email. Everything a web developer needs. Rails was developed by "David Heinemeier Hansson":http://www.loudthinking.com/ of "37signals":http://www.37signals.com/ to develop their online application "Basecamp":http://www.basecamphq.com/ and was opensourced over a year ago and now nears the 1.0 release. Since then a "lot":http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html, "loads":http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/06/09/rails_ajax.html, "tons":http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-rubyonrails/ and "multitudes":http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=31 of things have been said about Rails. The most talked about project in web development for a long time. Its effect on the web development communities is similar to the "Spring Framework":http://www.springframework.org/ effect on the J2EE community. Spring had a "similar goal in reducing the complexity of the development effort":http://www.springframework.org/about, removing redundancy and decreasing timescales while using the best practices and patterns devised. Spring has been massively successful in the industry, many Java development houses in companies across the board have embraced it. It is having a significant effect on improving Java web development. Whether Rails will have the same effect in the corporate world is unlikely, but for hobbyists and start-ups it’s take up could be massive. One things for sure things are moving forward and Rails is a massive leap. "Liverail.net":http://www.liverail.net is going to chronicle my experiences with Rails, technology and development in general.

Festoon

November 15th, 2005 Sounds like a cartoon festival. Actually "Festoon":http://www.festooninc.com/ is a plugin for Skype and GoogleTalk allowing video and video affects to be integrated into your conversation. Big deal right? Well actually it also allows you to share parts of your desktop. Great for interactive working events, especially if you are already using Skype to communicate with co-workers in other countries. The problem: Windows only. But bring on the mac version and i'm there.

The first... but not the last

November 10th, 2005

Ahhh that new blog smell.. the dusty leather, the sound of a million minds melding.

Or not. :-)

So this is the home of my new blog. In my move from Java to Rails as the thing that keeps me busy (but doesn’t necessarily pay the bills) I present liverail.net

Hopefully i’ll post a little more than i used to before but then again i am paying for this hosting ;-)