The "What the hell is that?" guide to Ruby

May 22nd, 2006

If like me you are coming from a Java development background or even other languages there are a few things with Ruby you just gotta say “What the hell is that?” when it comes to reading code.

Reading other people’s code is the best way to learn a new language. Period. But there is a few things with Ruby you may not be used to, well I wasn’t anyway.

I do suggest everyone interested in Ruby take’s a browse through The Ruby Book

Here are a few of them:

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Flex and Rails Part 2: Extra Time

May 13th, 2006 In honour of today's FA Cup Final (What a Game!!) here is an extra time on the last tutorial. There was some questions on how to productionise the Flex application. If the flex application is served from the same domain as your Rails application you can modify the HTTPService URLs to just point to your controller with a relative path. From
To
You can then compile the application and move the files from the Flex bin directory into the rails 
public
directory.

WebDAV on Rails

May 8th, 2006 A little treat for you all. As part of a larger project i've been working on, i've created a plugin for Rails which allows for controllers to handle "WebDAV":http://www.webdav.org/ requests. At the moment it is only working for Rails 1.0 but i'll work on upgrading it. It's still only beta, has a few problems and doesn't do the whole spec, which is massive. But it's a good start. WebDav controllers can be registered by: 


  class DavController < WebDavController
    set_rails_webdav_root "directory_path"
    set_max_propfind_depth 1

  end
This will allow a directory under RAILS_ROOT to be accessible via WebDAV. You can also register callbacks to handle the assets after a request 

  def after_webdav_put
     logger.info("got a new file #{@file_path}")
  end
WebDAV is great and a Rails implementation will allow exposing not just files but a file-system representation of your data and system to users. Anyway i'll release the code soon but for now "here is a video":/assets/2007/2/4/WebDavOnRails.mov

RubyOnRails (1.1) and Flex (2.0): Pt 2

May 6th, 2006

UPDATE: Continued from part 1

20 days!! That’s terrible of me, I didn’t mean to be this long in putting up the second part of ths tutorial but work has been madness and I just want to go home and sleep every day.

Still here we are, thanks for everyone who commented on the tutorial especially Mikey Jones for linking to it and Alex MacCaw for taking Up Flex and Rails so enthusiastically.

I think Ruby On Rails is a good choice for your hobbist Flex development, easier to learn for all the Flash Gurus out there and much quicker to learn and robust than PHP.

So in this part i’m going to look at a few new, more advanced things in Flex and some dead simple stuff in Rails. We’re going to do some Flex components, some parameter passing, some ActionScript coding, better Flex form code, some states and some transitions.

So stay awake at the back….

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