WebDAV Ruby On Rails Plugin

June 25th, 2006

The moment a few of you have been waiting for.

I’m releasing the first version of the RailsDAV plugin. What does RailsDAV do. Well it allows people to create Ruby On Rails controllers which will respond to WebDAV requests and expose functionality as a file-system.

The plugin can be downloaded from

http://svn.liverail.net/svn/plugins/railsdav

Of course the great thing about WebDAV is that it doesn’t just need to expose a directory on your server but can expose any concept you have in your application. For instance, for a Digital Asset Management System expose a list of tags as directory names, navigate into that directory and see all the images tagged with that word.

I’ll write about using the plugin in just a second, but first a little wording. This is definitely a 0.1 release and still needs work and a lot of testing before being production ready. It is likely to take on a different shape as well. It has many problems under WebBrick but works very very nicely under Mongrel (this is a problem with WebBrick) But release early, release often huh!

The plugin contains a base WebDAV controller and 2 specific implementations. A file-system exposer and an ActiveRecord exposer.

With thanks to Fabien Franzen for his input so far

There is also video of the FileSystem WebDAV Controller and the ActiveRecord WebDAV Controller

Read the rest of this entry

Ruby On Rails at the London Flash Platform User Group

June 15th, 2006

Yours truly will be giving a little talk at the London Flash Platform User Group on Thursday 22nd June

Ruby On Rails for the Flex Developer (20:15 – 21:15) – Stuart Eccles

Ruby On Rails has been one of the hyped development technologies of the last 12 months but what is it really about? Find out how you can use Ruby On Rails to build database-driven back-ends for Flex 2 applications with less lines of code than ever before.

Stefen Richter is giving a talk on Flash Media Server which i’m really excited about. The Media Server is one of the things that makes Flash unique as a true Rich Media Application.

So if you are interested in Flex, Flash or Ruby On Rails and you are hanging around London the sign up at http://www.lfpug.com/

UPDATE:

O’Reilly have been kind enough to give me 5 copies of Agile Web Development with Rails and 5 vouchers for a free copy of their new book Ruby On Rails: Up and Running to give away as prizes to attendees.

So register over at LFPUG to be entered for the draw.