RailsConf Europe - Wednesday Sessions - 2

Posted about 1 year back at Liverail - Home

First of all, some of the presentation downloads for RailsConf Europe have started appearing on the O’Reilly site here, so please run along and grab them. Nothing to see here.

Well ok, i’ll continue live-blogging from the afternoon sessions but I have a plane to catch soon :-)

Development Case Study: MindMeister

I’ve chosen the lest technical session because sometime the anecdote, the story, is more useful than the code. Development Case Study: MindMeister is the story off the online mind mapping tool “The google docs of mind mapping� apparently.

MindMeister It’s all AJAX (and a lot of it), tough call I think the interface could be way better in Flex and you have offline Mind-mapping possibilities with AIR.

They started with prototyping, then some design concepts , which all looked quite good if you ask me.

The name was the hardest thing to fine.

I hear that.. It is very hard to find a name. I agree you shouldn’t be obsessed with finding a free .com domain name, 37signals never did.

Private betas are good, 2 launches making it exclusive with lots of feedback. Starting with just friends but allowing invites to others. No longer than 2 months with an upgrade offer at the end.

They got lots of competitors and clones after launching which I think is a common problem, just make sure you are the brightest and the best. MindMeister have some good user stats, better traffic than their competitors (according to Alexa) but less features than the competitors. Usability is what makes them better. Every euro spent on design is worth it..

Recommendations

• Get a great designer on board
• Target non-technical users
• Watch every Apple demo

Marketing

• Write to bloggers
• Post site to app portals
• Create an API
• Write regular newsletter & blog posts
• “Add to del.icio.us / digg� button
• Spend time (and money) on SEO
• Be generous with Premium accounts
• Don’t comment spam
• Don’t pay for placements and ads

• Don’t start charging before its really stable
• Carefully select premium features
• Think of students et al

Technical Issues

• Everybody has them
• It pays to be honest
• Explain what happened
• Announce maintenance windows

It seems MindMeister are going offline with Google Gears which is the right move, maybe AJAX was a good choice after all. Use a canvas library which turns to VRML on IE.. And Wirecard

I’ve got to day playing with it now MindMeister is pretty good, its slick works well and I can see how it would be both useful and easy with is important in brainstorming tools. Bravo guys!

Outsourcing to Open Source

Another non-technical session Outsourcing to Open Source from Tobias Luetke at “Shopify’:http://www.shopify.com/. I chose this because i’m a real fan of Shopify, JapedPixel and because it’s more relevant to my business than the others. But I wish I could also have gone to Exploring Very Rapid Web Development Techniques with Hobo by Tom Locke, but those the breaks..

Tobias is talking about Liquid which for those that don’t know is a safe templating method for Rails which you can give to customers to make their own designs/themes without them breaking your app. And he wrote it on the plain to RailsConf 2005!! Not only is it safe but only exposes what you want to expose ie.

class Product << ActiveRecord::Base
liquid_methods :title, :price, :description

If you don’t know about liquid, go look it up. If you ever developing a SaaS with needs safe themes for users, its a great fit. Tobias is also talking about Vision which is a downloadable theme engine which works offline. Using this tool the launched a competition for themes for shopify with an iPod nano, the people who entered then now do full time Shopify themeing and earn more money from it than JadedPixel!!

Vision works by donwloading a Mock version of Shopify with no backend but the objects returned have real like data. Like a massive test case your users can download and theme.

JapedPixel also issued the open source AcitveMerchant as a library for payment processing gateways. It is really useful contribution to Rails. It supports 40+ gateways. Often they are commission by shopify customers who pay a ruby developer to contribute a specific merchant to ActiveMerchant which then automatically appears in Shopify. This is a great example of crowd-sourcing helping the community which then helps your product. It’s like work for free….

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine an algorithm or help analyze large amounts of data.

Examples of crowdsourcing are threadless.com, freebase, Mechanical Turk, PeertoPatent, OrganizedWisdom. Tobias simple example of CrowdSourcing is giving your users the ability to create a new translation of text in checkout and feed that back to the system. They get credit for the translation and shopify track the progress of translation. This allows them to email authors when they add a new string that needs translation.

A really good talk from Tobias but he could have gone into the theme of crowd-sourcing more than than shopifies use of it, then given the examples. Just a structural thing.

For those interested. Shopify use Solr and love it. From being a public facing Rails application they get some really random requests such as a whole Shakespeare text in a param!. The run 25,000 public facing with different URLs, so they get a lot of web-spiders on the servers. They use memcache generating a unique key for every possible input for a page, check memcache to see if it has a version. If memcache doesn’t have it they gzip it and stick it in memcache. They use version numbers of each object and the version number is part of the key, instead of expiring they just have to lookup a new key and get a cachemiss so generate it. No cache invalidation.

Ruby on Rails Developers IDE, NetBeans 6 Beta 1 is Out!

Posted about 1 year back at Web 2.0 with Ruby on Rails

NetBeans 6 Beta 1 is here!!

Let’s rock the boat

It’s the first significant NetBeans event in probably a year

NetBeans isn’t only for Java geeks anymore, it has tons of Ruby and Ruby on Rails support now!

What surprises me (and delights me!) about this release is that, not like previous NetBeans 6 milestones where NetBeans-Java is bundled with Ruby, they actually make a special Ruby-only version.

The Ruby-only download is mere 19 MB in size!

That’s quite “cheap” (in terms of bandwidth usage). I’d expect the Ruby version to be less memory bloat and should have better performance as well, than the mammoth 172 MB one

I have been using NetBeans 6 for several months now, starting from the first NetBeans+Ruby version which is NetBeans 6 Milestone 7, and I can say I’m very impressed.

I’m still downloading Beta 1 and haven’t yet installed Beta 1 at the time of this writing, but I can be sure it’s gonna be event better than the last NetBeans 6 Milestone 10.

Don’t let the “Milestone” or “Beta” name put you off, it’s already usable in more ways than most software.

Check out why George Cook says Netbeans THE best ruby on rails IDE:

… I was gonna write a blow for blow comparison of netbeans against radrails, but I really see no point. I figured it’s best just to tell you why netbeans’ rails support is so creamingly good, but so you know I have evaluated both and textmate, firstly – here’s some points about the other 2. …

… I looked about and by chance came across an article that said that ruby on rails support was being added to netbeans 6. I hunted around like a crack addict and found the nightly builds to try out.

I was extremely impressed.

Netbeans is fucking fab, it proper rocks. I’ve been on netbeans 6 since milestone 8, which is about 1,000 builds now (they’re constantly working on it, and updating it). I’ve been with it through broken indentation, broken code completion, broken everything, null pointers, new features, more efficiency, the memory leak sorted out. I’ve watched it evolve before my eyes: I was installing new builds twice a day – Now it’s so stable and so good that I haven’t updated my build in a month (I might later on ;-).
Code completion that works – really really works:
Code completion is activated with CTRL + SPACE – once activated you can type, or select from the list:

And here are what the diffs look like in the files themselves:

In line documentation when you need it, where you need it:
Just press CTRL+SPACE on a keyword and you get the docs.

Click on rescue, or move the caret over it with the cursor keys:

code folding:
You use the + and – buttons to fold code

(Read his article for more info. He has a very comprehensive review of many NetBeans-Ruby features!)

Michael Urban has his own opinion in Move Over Eclipse. NetBeans 6 Rocks!:

Ok, I admit the title is a bit inflammatory to Eclipse fans. But after working with NetBeans 6 over the last week, I have to say I am very impressed. This is not simply a minor upgrade, as is so common in IDEs these days even when they are given a new major version number. Quite the contrary, NetBeans 6 is a major new release, and a major improvement over NetBeans 5.5.

A roundup of NetBeans Ruby-specific features in this release:

Ruby/JRuby/Ruby on Rails Support

• Project Support. Quickly create Ruby projects with logical structure, run Ruby files, configure other Ruby interpreters (such as JRuby or native Ruby), locate and install Ruby Gems through a graphical wizard, create and execute unit tests, run RSpec specification files, jump between a Ruby file and its corresponding unit test or spec file, and so on. View Demo.
• Advanced Ruby Editing. Advanced code editing for Ruby, using semantic information about the program to offer code completion, showing available classes and methods for the current expression, along with the associated RDoc documentation. The syntax highlighting is enhanced with semantic information, such that unused local variables and parameters are shown in gray. There are many other editing features, including Goto Declaration for jumping to the declaration point of a class or method reference. View Demo.
• Ruby Debugger. Single-step or run through Ruby code, set breakpoints, look at local variables, navigate the call stack, switch threads, and evaluate expressions by just hovering the mouse over the variable in the Editor. There is also support for the “fast debug” extension.
• Ruby on Rails Support. Generate Rails projects, or generate code through the Rails code generator graphical wizard, which offers documentation on the plugins within the wizard itself. Third party generators are also supported. Furthermore, there are actions for jumping quickly between a Rails action and its corresponding View, or warping to the browser for the URL most relevant to the file you are editing. Database migrations and Rake targets are supported as well. Finally, RHTML files are highlighted (along with improved NetBeans 6.0 support for related files, such as JavaScript and CSS). View Demo.

And also:

• Quick Fixes
  • Automatic detection of block variables that might be accidentally modifying local variables

• • Rails deprecation warnings which identify usages of deprecated Rails idioms (enable this warning in the Ruby options panel)

• • Quick which finds same-line definitions of classes or methods and offer to explode these into multiline, formatted definitions

• • A number of experimental hints compatible with Beta 1 but not bundled; access these from the Plugin manager. These hints can convert between do and brace-style blocks, they warn about “wrong” name conventions for Ruby symbols, they offer to run the Rails generator to generate missing views for action methods, they identify possible incorrect usage of attributes
  • More information about the Ruby quick fixes
• RHTML formatting (and improvements to the Ruby formatting algorithm). A new formatting preferences panel allows configuration of the continuation indent as well as enabling reformatting of comments.
• Updated bundled JRuby to version 1.0.1
• Ability to deploy Rails projects to Java EE application servers
• YAML code folding and navigator, improved RHTML navigator
• Go To Declaration in RHTML files now work to warp to partials, redirect_to, link_to, etc.

• Large number of bug fixes and tweaks

Diff

• Export Diff Patch - CVS and Subversion integration
  • based on unified diff
  • automatically opens generated patch file into the editor with colored annotations

Don’t forget the general improvements as well:

Editor Improvements

• Smarter code completion. The NetBeans editor is quicker and smarter, providing completions for keywords, fields, and variables. It also lists the most logical options at the top, and lets you dig down into the full options at the bottom
• Highlights. You can think of the highlights feature as an easy-to-use and more correct substitution for the editors Search. The IDE tracks the position of the caret and, based on it, highlights some parts of the code. The highlights are marked with a background color in the editor they are also put into the error stripe, which permits for having overview of the whole file.
• Better Navigation and Inspection. In addition to Highlights, the source editor lets you quickly navigate through your code with improved Navigator window organization and the Members and Hierarchy Inspectors.
• More than just code completion. With live templates and Surround With functionality, you can quickly enter commonly used blocks of code and focus on the business logic.
• There is much more. See the Java Editor User’s Guide.

Already more than enough evangelizing, I guess…

Head on to NetBeans 6 Release page to find out more and download.

RailsConf Europe - Wednesday Sessions - 2

Posted about 1 year back at Liverail - Home

First of all, some of the presentation downloads for RailsConf Europe have started appearing on the O’Reilly site here, so please run along and grab them. Nothing to see here.

Well ok, i’ll continue live-blogging from the afternoon sessions but I have a plane to catch soon :-)

Development Case Study: MindMeister

I’ve chosen the lest technical session because sometime the anecdote, the story, is more useful than the code. Development Case Study: MindMeister Case Study: MindMeister is the story off the online mind mapping tool “The google docs of mind mapping” apparently.

It’s all AJAX (and a lot of it), tough call I think the interface could be way better in Flex and you have offline Mind-mapping possibilities with AIR.

They started with prototyping, then some design concepts , which all looked quite good if you ask me.

The name was the hardest thing to fine.

I hear that.. It is very hard to find a name. I agree you shouldn’t be obsessed with finding a free .com domain name, 37signals never did.

Private betas are good, 2 launches making it exclusive with lots of feedback. Starting with just friends but allowing invites to others. No longer than 2 months with an upgrade offer at the end.

They got lots of competitors and clones after launching which I think is a common problem, just make sure you are the brightest and the best. MindMeister have some good user stats, better traffic than their competitors (according to Alexa) but less features than the competitors. Usability is what makes them better. Every euro spent on design is worth it

Recommendations

• Get a great designer on board
• Target non-technical users
• Watch every Apple demo

RubyForge vs CPAN

Posted about 1 year back at O'Reilly Ruby

It’s often been said that Perl’s greatest strength is CPAN, Perl’s vast collection of free libraries contributed by developers from around the world. Recently I started to wonder about RubyForge and how RubyForge stacks up against CPAN in general.¹

First, length of service. CPAN has been around for 12 years (October 1995). RubyForge has been in existence for just over 4 years (July, 2003).

Second, the number of users. RubyForge boasts over 20,300 users. CPAN, on the other hand, has far less at just over 6,150 registered users.² Not every registered user is associated with a project, however. There are 3635 users are associated with a project on RubyForge, while on CPAN there are 3774 users associated with at least one library. Of the 3635 users on RubyForge, 849 are associated with more than one project.³

Third, the number of libraries. CPAN boasts approximately 13,500 separate libraries. RubyForge currently has approximately 5000 separate libraries, organized into about 4800 projects. That means, on average, most projects have one library, but some have multiple libraries per project.⁴ While RubyForge has far fewer libaries than CPAN, the ratio isn’t nearly as large as I would have thought.

Quick aside. I didn’t do any real analysis against Python, but the home page for the Vaults of Parnassus shows 2025 libraries.

Fourth, library quality and usefulness (more subjective here). There’s a lot of overlap and, well, cruft on CPAN.⁵ There are over 300 Acme (joke) modules. There are multiple wrappers for the same underlying library, such as many of the “Tiny” and “Simple” modules. There are libraries that should have been bundled together but weren’t, such as the various Chemistry::PointGroup libs. There are also libraries that have similar or identical functionality to other libraries, such as many of the List and/or Array libraries.

On top of that, a healthy chunk of the Perl libraries on CPAN are either unnecessary in Ruby or contain behavior that’s already baked into Ruby itself. Examples include a large collection of OO modules (Class::Accessors and the like), a large number of modules that create various IO, Number, File, Array, String and Hash classes, and related methods, that Ruby has builtin (Array, Array::List, File::chmod, and so on), over 200 “Tie” modules (Ruby doesn’t need ‘tie’), over 90 libraries for interacting with CPAN or the RT backend itself (I only know of one library for RubyForge), and equivalent libraries that are already part of Ruby’s standard library (e.g. libwww).

Last, release frequency. Between August 14th and September 14th there were 1133 releases from 690 distinct libraries on CPAN ⁶. RubyForge, by contrast, had 612 releases in the same date range (although I wasn’t sure how many of them were from distinct libraries at the time of this writing). So, slightly less than half of CPAN at the moment.

What do all these numbers mean? Good question. I think, at the very least, it means that the Ruby community is doing very well in terms of library development and releases. I give Tom Copeland a huge amount of credit for that, in that I think the very act of creating RubyForge fostered an atmosphere of development (collaborative or otherwise) and inspired programmers new to Ruby to take the step of releasing their own software. I can’t prove it, of course. It’s just a gut feeling I have after watching the Ruby community grow for seven years.

It also means that Perl is still going strong, cruft and all. You can’t really argue too much with their release rate, and some of it is really good stuff, too. I would say that CPAN still has the edge in database interfaces, Apache libraries and wrappers for 3rd party commercial libraries, among a few other things.⁷

But, we’re catching up, and fast. :)

See you next Wednesday.⁸

¹ When I say “CPAN”, I’m generally referring to search.cpan.org plus RT.
² I scraped the Authors pages to get the total. At the time of this writing it was 6152, although a handful of these appear to be generic logins.
³ CPAN isn’t a collaborative development environment, so there may be multiple users actively associated with a given library, but there’s no way to tell without manually digging through files.
⁴This number does not include a number of libraries listed on the RAA that are not on RubyForge. I’d make a very rough guess of about 200. (Update: it’s actually over 1000 - see my next post)
⁵ I should know. I own some of the cruft.
⁶ There were anywhere from 1 to 10 releases per library in that period. Some had multiple releases in the same day, a curious trend on CPAN.
⁷ Port a Perl module today! I should mention that I didn’t do any very long term trending, so I guess it’s possible that the releases per month have dropped, but I somehow doubt it. Feel free to prove me wrong (or right).
⁸Many thanks go to Tom Copeland for providing me with the RubyForge statistics.

RailsConf Europe 07: Presenter Links

Posted about 1 year back at Jay Fields Thoughts

Here are the resources relevant to my RailsConf Europe 07 presentation: Extending Rails to use the Presenter Pattern.

My entries (in order)

• Model View Controller + Presenter?
• Another Rails Presenter Example
• Presenters - An additional layer alternative
• Rails Presenter Pattern

Jamis Buck

• Skinny Controller, Fat Model
• Moving Associated Creations to the Model

Courtenay

• Simple Presenters

railsconfeurope and resources_controller

Posted about 1 year back at The Mechanical Turk

I've been chatting to a few people at RailsConfEuropoe about resources_controller, so I thought I'd say a few words about waht it's key features are, and about RC at RailsConfEuropoe in general.

Key features

There's a few plugins out there that try and solve the same sort of problem - DRY up RESTful controllers. I believe that RC's standout features can be seen when considering how to write controller for a polymorhpic has_many relationship.

Polymorphic Tags

So you want to tag a bunch of models, and so you sure the :polymorphic has_many assoc, and make a Tag model with belongs_to :taggable, :polymorphic => true.

You want tags to be nested under a bunch of different resources like this:

  map.resources :users do |user|
   user.resources :tags, :controller => 'user_tags'
  end

  map.resources :posts do |post|
   post.resources :tags, :controller => 'post_tags'
  end

Standardly, you'd then have to write two controllers: UserTagsController, and PostTagsController, and map the above two nested routes to those different controllers. These would be essentially the same functionality except:

• they would load different models in before filters: @user in one and @post in the other,
• they get the post from different collections (@tag = @user.tags.find(params[:tags_id]) vs @tag = @post.tags.find(params[:tags_id])),
• they redirect to different routes on completion of certain actions user_tags_path and post_tags_path in the other.

To do this, even with plugins to dry everything up, you still need to create two (or three, or four) controllers for tags - all doing essentially the same thing.

it gets worse. You'll need a bunch of different views - because they all need to link to urls relative to the enclosing resource. Suddenly you've got a lot of really similar code - or some really ungly hacks in your views.

(and all of this gets much worse if you have deeply nested routes)

Polymorphic tags with resources_controller

resources_controller (used in the default way) inspects the route that was used to invoke the controller. From this, it:

• loads all of the enclosing resources,
• uses the immediately enclosing resource as the resource service (the object that we send find and new to to - in the case of /posts it would be the Post class, in the case of /post/1/tags it would be the @post.tags association),
• does some method missing magic so that you can refer to all named routes relative to the current resource

All this means you just need to write one controller, and one set of views for Tags

Here's some sample code

  class TagsController < ApplicationCntroller
    resources_controller_for :tags
  end

in show.html.erb:

  <%= link_to 'tags', resources_path %>

The above will be user_tags_path(@user) in one case and post_tags_path(@post) in another.

It gets better, you can refer to the enclosing resource as well:

  <%= link_to "back to #{enclosing_resource_name.humanize}", enclosing_resource_path %>

And if you have routes like /users/1/posts/2/tags, and /posts/1/tags, the you can use the same view for posts:

  <%= link_to 'tags', resource_tags_path %> # in /users/1/posts/2/tags will be:
                                            # user_post_tags_path(@user, @post)
                                            
  <%= link_to 'tags', resource_tags_path %> # in /posts/2/tags will be:
                                            # post_tags_path(@post)

That's just some of the features, I'd love to get feedback, patches, bug reports, etc. There are links to RC via svn, and rdoc on our plugins page

BoF and RejectConf

Man, I've got a lot to learn about presentations...

I gave a BoF at RailsConfEurope07 session on resources_controller - I was expecting about 10 people and a round table discussion on taking the pain out of RESTful controllers. About 50 or 60 people turned up so we ended up all crowded round a couple of laptops. But everyone was friendly and there was no heckling. Paolo, who gave the incredibly entertaining talk on widgets, took some photos

There was, however, plenty of heckling at the RejectConf talk. The format was 5 minutes of slides, 20 seconds automatic countdown for each one. I wrote the presentation during the day, and ran through it with my wife before hand. It sucked - way too much info. So I cut it down.

However, I was first up, and gave the audience the choice of the insane, or sane, talk, and they chose insane. I tried to get across about 1/2 an hour's worth of stuff in 5 minutes, and the audience looked as though they were in a wind tunnel. It was a great icebreaker for the other speakers though. I'll post the slides here in due course.

RejectConf was simply awesome by the way. The berlin ruby user group rocks.

RailsConf Europe - Wednesday Sessions - 1

Posted about 1 year back at Liverail - Home

Trying to make better choices today which shouldn’t be too hard. So I decided on following up my Flex on Rails background (which I havn’t be exploring recently), but since I was the first tutorial on integrating Flex and Rails, I thought i’d check on it’s progress.

Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Ruby on Rails

This session was given by Simeon Bateman, who although not Adobe is certainly a Flex expert and has real world in-anger experience of Flex and Rails.

Unfortunately Simeon spent far too much time on Flash background and had some problems with the Internet before getting to the good stuff. But did manage to quick demonstrations of

• HTTPService using XML REST responses from Rails
• AMF using WebORB
• AMF using RubyAMF

To his credit the last 15 mins was some of the best and explained the advantages of AMF over HTTPService with great examples. Simeon reckons that RubyAMF is the way to go in the future as WebORB has not been updated in a year, other people I know concur with that.

The other question for people interested in Flash/Flex is:

What is Thermo?

Creating Hybrid Web and Desktop Applications with Rails and Slingshot

A session by Joyent on Slingshot. This is something i’ve had an interest in for a while, in the realms of the online/offline applications. In theory Slingshot offers downloadable Rails applications that run on the desktop but syncs with an online web-application.

It will do syncronisations, and you can extend the sync-hooks and will need to implement aggregate_data for your models to get the sync works. But it won’t do conflict resolutions, but it does handle auto-increment ids and foreign-key problems on the syncronisation side which is a pretty tough problem. It can also sync files as well as data between online and offline. You must have timestamps on your model to sync models which make sense.

I will do some drag and drop stuff but only on Mac OS X. This is a real problem, and certainly AIR could overtake easily in this area. I would like to see how I could get RailsDAV working with Slingshot on this.

Your code will be visible in the download, it is after all Ruby. So it better be open-source application on a behind firewall deployment. I don’t think this is this biggest problem as people won’t be able to copy it without the web-application component.

They downloads can be big. 20MB is the initial hit and applications can be as big as 100MB.

Overall it seems better on Mac OSX than Windows. It has DMG packaging, XCode customisation and changing Info.plist while the Windows deployment looks a lot harder.

In practice, its not complete. Here is a list of things it won’t do (Yet)

• sync conflict resolution
• encrypt your code
• domain specific online/offline issues
• package you application automatically
• update itself + your Rails app code
• native menus

But this is still one of the most interesting and innovative things being talked about at RailsConf Europe so was certainly worth intending. The presentation was well done and paced well, including presentation then questions then demo which is a lot to fill 45 minutes. Showing you don’t have to aim your presentation at the lowest common demoninator.

I’m wondering if you could just use the sync_controller parts of slingshot and write an AIR end…. Evil but useful.

Great demo..

RailsConf Europe - Wednesday Sessions - 1

Posted about 1 year back at Liverail - Home

Trying to make better choices today which shouldn’t be too hard. So I decided on following up my Flex on Rails background (which I havn’t be exploring recently), but since I was the first tutorial on integrating Flex and Rails, I thought i’d check on it’s progress.

Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Ruby on Rails

This session was given by Simeon Bateman, who although not Adobe is certainly a Flex expert and has real world in-anger experience of Flex and Rails.

Unfortunately Simeon spent far too much time on Flash background and had some problems with the Internet before getting to the good stuff. But did manage to quick demonstrations of

• HTTPService using XML REST responses from Rails
• AMF using WebORB
• AMF using RubyAMF

To his credit the last 15 mins was some of the best and explained the advantages of AMF over HTTPService with great examples. Simeon reckons that RubyAMF is the way to go in the future as WebORB has not been updated in a year, other people I know concur with that.

The other question for people interested in Flash/Flex is:

What is Thermo?

Creating Hybrid Web and Desktop Applications with Rails and Slingshot

A session by Joyent on Slingshot. This is something i’ve had an interest in for a while, in the realms of the online/offline applications. In theory Slingshot offers downloadable Rails applications that run on the desktop but syncs with an online web-application.

It will do syncronisations, and you can extend the sync-hooks and will need to implement aggregate_data for your models to get the sync works. But it won’t do conflict resolutions, but it does handle auto-increment ids and foreign-key problems on the syncronisation side which is a pretty tough problem. It can also sync files as well as data between online and offline. You must have timestamps on your model to sync models which make sense.

I will do some drag and drop stuff but only on Mac OS X. This is a real problem, and certainly AIR could overtake easily in this area. I would like to see how I could get RailsDAV working with Slingshot on this.

Your code will be visible in the download, it is after all Ruby. So it better be open-source application on a behind firewall deployment. I don’t think this is this biggest problem as people won’t be able to copy it without the web-application component.

They downloads can be big. 20MB is the initial hit and applications can be as big as 100MB.

Overall it seems better on Mac OSX than Windows. It has DMG packaging, XCode customisation and changing Info.plist while the Windows deployment looks a lot harder.

In practice, its not complete. Here is a list of things it won’t do (Yet)

• sync conflict resolution
• encrypt your code
• domain specific online/offline issues
• package you application automatically
• update itself + your Rails app code
• native menus

But this is still one of the most interesting and innovative things being talked about at RailsConf Europe so was certainly worth intending. The presentation was well done and paced well, including presentation then questions then demo which is a lot to fill 45 minutes. Showing you don’t have to aim your presentation at the lowest common demoninator.

I’m wondering if you could just use the sync_controller parts of slingshot and write an AIR end…. Evil but useful.

Great demo..

RailsConf Europe - Wednesday Sessions

Posted about 1 year back at Liverail - Home

Trying to make better choices today which shouldn’t be too hard. So I decided on following up my Flex on Rails background (which I havn’t be exploring recently), but since I was the first tutorial on integrating Flex and Rails, I thought i’d check on it’s progress.

Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Ruby on Rails

This session was given by Simeon Bateman, who although not Adobe is certainly a Flex expert and has real world in-anger experience of Flex and Rails.

Unfortunately Simeon spent far too much time on Flash background and had some problems with the Internet before getting to the good stuff. But did manage to quick demonstrations of

• HTTPService using XML REST responses from Rails
• AMF using WebORB
• AMF using RubyAMF

To his credit the last 15 mins was some of the best and explained the advantages of AMF over HTTPService with great examples. Simeon reckons that RubyAMF is the way to go in the future as WebORB has not been updated in a year, other people I know concur with that.

The other question for people interested in Flash/Flex is:

What is Thermo?

RailsConf Europe - Wednesday Sessions - 1

Posted about 1 year back at Liverail - Home

Trying to make better choices today which shouldn’t be too hard. So I decided on following up my Flex on Rails background (which I havn’t be exploring recently), but since I was the first tutorial on integrating Flex and Rails, I thought i’d check on it’s progress.

Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Ruby on Rails

This session was given by Simeon Bateman, who although not Adobe is certainly a Flex expert and has real world in-anger experience of Flex and Rails.

Unfortunately Simeon spent far too much time on Flash background and had some problems with the Internet before getting to the good stuff. But did manage to quick demonstrations of

• HTTPService using XML REST responses from Rails
• AMF using WebORB
• AMF using RubyAMF

To his credit the last 15 mins was some of the best and explained the advantages of AMF over HTTPService with great examples. Simeon reckons that RubyAMF is the way to go in the future as WebORB has not been updated in a year, other people I know concur with that.

The other question for people interested in Flash/Flex is:

What is Thermo?

Creating Hybrid Web and Desktop Applications with Rails and Slingshot

A session by Joyent on Slingshot. This is something i’ve had an interest in for a while, in the realms of the online/offline applications. In theory Slingshot offers downloadable Rails applications that run on the desktop but syncs with an online web-application.

It will do syncronisations, and you can extend the sync-hooks and will need to implement aggregate_data for your models to get the sync works. But it won’t do conflict resolutions, but it does handle auto-increment ids and foreign-key problems on the syncronisation side which is a pretty tough problem. It can also sync files as well as data between online and offline. You must have timestamps on your model to sync models which make sense.

I will do some drag and drop stuff but only on Mac OS X. This is a real problem, and certainly AIR could overtake easily in this area. I would like to see how I could get RailsDAV working with Slingshot on this.

Your code will be visible in the download, it is after all Ruby. So it better be open-source application on a behind firewall deployment. I don’t think this is this biggest problem as people won’t be able to copy it without the web-application component.

They downloads can be big. 20MB is the initial hit and applications can be as big as 100MB.

Overall it seems better on Mac OSX than Windows. It has DMG packaging, XCode customisation and changing Info.plist while the Windows deployment looks a lot harder.

In practice, its not complete. Here is a list of things it won’t do (Yet)

• sync conflict resolution
• encrypt your code
• domain specific online/offline issues
• package you application automatically
• update itself + your Rails app code
• native menus

But this is still one of the most interesting and innovative things being talked about at RailsConf Europe so was certainly worth intending. The presentation was well done and paced well, including presentation then questions then demo which is a lot to fill 45 minutes. Showing you don’t have to aim your presentation at the lowest common demoninator.

I’m wondering if you could just use the sync_controller parts of slingshot and write an AIR end…. Evil but useful.

Great demo..

RailsConf Europe - Wednesday Sessions - 1

Posted about 1 year back at Liverail - Home

Trying to make better choices today which shouldn’t be too hard. So I decided on following up my Flex on Rails background (which I havn’t be exploring recently), but since I was the first tutorial on integrating Flex and Rails, I thought i’d check on it’s progress.

Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Ruby on Rails

This session was given by Simeon Bateman, who although not Adobe is certainly a Flex expert and has real world in-anger experience of Flex and Rails.

Unfortunately Simeon spent far too much time on Flash background and had some problems with the Internet before getting to the good stuff. But did manage to quick demonstrations of

• HTTPService using XML REST responses from Rails
• AMF using WebORB
• AMF using RubyAMF

To his credit the last 15 mins was some of the best and explained the advantages of AMF over HTTPService with great examples. Simeon reckons that RubyAMF is the way to go in the future as WebORB has not been updated in a year, other people I know concur with that.

The other question for people interested in Flash/Flex is:

What is Thermo?

Creating Hybrid Web and Desktop Applications with Rails and Slingshot

A session by Joyent on Slingshot. This is something i’ve had an interest in for a while, in the realms of the online/offline applications. In theory Slingshot offers downloadable Rails applications that run on the desktop but syncs with an online web-application.

It will do syncronisations, and you can extend the sync-hooks and will need to implement aggregate_data for your models to get the sync works. But it won’t do conflict resolutions, but it does handle auto-increment ids and foreign-key problems on the syncronisation side which is a pretty tough problem. It can also sync files as well as data between online and offline. You must have timestamps on your model to sync models which make sense.

I will do some drag and drop stuff but only on Mac OS X. This is a real problem, and certainly AIR could overtake easily in this area. I would like to see how I could get RailsDAV working with Slingshot on this.

Your code will be visible in the download, it is after all Ruby. So it better be open-source application on a behind firewall deployment. I don’t think this is this biggest problem as people won’t be able to copy it without the web-application component.

They downloads can be big. 20MB is the initial hit and applications can be as big as 100MB.

Overall it seems better on Mac OSX than Windows. It has DMG packaging, XCode customisation and changing Info.plist while the Windows deployment looks a lot harder.

In practice, its not complete. Here is a list of things it won’t do (Yet)

• sync conflict resolution
• encrypt your code
• domain specific online/offline issues
• package you application automatically
• update itself + your Rails app code
• native menus

But this is still one of the most interesting and innovative things being talked about at RailsConf Europe so was certainly worth intending. The presentation was well done and paced well, including presentation then questions then demo which is a lot to fill 45 minutes. Showing you don’t have to aim your presentation at the lowest common demoninator.

I’m wondering if you could just use the sync_controller parts of slingshot and write an AIR end…. Evil but useful.

Great demo..

Looking for Ruby on Rails work?

Posted about 1 year back at Weblog - Home

While most people went on holiday it seems the recruiters came out to play. In fact we have had a steady stream of third parties knocking on the door looking for skilled Rails developers for many months now. From projects, freelance gigs to full time Rails positions all over the world. Many at decent rates too. The Ruby on Rails skill set is in demand. <style> img {border: 0} </style>

Announcing the Working With Rails:

Never one to jump on the band wagon but addressing an immediate need we must. The job board has been a much requested feature and we finally gave in! It's been live on the site now for a little while but this is the first official announcement.

As a member of Working With Rails you can view the jobs directly on site or choose to have opportunities mailed to you on a regular basis.

Here are just a few of the many opportunities currently posted:

Ruby on Rails Genius Required x 5 in London - to 60,000 GBP (120k USD) inc Bonus & Benefits

Lead Engineer for Praized Media - Canada, Montreal / Quebec - Market Rate + options Flexible hours, Laptop / computer, Equity share, Telecommuting

Rails developer to help build Beanstalk - United States, Philadelphia (Telecommuting) Pay: Depends on skill level

See more on the: Working With Rails Job Board

Need a Rails developer? Post a job for free now

Been to a conference recently?

Posted about 1 year back at Weblog - Home

Or maybe you are at one now?

RailsConf Europe is into it's second day. Don't forget to cast your votes for your favourite Railers by recommending them on site.

The Charts:

• Overall Popularity Chart
• Speaking Popularity
• Training Popularity

RailsConf Europe - Wednesday Keynotes

Posted about 1 year back at Liverail - Home

Partly due to having to check out my hotel, partly due to my hangover and partly due to not being bothered I missed today’s pre-roller advert by ThoughtWorks to today’s keynotes.

But i’m here now for the session on Best Practices. A bit late. Siting at the back nursing my headache.

The Best Practices session is very codey but still entertaining so far covering test-first, associations, method naming and chaining. Expressive Interfaces they call them, readability and undestanding. Now moving on to with_scope and the dangers of using a before_filter with a scoped command, hence reducing all queries to a limited scope. For instance only finding posts for the current user. Instead use associations:

current_user.posts.find(params[id])

But it has uses. You can use method_messaging with a with_scope and create a dynamic has_many association through a proxy. Similarly very cool but I can see that being mis-used also. I think using method_missing should be a last resort, documented heavily and only used if it significantly improves readability or time. Not really as a best practice.

The use of conditions and commands in Ruby can be confusing as there is many ways of doing it. The question, which can be understood quickest?

command if conditional?
....
if conditional?
  command
end
...
conditional? and command
...
conditional? && command
...

All of the above do the same. For me number 2 is clearest but involves more typing, but I hate mixing up commands with conditionals in an expression, and the speakers agree.