Rails

Lucid theme / Rails / Typo — 8 Comments
24
Jul 07

TheLucid Typo theme now works with version 4.1

TheLucid Typo theme finally works with version 4.1 of Typo.

Please bear in mind that this is quick-fix and and there will still be a Version 2 release sometime in the near future.

The new release can be downloaded below:

“lucid-typo-theme-1-1.zip”:http://thelucid.com/files/lucid-typo-theme-1-1.zip

There are a couple of improvements such as cookies remembering which colour scheme and layout have been selected along with some IE fixes.

Thanks to everyone who notified me of browser issues etc. and I hope to release v2.0 as soon as possible (for both Typo and Mephisto).

Ajax / Rails / Rake / Ruby — 8 Comments
16
May 07

Rails Edge: Getting your view extensions ready for edge

Following my previous post, below is a modified version of “John Nunemaker’s ‘Renaming RHTML to ERB’”:http://railstips.org/2007/3/4/renaming-rhtml-to-erb to take into account the format in the extension, and handle “the RJS issues I was having”:http://www.thelucid.com/articles/2007/05/16/rails-edge-view-file-extention-functionality-has-changed.

namespace 'views' do
  desc 'Renames all .rhtml views to .html.erb, .rjs to .js.rjs, .rxml to .xml.builder and .haml to .html.haml'
  task 'rename' do
    Dir.glob('app/views/**/[^_]*.rhtml').each do |file|
      puts `svn mv #{file} #{file.gsub(/\.rhtml$/, '.html.erb')}`
    end
 
    Dir.glob('app/views/**/[^_]*.rjs').each do |file|
      puts `svn mv #{file} #{file.gsub(/\.rjs$/, '.js.rjs')}`
    end
 
    Dir.glob('app/views/**/[^_]*.rxml').each do |file|
      puts `svn mv #{file} #{file.gsub(/\.rxml$/, '.xml.builder')}`
    end
 
    Dir.glob('app/views/**/[^_]*.haml').each do |file|
      puts `svn mv #{file} #{file.gsub(/\.haml$/, '.html.haml')}`
    end
  end
end

h4. Update

Added haml conversion.

Ajax / Rails / Ruby — No Comments
16
May 07

Rails Edge: View file extention functionality has changed

It seems that on edge revision 6502 and later, the way that view file extensions has changed considerably.

I couldn’t work out why my tests were breaking when doing an xhr request to a new action which had a respond_to block setup for both html and js. It was returning the html instead of the rjs??

It turns out (after tearing my hair out for over three hours) that “Changeset 6499″:http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/6499 changes things in such a way that the normal new.rjs naming will not get picked up on an xhr request, you now need to add the request format to the extension before the template type i.e. new.js.rjs

This seemed a little odd at first but I am guessing it means you could have a new.js.erb file which is pretty cool as you could achieve the same as “Dan Webb’s MinusR plugin”:http://www.danwebb.net/2006/11/17/rjs-minus-r.

What does seem a little odd is that a new.rjs will get picked up if you don’t give a respond_to at-all (I don’t know if this is a “feature” or a bug).

I’m am hoping that this may save someone some time.

General / Mac / OS X / Rails / SonicIQ / Subversion — No Comments
8
Mar 07

SonicIQ are hiring – Junior Rails Developer Wanted in UK

“SonicIQ”:http://www.soniciq.com are looking for a “Junior Ruby on Rails Developer”:http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/1203.

We are based in Bournemouth, Dorset, UK. Anyone interested in working professionally with Rails on some exciting projects please “drop us your CV”:http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/1203.

General / Mac / OS X / Rails — 2 Comments
1
Mar 07

Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X Tiger – The Easy Way

“Dan Benjamin”:http://hivelogic.com/authors/danbenjamin recently updated his very helpful article entitled “”Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X”:http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx”.

I don’t know about anyone else but compiling software is not one of my favourite pastimes. As I’ve been chopping and changing macs lately I thought I’d write a couple of shell scripts to get things right before running anything on my nice new (freshly installed) MacBook Pro.

h3. Prerequisites

There are a couple of prerequisites in addition to what’s on Dan’s “”What’s Needed”:http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx” list before running “the scripts”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/. The first is that you must have MySQL installed as referenced in “Dan’s article”:http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx, and the second being the following:

Ensure you have the following line at the end of your ~/.bash_login file:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH"

You can add this by typing nano ~/.bash_login then copy and paste the above line into the end of the file. Once this is done, hit ctrl-x to exit, answering ‘y’ to “do you want to save changes” prompt.

h3. The scripts

There are two scripts, “01_osx_rails.sh”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/01_osx_rails.sh and “02_osx_image_tools.sh”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/02_osx_image_tools.sh and the following will explain how to use them.

h3. Creating your development environment

The first script will install everything in Dan’s article along with the following gems that I use frequently:
* rails version 1.1.6 for support of older rails apps
* bluecloth
* redcloth
* sqlite3-ruby
* ferret
* ZenTest
* redgreen

Right… here we go:

(please read “the licence”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/MIT-LICENCE before running these scripts as although they have been tested on a clean install of Tiger, I can’t take any responsibility if something breaks)
# Download “01_osx_rails.sh”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/tools/osx_development_setup/01_osx_rails.sh to your desktop
# If you don’t wish to install all of these gems then open the file in a text editor and comment out the relevant lines with a hash.
# Open a new terminal window and type the following: 

cd ~/Desktop
sh 01_osx_rails.sh


# Go make a cup of tea and watch all the pretty text scroll before your eyes.

That’s it, you should now have a fully working development environment.

h3. Image tools

I use a couple of image tools on my system, GD and ImageMagick (with RMagick). If you wish to install these tools and the related libraries, run the following:

(This script hasn’t been tested as much as the previous one so use at your own risk. If anyone has any bug fixes then please post a comment)

cd ~/Desktop
sh 02_osx_image_tools.sh

h3. We’re done

Please let me know if I’ve missed anything obvious.

I hope this helps anyone else out there with Compilaphobia!

General / Rails / SonicIQ — 2 Comments
17
Feb 07

Ruby on Rails Exchange, London

Last Friday, a couple of us from “SonicIQ”:http://www.soniciq.com went to the first “RoR eXchange hosted by Skills Matter”:http://www.skillsmatter.com/rorexchange.

It was a great day with some interesting talks from:

* Chad Fowler
* Tom Locke
* Paul Battley
* James Cox
* Damien Tanner
* Ben Griffiths
* Eleanor McHugh

h3. Chad Fowler – Quick and -Dirty- Clean: Well factored Rails

Chad kicked off with a talk on “Quick and -Dirty- Clean: Well factored Rails”. For me it was one of those talks where you think “If only I heard this 6 months ago!”. The reason I say this is that a great deal of what he was talking about, we now implement on a day-to-day basis, but we have gotten there the hard way through making the mistakes that he mentions.

He talks about never using instance variables in views, I love that someone has confirmed this as I find it generally bad practice. For a while now we have been replacing them with helpers giving much more flexibility when the controller logic changes.

One great point that was made, was that SQL should never be used in controllers, not even in :o rder options. I have to admit, in the past I have done this a lot but the suggestion of custom finders in the model are a much better alternative and it keeps with the whole “Skinny Controller, Fat Model”:http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2006/10/18/skinny-controller-fat-model idea.

One thing I really must get into the habit of using are association proxies for has_many and such like. Chad showed some great examples of this.

I like one phrase that Chad came up with… “Bare Model Finds” which made me chuckle. What he was getting at was something like an account based site where everything should be found via the given account i.e. @account.projects.find(:all)

as opposed to a "Bare Model Find" of Project.find(:all, :conditions => ['account_id = ?', @account.id])

The main points I have taken away from this talk (which I am also going to put in a large poster on the office wall) are the folowing:

* No instance variables in views
* No SQL in controllers
* No more than 4 lines in controller actions

h3. Tom Locke - Experiments with Very Rapid Development in Rails

Tom gave a demo of his "Hobo":http://hobocentral.net/blog/ project which is very similar to a plugin we use in-house (which also may go open source at some point).

One thing I like about Hobo is the incremental nature of the "dryml" views, meaning that you can override certain elements in a default view bit-by-bit, i.e. if you just want a different header for a certain page you don't need to create a duplicate of the view and change it, you only need to redefine certain elements of the page.

I completely agree with Tom's views on generators, although he was slightly more diplomatic than I would have been. I am going to be slightly controversial and say that I really don't like generators except for creating stub files. What happens if you have an authentication system generator which you have used in 50 projects and you suddenly find a security hole?? ...You now have to go back through those 50 projects to fix it! [end generator rant]

h3. Paul Battley - Rerouting Rails

Paul attempted to explain how he believes the rails routing system should be re-written. I could see a lot of merit in what he was saying, however I don't believe it lent itself very well to this type of presentation.

h3. James Cox - Managing a high performance rails app without tearing your hair out

James gave some great tips on easy ways to increase the overall performance of Rails apps. We are in the process of configuring a new server so these tips came at a good time.

h3. Damien Tanner - Extend your Rails application using Domain Specific Languages

Damien explained a roundtrip his company went on with DLS's explaining that they are great in certain situations but can be taken too far or overused. In the example he gave, it turned out that the DSL he created was overkill for the business problem he was trying to solve.

h3. Ben Griffiths - Are your tests working for you?

For me, this and Chad's were the presentations that made the trip to London worth while. I am ashamed to say that until now, I have not gotten into TDD (I've been using Rails for over a year and a half). It's not through lack of trying but with clients constantly on your back to get projects out the door, it's all to easy to dive straight into coding the application and neglecting the tests.

He started with a comparison between testing and the film Predator. This sounds like a strange comparison however it really helped to illustrate the need for a good set of tests.

My main problem with tests were "what do I test?" and "my fixtures need too much maintenance!". I breathed a sigh of relief when Ben suggested not using fixtures at all as maintaining a load of fixtures really turned me off testing.

This was a great talk and I could bang on for hours on the benefits of testing with Ben's techniques and his whole take on modular design but I'll save that for another post. As a side-note, I have been doing TDD ever since this talk.

h3. Eleanor McHugh - Where's my SQL? Platform-independent database design using Migrations

Eleanor gave some examples of how migrations could be extended with plugins. A lot of the examples she gave were based on what has been implemented in Hobo. There were some interesting points in the talk although my concentration levels were frayed by this point.

h3. Group Discussion

The main point of discussion was views. I think everyone was in agreement that something needs to change with the way Rails handles it's views. I personally believe that they should be purposefully limiting so that it is hard to do bad things in the view. I am looking forward to seeing views taken to the next level and believe that there will be some large changes before 2.0 based on the comments during this discussion.

h3. After Party

The guys at "Skills Matter":http://www.skillsmatter.com put on the first 100 drinks at "Liquid" - a Japanese-themed bar. We had a chance to mingle and discuss a few of the points that we forgot to ask after the talks.

Thanks to all the speakers, all in all a great day out.

Videos of some of the talks are now "available online":http://skillsmatter.com/menu/479. Also, my colleague "Andy":http://darkliquid.co.uk has blogged about his take on the day: "Part 1":http://darkliquid.co.uk/2007/2/10/ruby-on-rails-exchange, "Part 2":http://darkliquid.co.uk/2007/2/11/ruby-on-rails-exchange-part-2.

General / Rails / SonicIQ — No Comments
21
Nov 06

New web-based GTD productivity application

Finally I can mention it. At SonicIQ we’ve been working on a web-based “GTD”:http://davidco.com application. Today the teaser site went live at “propelr.com”:http://www.propelr.com.

If you are are into “GTD”:http://davidco.com, life hacks or productivity in general head over to “propelr.com”:http://www.propelr.com. for a sneak peek!

Rails — 2 Comments
30
Sep 06

Maintaining database column order with migrations

If you’re anything like me, you like to keep database columns in a reasonably logical order. In my case I generally keep primary keys as the first column, then content columns, then special usage columns, then foreign keys e.g.

id
name
description
created_on
updated_on
account_id

Now, say I added a ‘slug’ column with a migration:

def self.up
  add_column "projects", "slug", :string
end

That’s fine, I have my new column but it’s after my foreign keys:

id
name
description
created_on
updated_on
account_id
slug

What’s it doing down there? I want it after the ‘name’ column! …wouldn’t it be nice if you could specify an :after option for add_column.

We can make this possible by monkey patching the add_column method at the top of our migration file (I will make this into a plugin when I get time):

module ActiveRecord
  module ConnectionAdapters # :nodoc:
    module SchemaStatements
      def add_column(table_name, column_name, type, options = {})
        add_column_sql = "ALTER TABLE #{table_name} ADD #{quote_column_name(column_name)} #{type_to_sql(type, options[:limit], options[:precision], options[:scale])}"
        after_column = options.delete(:after)
        add_column_options!(add_column_sql, options)
        add_column_sql << " AFTER #{after_column}" if after_column
        execute(add_column_sql)
      end
    end
  end
end

This lets us do the following:

def self.up
  add_column "projects", "slug", :string, :after => 'name'
end

Which gives us:

id
name
slug
description
created_on
updated_on
account_id

Much better… this may seem a little petty, however as your tables get more and more columns it makes things much easier to follow.

Please note: I have only tested this with MySQL

h4. Update: this is now a plugin and can be “downloaded here”:http://svn.soniciq.com/public/rails/plugins/iq_migration_extensions/

Rails — 1 Comment
28
Sep 06

CSS and JS directories in Rails

One thing that annoyed me when I first started using Rails at 0.14 was that I was forced to put my .css files in a ‘stylesheets’ directory and my .js files in a ‘javascripts’ directory.

Previous to Rails I would put .css files in a ‘css’ directory and .js files in a ‘js’ directory (call me old fashioned). I use the following code in my application helper to allow me to do this:

module ApplicationHelper
  def javascript_path(source) compute_public_path(source, 'js', 'js') end
  def stylesheet_path(source) compute_public_path(source, 'css', 'css') end
end

Just incase anyone else has the same niggle.

*Update 29-11-08:* for Rails 2.2, see new post.

Rails / Rake — 1 Comment
21
Sep 06

Disabling plugin code in generators/migrations

I have found on numerous occasions that I need to disable certain plugin functionality if running a generator / rake db:migrate etc.

An easy way to disable certain functionality follows:

def method_that_shouldnt_be_run_in_migrations_or_generators
  # Return if we are using a generator or migrations
  script = File.basename($0)
  return if (script == 'generate') || (script == 'rake' && ARGV[0] =~ /migrate$/)
end
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