Floyd’s Thoughts…

Bourbon Creams and Bananas are not a balanced diet.

Phusion Passenger on Amazon EC2
Some useful stuff relating to Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) on Amazons Elastic Computing Cloud.

Moving from Java to C#
A senior ThoughtWorker talks about his first C# project 10 years after he first tasted the Java bean.

IPhone GUI PSD
Some photoshop goodies for mocking up IPhone UI’s.

If you have recenlty or are about to Upgrade an existing Rails application to Rails 2.1 (and why wouldn’t you), be aware that your implementation of Exception Notifier might not work due to a scope change in Rails where:

@controller.filter_parameters

Is now protected, therefore the code in Exception Notifier that called it needs to be change as follows :

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   #exclude_raw_post_parameters? ? @controller.filter_parameters(parameters) : parameters
   exclude_raw_post_parameters? ? @controller.send!(:filter_parameters, parameters) : parameters

Utilizing the send method allows you to call the protected method.

Fortunately the Exception Notifier plugin on GitHut has already been updated to accommodate this fix and can be installed by :

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	./script/plugin install git://github.com/rails/exception_notification.git

NOTE
Exception Notifier (like most plugins) comes with a suite of tests that you should run as part of your build or at the very least whenever you change something as fundamental as the Rails version your using… BTW I did neither of these things and found out the hard way :-/

Sometimes you need a catch-all route in rails to support dynamic applications like Content Management Systems, where all requests that are not matched by an existing route get passed to a controller who can deal with the request.

Add the following to the end of your routes.rb :

map.with_options(:controller => ‘page_engine’) do |site|
site.connect ‘*url’, :action => ‘show_page’
end

If that’s your last route, it means that anything that isn’t recognised by any of the other routes will get routed to that controller/action (page_engine/show_page). It shouldn’t interfere with images/assets because they are served with higher priority than Rails routes. It lets you have any number of forward-slashes.

So if you hit your site with the following URL:

http://localhost:3000/we/really/hate/wcf

The request will be routed to the show_page action in the page_engine controller where you can then access the actual url elements with :

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path = request.path # '/we/really/hate/wcf'
path_elements = request.path.split('/') # ['', 'we', 'really', 'hate', 'wcf']

While this isn’t the type of thing you would do on many Rails projects you certainly will find this useful for projects that have an element of dynamic routing that goes beyond the RESTful style that rails implements, and its especially useful for implementing Content Management Systems.

Last time I tried to do MemCache on windows I gave up, as getting MemCache to work on Windows was seriously difficult.

Well this is all a thing of the past due to some fine work from Kenneth Dalgleish who has created a Win32 port – Top Man

Installation

Download the memcache port from http://www.splinedancer.com/memcached-win32/

Extract the download to your filesystsm (say c:\memcached)

Create a service using the command : c:\memcached\memcached.exe -d install

Start the server using the command : c:\memcached\memcached.exe -d start (or using the services management console)

Thats it! by default it listens on port 11211

Rails 2.1 makes using memcache really easy and having this option on Windows is a real shot in the arm for Enterprises who are looking to host Rails apps on Windows.

I love Rails and use it all the time, fortunately the company i work for builds web products that lend them selves to the Rails way, however we also do consultancy work for larger Enterprise companies where Rails doesn’t lend itself so well.

I’d love to see Rails include features that would ease its adoption within the enterprise, here are a few things that i’d like to see:

Better support for Windows
Now it hurts me to say this as everybody here loves OS X and our products are built for OS X or linux deployment but many (i’m inclined to think most) enterprises use Windows for deployment of internal intranet apps.

With the release of Mod_rails, deploying ruby apps into production is now only easy its reliable, Enterprises organizations need both of these things, but i think they need them on windows too.

Support for Stored Procs
Now i now its pretty easy to add this support (and i will get to that later) but having Stored Procs support baked into Rails would make using Rails in a enterprise environment so much easier.

We have been to many large companies to build large internal intranet applications and in every one of them we have had to interface with legacy systems via APIs that are exposed by stored procs.

Telling a client that you are going to use Rails in this environment consistently produces a look of horror from the clients technical guys and follows with a Rails can only do Object Relational Mapping discussion.

Any (that i have met) technical architect in the corporate work will dismiss rails for its (perceived) lack of Stored Proc support.

I’d like to see this functionality baked in to rails and advertised as a “Feature”.

Integrated Development Environment
Right now i can think of at least 6 IDE’s that support rails and thats not including TextMate (which i use).

Of all the IDE’s that i have tried NetBeans is the best, it has good all round support for rails but even still, its miles away from what a corporate developer would consider a good IDE for rails development.

Developers need refactoring tools in any language but the need for good refactoring is greater with dynamic languages, netbeans has one refactoring option enable when using rails “Rename” and even that doesn’t safely rename.

Now i’m not suggesting we need Resharper for rails before corporate developers adopt rails but somewhere in between resharper and what we have now would be a good start.

Address the Scaffolding Myths.
Every rails developer knows that scaffolding was (pre rails v2.x) pretty useless but served a good purpose in helping to increase the Buzz around rails with the promise of one click application stubs.

In rails 2.0 scaffolding is Slightly more useful in that it creates nice Restful controllers and some pages to help you get going with the first few resources in your application however, the Rails community needs to address the perception thats rails is all about scaffolding.

So many times i have had conversations with Tech Leads, Development Managers, Developers, etc about rails being more than scaffolding, usually they are amazed to hear that most rails developers don’t even use scaffolding in there apps.

Its as if this great little feature of rails is holding it back in the minds of “serious” corporate developers, who don’t see scaffolding for what it is.

Database Support
Active Resource is an amazing piece of work, I often go through the Code Base to see how certain things are done and find myself gushing over the code in there its amazing…

However, since Rails v1.2.6 the core team seem to have lost interest in Databases other than sqlite and mysql, which is all good and well for the the Web 2.0 community, however corporate guys need Oracle and/or Microsoft SQL Server support out of the box, and it seems that using either of these engines now requires extra gems and some hacking around. I have had many conversations with devs who “tried” to use rails but couldn’t get it to connect to Oracle. After looking around the web they often got frustrated by the contradicting and out of dat solutions to this problem and gave up.

If rails is living on its promise to give database independence and Rapid development thought active records object relational mapping magic it can’t force corporate developers down a wild goose chasing for gems, it need to work – Out of the box.

The Solution…
Well rails is young and i’m certain that these issues will be resolved given time, however i think its the responsability of all rails developers to increase its presence in the Corporate world when and where ever we can.

As such I’m going to start a Rails in the Enterprise site where issues such as the ones i have highlighted can be discussed, resolved and communicated to the corperate world.

I’m like to see this site become a one stop resource for corporate developers who are trying to use rails.

jQuery is an alternative to the Prototype JavaScript library that is gaining some real traction these days.

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

jQuery also sports an elegant model of method chaining where almost all methods return an instance of the object they are called on, this means you do do stuff like:

	$("p.surprise").addClass("ohmy").show("slow");

The only problem is I love using Rails which has many helper methods that make using Ajax really easy which use the Prototype JS library, so ncluding jQuery as well as Prototype is not only a pain it also means i’m doubling the amount of javascript i ship with each page.

Fortunatly the problem has been solved via a cool rails plugin called jrails.

jrails is easy to install (script/plugin install http://ennerchi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/jrails) and replaces all the calls to Prototype with calls to jQeury allowing you to remove prototype from your application without loosing any of the rails magic.

This is less of a tip and more a of my own metaphorical “Kit up the Back Side” that happened to me a few weeks ago.

While looking for some software to audit the applications i had on my Mac came across Slie.

Now slife doesn’t audit apps it actually monitors and records the activity of applications that you use.

What makes slife so useful is that it renders the data about your application usage in a timeline representing the day, so you get an idea of which application consumed most of your time.

My expectation of the slife results for a common day would be some email and browser activity in the morning followed my some hard core TextMate activity up until lunch where email, soduko and safari would be used, come the afternoon another good block of TextMate, sprinkle a bit of NetNewsWirs across the entire day and there you go, another productive day from me

Well this is all good an well but the reality is somewhat different, the results actually show that i spend much more time in mail and safari and a hell of a let less time in TextMate, for me this is a real kick up the back side! I value my time and investing so much of it in “Surfing” or “Emailing Friends” is not a good us of my valuable time.

I now run slife all the time, and review my own activity at least on day a week.

Net result : I now spend more time “working” so i can get my task done sooner… which gives me more time to surf

Estimating is one of those tasks that really takes it out of the whole team, hours or even days of reviewing stories and estimating the effort is hard work.

The temptation is to crack on and keep going until the task is done however I can’t stress enough the importance of taking time away from this process to recharge and re-engage with the subject mater.

Some techniques for making the process less onerous (if thats possible):

Story Rotation
Often teams will follow a story list as it define by the BA, which in my opinion can lead to less informed estimates, having discussed the attributes of one story only to be presented with another similar story can often lead to dismissive estimations where in isolation the story may reveal more detail.

Take Breaks
Accept that a fresh mind is better at dealing with problems, taking a break is one of the most productive things you can do.

Give everyone a stage to express their opinion
So often the dev lead will take up most of the air space while more “junior” members of a team will sit nodding (or nodding off). Give your whole team a chance to engage in this process after all you will expect them to work in this project right?

Have Fun
Enjoy the process by making it fun! Use novel gestures for estimating or high five when you all agree, whatever it is you guys do that is fun, do it and do it more often, having a laugh will make the most onerous of tasks less so.

Estimating has to be one of the tasks i “enjoy” the least however, its value is without question.

More estimating today! Calculating velocity tomorrow… Joy!

Y Combinator’s Demo Day Summer 2008
Some y-combinator startups show of there stuff.

YUI 3 Preview
Personally i prefer ExtJS but more choice in this area is good for all.

AppStore Developer TapTapTap Publishes Sales Figures
Interesting stats from TapTapTap – Makes me think I should building IPhone apps

Rails (or should i say ActiveSupport) adds a blank? instance method to object that encapsulates the nil? || empty? check that I find myself doing all the time.

A quick review of the source show that the empty? method is added to the following:

  # An object is blank if it's nil, empty, or a whitespace string.
  # For example, "", "   ", nil, [], and {} are blank.
  #
  # This simplifies
  #   if !address.nil? && !address.empty?
  # to
  #   if !address.blank?

The full source is actually very simple (I Love Ruby)

class Object
 
  def blank?
    if respond_to?(:empty?) && respond_to?(:strip)
      empty? or strip.empty?
    elsif respond_to?(:empty?)
      empty?
    else
      !self
    end
  end
end
 
class NilClass #:nodoc:
  def blank?
    true
  end
end
 
class FalseClass #:nodoc:
  def blank?
    true
  end
end
 
class TrueClass #:nodoc:
  def blank?
    false
  end
end
 
class Array #:nodoc:
  alias_method :blank?, :empty?
end
 
class Hash #:nodoc:
  alias_method :blank?, :empty?
end
 
class String #:nodoc:
  def blank?
    empty? || strip.empty?
  end
end
 
class Numeric #:nodoc:
  def blank?
    false
  end
end