After following the instructions for creating a new Rails 3 app (using the –database=mysql parameter for the “rails” command) I noticed that the application tried to access the (not existing) production database. That was a bit strange, because I expected it to access the development database as I set the RailsEnv option of Passenger accordingly:

# for example in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
RailsEnv development

The reason this doesn’t work is because the generated application contains a “config.ru” file. In this case, Passenger treats the application as a Rack application and not as a Rails application. And so the RailsEnv setting is ignored as it is Rails-specific…

There are two ways to run the application in development mode: you can either remove the “config.ru” file (and keep the RailsEnv setting) or you can set the RackEnv option:

# for example in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
RackEnv development

Have fun with Rails 3 :)

In this case, the following steps might help to fix this issue:

• Ensure you have Curl and OpenSSL installed
• Enable the Curl and OpenSSL extensions in your php.ini (on Archlinux this file is found in /etc/php/):

  extension=curl.so
  extension=openssl.so
  

• Restart your web server

Now the error message should disappear and you should be able to log in with the Google OpenID.

—-

That’s it for 2009. It was a rather lazy year on this blog from my side (I didn’t even manage to do a redesign…), and so I hope I will be a bit less lazy with writing on this blog in 2010.

Anyway, thank you for reading this blog, and for all your comments and emails. A Happy New Year everyone & cu in 2010 :)

AX is in principle the “big brother” of the Simple Registration Extension (or SReg for short). Whereas SReg only allows you to retrieve nine commonly requested pieces of information, AX allows you to retrieve any identity information. And theoretically it also allows you to store/update your identity information at your OpenID provider. But it seems like no OpenID provider supports this feature…

Let’s have a look at an example.

First the login method:

// app/controllers/users_controller.php
class UsersController extends AppController {
    public $components = array('Openid', 'RequestHandler');

    public function login() {
        $realm = 'http://'.$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];
        $returnTo = $realm . '/users/login';

        if ($this->RequestHandler->isPost()) {
            $this->makeOpenIDRequest($this->data['User']['openid_identifier'], $returnTo, $realm);
        } elseif ($this->Openid->isOpenIDResponse()) {
            $this->handleOpenIDResponse($returnTo);
        }
    }
}

The next step is to implement the makeOpenIDRequest() method. For each attribute we want to retrieve, we have to create an Auth_OpenID_AX_AttrInfo object with the respective attribute type. A list of possible types is available on http://www.axschema.org/types/. Though there are many types defined, OpenID providers usually only support a small subset of those types.

The “1″ we pass to the make() method specifies the number of values we want for this type. In this example it doesn’t make much sense to specify a value other than “1″, but for other types it is theoretically possible to have multiple values (for example you could have defined multiple email addresses). It is an optional parameter and by default it is “1″.

The last parameter specifies whether the value of the attribute is required for our application. This is simply a hint for the OpenID provider so it could display this attribute differently, but it doesn’t guarantee a value is returned. By default this parameter is “false”.

private function makeOpenIDRequest($openid, $returnTo, $realm) {
    $attributes[] = Auth_OpenID_AX_AttrInfo::make('http://axschema.org/namePerson', 1, true);
    $this->Openid->authenticate($openid, $returnTo, $realm, array('ax' => $attributes));
}

Finally, we have to implement the handleOpenIDResponse() method. As we expect only one value for the attribute we specified, we can use either get() or getSingle() to retrieve its value. getSingle() returns the value whereas get() returns an array.

private function handleOpenIDResponse($returnTo) {
    $response = $this->Openid->getResponse($returnTo);

    if ($response->status == Auth_OpenID_SUCCESS) {
        $axResponse = Auth_OpenID_AX_FetchResponse::fromSuccessResponse($response);

        if ($axResponse) {
            debug($axResponse->get('http://axschema.org/namePerson'));
            debug($axResponse->getSingle('http://axschema.org/namePerson'));
        }
    }
}

That’s it.

You can get the new version of the OpenID component from GitHub. If you use SReg in your code and you want to update to this version, please make sure to adapt your code in the following way:

// old
$this->Openid->authenticate($openid, $returnTo, $realm, array('email'), array('nickname'));

// new
$this->Openid->authenticate($openid, $returnTo, $realm, array('sreg_required' => array('email'), 'sreg_optional' => array('nickname')));

Feedback is welcome :)

Here an example from the API:

# app/views/posts/index.atom.builder
atom_feed do |feed|
  feed.title("My great blog!")
  feed.updated(@posts.first.created_at)

  @posts.each do |post|
    feed.entry(post) do |entry|
      entry.title(post.title)
      entry.content(post.body, :type => 'html')

      entry.author do |author|
        author.name("DHH")
      end
    end
  end
end

The code should be self-explanatory (if not, please leave a comment).

Recently, I had two such views which were almost identical, the only difference was the feed title. And that’s of course not really DRY.

One possible approach to fix this “issue” is to set an instance variable with the feed title in the controller and render the same view in both cases. As I don’t like to set view titles (resp. feed titles in this case) in the controller, I decided to use a partial.

And so I put the code from above into a partial (plus changing the instance variable “@posts” to a local variable “posts” and introducing a new local variable “feed_title”), and tried to use this partial (app/views/shared/_feed.atom.builder) in the following way:

# app/views/posts/index.atom.builder
render :partial => 'shared/feed', :locals => {:feed_title => "My Posts", :posts => @posts}

Well, it didn’t work. No output was generated.

After experimenting a bit I found the following solution by moving the outer-most block definition from the partial to the views:

# app/views/posts/index.atom.builder
atom_feed do |feed|
  render :partial => 'shared/feed', :locals => {:feed => feed, :feed_title => "My Posts", :posts => @posts}
end

I don’t know whether this is the best solution (probably not), but it is definitely better than what I had previously ;-)

Thanks to CSS it should be easy to make a button look like a link, that’s what I thought when I started. But as usual when I work with CSS, what seems to be easy is not that easy… Anyway, here is the solution:

First the HTML code. Nothing special here, the only thing to note is that I had to use a “button” instead of an “input” element due to some CSS issues with Konqueror.

<form action="/article/1" method="post">
  <p>
    <button type="submit" class="link"><span>Delete</span></button>
  </p>
</form>

And here the CSS (thanks to Natalie Downe for her article Styling buttons to look like links, from where I got some of the settings below):

button.link {
  -moz-user-select: text;
  background: none;
  border: none;
  cursor: pointer;
  color: blue;
  font-size: 1em;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  text-align: left;
  text-decoration: underline;
  overflow: visible;
  width: auto;
}

This worked fine in Konqueror, but in Firefox there was always a padding of 2px. And of course I had no clue why. As you can see in the CSS snippet above, the padding was already set to 0… Fortunately, I found the solution in a comment of the aformentioned article:

button::-moz-focus-inner {
  padding: 0;
  border: none;
}

To use such link-like buttons in your own application you have to adapt the CSS to your own needs.

Have fun :)

It is ok to be new and inexperienced with a framework/programming language/whatever. Everyone of us is from time to time in such a “newbie phase”. And this means you will ask “stupid” questions (of course after you have done your “homework”, i.e. searching on the internet, reading the documentation). It’s part of the learning process. And it’s nothing you have to apologize for.

I don’t know whether this will be the case, it is too early to say. But I doubt it. The project is still backed by the Cake Development Company, which employs some of the core contributors (Larry Masters aka PhpNut, Mark Story). That’s some guarantee that the show will go on. And of course there is a large community.

On the other hand I don’t know how many of the other contributors will remain. And the lack of (official) communication is also not that good for the confidence into the project. What happened? What will be the next steps? Who will take over those vacant roles? See also Matt Curry’s post on this matter.

Anyway, probably the best thing to do now is to drink tea and to wait until the dust settles…

Update (2009-10-23): an official statement has been published in the meantime.

There isn’t much to say about the hardware I use: my only machine is a Dual-Core Toshiba Notebook with 4GB RAM and a trackpoint (the most important feature to me, as it allows me to keep my hands on the keyboard all the time).

And here my (probably incomplete) list of software I often use:

• OS – Arch Linux with KDE as window manager
• Browsers – My preferred browser is Konqueror, it is light-weight and, thanks to the good KDE integration, it is a Swiss Army knife. However, it doesn’t work properly with some websites… The other browser I use is Firefox with the Adblock Plus plugin (additionally I have Firebug installed, though it is usually deactivated).
• Chat – To chat I use either Kopete or Skype
• Mail – Thunderbird
• IRC – Konversation
• Database Tools – MySQL Query Browser
• Coding – Eclipse with PDT has been for a long time my primary development environment. However, as it seems like it becomes worse with each release, I use more and more the Vim editor.
• Source Control – For the few remaining Subversion repositories I use the Subversive Eclipse plugin, and for everything else I simply use Git
• Graphics – Inkscape
• Debugging – To see what’s going on when working with OpenID or some APIs I like the Wireshark network protocol analyzer

And last, but not least, my favorite tools: paper and pen. I use them primarily to manage my todos and most of my passwords, to draw UML diagrams, and to sketch UIs.

undefined method `^' for "b":String (NoMethodError)

Fortunately, I am not the first one who encountered this issue, and so it is already fixed in the Rails git repository. To fix it on my local installation, I simply had to replace /<path_to_ruby_gems>/activesupport-2.3.4/lib/active_support/message_verifier.rb with the corresponding file from the git repository. And with that, my applications started to work again :)

Let’s say we want to add a method to the request handler component. And so we create a new class which inherits from the request handler component:

// app/controllers/components/my_request_handler.php
App::import('Component', 'RequestHandler');
class MyRequestHandlerComponent extends RequestHandlerComponent {
    public function example() {
        // do something
    }
}

To use this component, we have to add it to the $components array of our controller:

// app/app_controller.php
class AppController extends Controller {
    public $components = array('MyRequestHandler');	
}

Nothing new so far. However, a disadvantage of this approach is that you have to use the component in the following way:

$this->MyRequestHandler->isAjax();
$this->MyRequestHandler->example();

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could use it in the usual way?

$this->RequestHandler->isAjax();
$this->RequestHandler->example();

And yes, it is possible. For this purpose we have to override Controller::constructClasses():

// app/app_controller.php
class AppController extends Controller {
    public $components = array('MyRequestHandler');
	
    public function constructClasses() {
        parent::constructClasses();
        $this->RequestHandler = $this->MyRequestHandler;
    }
}

Happy baking!