Rails Jedi

TakeFive Interview

2008-07-12T00:43:20+00:00

FiveRuns has been kind enough to post my submission to their TakeFive questionnaire…. Give it a Read

Passenger @ RailsConf

2008-06-01T21:40:57+00:00

At their RailsConf session this morning, the Phusion team had some big announcements.

- Passenger version 2.0 will be releasing today

- Ruby Enterprise version 1.0 will be releasing today

The biggest news so far is the immediate availability of support for Rack in Passenger. This means Merb, Sinatra, and any other ruby framework with an adapter now has a braindead easy way to deploy and host with Apache. Since Passenger is now framework agnostic, they have dropped the name “ModRails”, even though I suspect it will be referred to by this name for a long time to come.

Ruby Enterprise is the other big news of the day. It’s a tweaked Ruby MRI (with a terrible name) that vastly decreases memory usage (around 25%) for your hosted app. It uses a strategy called copy-on-write which he explains in his slides (should be available soon). Since memory is at a premium on VPS installations, this is a huge benefit and should allow you to save a decent amount of money right off the bat. The coolest part is their slick installer which takes care of all the setup for you so its a dead simple replacement, and it is perfectly happy to install alongside the normal Ruby MRI installation.

I worked with the Phusion team this afternoon and installed the new Passenger 2.0 and Ruby Enterprise on my SliceHost. Everything worked like a charm as the installer scripts are extremely robust and newbie friendly. I’ll follow up next week with detailed instructions and some stats for memory usage of the new server compared with the old.

With my experience with Passenger so far, I’m finally convinced it’s the best of breed deployment solution for Ruby on Rails apps large and small. Start reading up on it and give it a try.

Javascript-Enabled or Bust

2008-04-16T06:50:54+00:00

After a recent deluge of blog spam, I went ahead and installed an interesting Rails plugin to my project called form-spam-protection. I was actually initially searching for a captcha plugin, but since I despise captchas on sites and wasn’t in the mood to integrate with the Akismet antispam web service, I jumped on the opportunity to try this thing out.

What the plugin does is tries to block spam seamlessly on your forms by using a little hackery on the backend. When an html form is displayed, it encodes a string via SHA1 on the server side. It then uses Hivelogic’s Enkoder to output a mess of javascript to the page, which on the client side, populates the form which via that javascript code, putting the key back together into a hidden field before the form submission. Then, on postback it validates the key with the one previously added to the session. For a more detailed explanation, click here.

Anyways, the thing seems to works great. But as you might be able to guess it’s got one big catch. One whose consequences may invoke rage in some certain individuals. Try turning off javascript and interacting with my site (submitting a comment, or logging in) and here’s what you might see.

Deeeeenied

Pleasant error message I’d say. But my question is, are we to the point where we can just say no to those folks who don’t have Javascript enabled? What year are these people living in anyways? Long ago we passed the point where we could safely give the finger to our non-cookie enabled users. Is it about that time to be A-OK with offering the same treatment for non-javascript users?

One interesting sidenote, despite my complete indifference to the pain and struggle of our less fortunate javascriptless citizens, I still agree wholeheartedly with the coding practice of using “unobtrusive” javascript. While I couldn’t care less about graceful degradation part, separating generated html from your javascript code does make things vastly more reusable and easier to manage during web development.

Feel free to complain about this in the comments. But if you don’t have javascript on, you won’t be able to post one anyways.

OpenSourceRails.com now live

2008-04-14T19:02:28+00:00

With the amazing open source apps that are being released almost every week in the Rails community, I thought we might need a place to track them all and keep everyone up to date. So as of today, I’m announcing opensourcerails.com, a gallery of sorts for Open Source Ruby on Rails applications.

Here’s a rundown of the initial features:

The OpenSourceRails homepage shows the latest applications promoted to the front page, with the ability to bookmark, rate, and download applications It also provides basic tagging and search capabilities.

The Application detail page shows you the details of the project along with screenshots, file downloads, and demo links. Any member can submit their own screenshots, files, and links for any application.

Submitting an application will bring you to a blank project page where you can set its details, upload screenshots, files, and links for that project. Once its ready, you can then submit it to the gallery where it will show up on the “Upcoming” list. After being approved and vetted by the community, it will then be promoted to the front page.

Lots more features coming over the next couple weeks (like OpenID). Subscribe to the site’s RSS to get the latest projects as the bulk of the initial population occurs over the next few days.

View OpenSourceRails.com

Firebug 1.2 Excitement

2008-04-06T22:32:52+00:00

It goes without saying that every web developer uses and loves Firebug. For me, it’s pretty much single handedly made web development tolerable again.

I found out a few days ago that Firefox 3 beta 5 broke Firebug 1.1. I wasn’t going to be able to live with this, and didn’t want to downgrade back to Beta4 just yet, so I went searching for a fix. This eventually led me to the Firebug 1.2 alpha. And it just so happens that it’s awesome. 1.2 seems to fix nearly every one of my complaints with Firebug.

Download Firebug 1.2 alpha

Here are the significant improvements I’ve seen so far:

Open in External Editor

For me, this one is huge. Previously if you were copy/pasting code and css from Firebug you ended up with a mess of line numbers. p.

This way you can set your external editor to textmate to pop open the javascript or css from any page in no time.

JQuery Selector Display

JQuery selector output now displays correctly again, and you can hover directly over the elements to see it outlined in the browser. It used to work in Prototype but not JQuery. Now it works in both.

Function Display in Logger

Previously in Firebug, if you outputted a function, it would just display as “function()”. Now firebug will actually show the function source code.

Additional Thoughts

If there other killer features I missed please let me know in the comments.

Also keep in mind Firebug isn’t just a debugging tool. It’s also the most effective learning tool out there for front-end web development. When doing normal site browsing, you should keep firebug enabled and on hand. When you see a design or script you really like, open up the code in firebug and hack on it a bit. In 1 or 2 months, this will likely give you more knowledge of real world web development skills than reading any number of books on the subject.

So bring on the beta already! Help the project by reporting any bugs you find to the Firebug Google Code project.