half-pie - rubyish

not so agile

2007-04-15T10:13:45Z

Things I have discovered while working through Agile Web Development with Rails:

Two years ago I was not wrong to try to learn Ruby before attempting to learn Rails. Learning Ruby (I still have a copy of Mark Slagell’s Learn Ruby in 21 Days at home) was a dismal failure when I tried it back then – it seemed too far removed from the exciting world of Rails. I wanted to implement the Idea RIGHT NOW. I’m now wishing I tried a bit harder with Ruby. While someone with existing expertise in programming other languages might be able to pick up what they need while going straight to Rails, as a non-programmer I am finding lots of stuff that seems incomprehensible without the Ruby (and programming) knowledge I don’t have.
My obsession with diagramming continues. Now I’m using Inkscape for my ERD diagrams – and as Inkscape outputs SVG (an XML flavour) I can put my diagrams into Subversion. This is cool, if quite a bit over the top. I think I’m avoiding the hard work.
The hard work (i) at the moment is thinking about how my app is going to work. And what I can cut out of the first iteration. Diagramming helps draw this out, as does thinking about page flows for the various actions that need to be available. Talking with Becky (a potential user) is helpful too.
The hard work (ii) – what really daunts me: the complexity. It’s bigger and more complex than the Depot app already, and the jump between the two is widening. And this is before I’ve made anything that actually works. I don’t know enough to know if it can work yet. Which is also a worry. Weirdly though, my Idea – the same one I’ve had for over two years – remains just as simple to describe as it always was.

I just need to keep chipping away.

reading, not doing

2007-03-28T10:33:11Z

Once again I’m fooling with tools and documentation rather than JFDI.

I’ve borrowed Agile Web Development with Rails from the nice people at Hirethings, who host a cool little library of Rails books for people to borrow. And now I know where Creative HQ is, should I get around to attending any of the WellRailed meetups.

Anyway, it turns out this is the book I should always have bought. It seems to be a really practical step by step manual that explains reasonably fully as it goes, but in a light enough tone to keep you going.

In comparison, Ruby on Rails: Up and Running is perhaps a little too abbreviated for my use (but will suit some people because of this), and Ruby for Rails will come in handy later once I get over this initial hump of building something (anything! just JFDI!), and need to extend my knowledge of Ruby further.

I actually went ahead last night and bought the PDF from the publisher’s website. It is possible to get a 60% discount on the PDF if you own a copy of the paper book, and I admit I was tempted to commit a morally dodgy act. While I had the book in my possession, I did not own it… so after a short moment’s thought I reloaded the shopping cart at the full price. Then I added the PDF for the new TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac, which has already taught me more in an hour of reading than I’ve picked up in the last six months of using the application.

The latter I’ve printed at 4-up double sided at work (shhh – don’t tell my employers). It’s perfectly readable. I may well do the same for the Rails book. Not only do I get to save money (the PDF is well discounted), but I get to feel environmentally virtuous as well. Not that helps with getting some Working Code. And being Agile. And all that.

Of course, what will help is two weeks of holiday coming up next month, in which for much of it I’ll be holed up with the family in remotest Eastern Bay of Plenty. There’ll be time for this thing. And it’s gonna be good.

Meanwhile, if someone wants Ruby on Rails: Up and Running I’m sure we can come to an arrangement.

models and migrations

2007-03-22T09:41:46Z

I’ve recently climbed back in the saddle.

It seems that where I fell off earlier, before Christmas in fact, was in the tricky (for the uninitiated) area of working out the model for my app. With some lengthy and hard thinking I think I’ve figured out how all the entities relate to each other: e.g., how both users and groups can have many memberships; but a membership can only belong to one user and one group. I had to write it all down before it started making sense.

Now I have eight things that all need tables of their own. But no doubt this will change… and anticipating this Rails has “migrations”, a way to specify in code what the database should look like so that changes to the database can be made easily without having to worry about the different flavours of SQL that might be required to accomplish that (given that the app you are writing might be one day run on Oracle instead of MySQL… yeah right).

So that’s the next job: to learn about migrations.

delay and delay

2007-01-13T07:33:52Z

Oh dear. As I suspected would happen, I’ve somewhat let my little project fall by the wayside before Christmas and through the holiday period.

And getting back to work, with full five day weeks, has not been conducive to concentration.

However, excuses must cease. Especially as my workmates (not to mention the people at PlayCentre) are waiting to use my very vapourous piece of ‘ware.

<sigh.>

gliffy

2006-12-03T01:19:40Z

In a quest to waste more time on tangential diversions, I conceived a burning desire to find a free, cross platform tool for easily creating a database diagram that would be useful when setting up models in ActiveRecord.

For some reason, mere paper would not suffice for this task. So I spent many happy hours looking for alternatives to expensive things like Visio, almost settling on Inkscape (very fine tool, by the way) before discovering Gliffy.

I’m hooked. Here’s my extremely complicated lending library schema (which is currently serving as my training application):

It’s got just the features I need and no more; it’s easy and intuitive to use, and I can share stuff for others to edit (or not) as I wish. Plus there’s a plugin for Confluence, which would go down well at work.

Highly recommended.

succumbed

2006-11-30T10:15:22Z

In Dymocks today I saw two new copies of Ruby on Rails – Up and Running. This turned out to be a book that I didn’t know I wanted until I saw it. So I bought it (justifying it by reminding myself of its relatively low price). Even if it’s at a level just slightly above many of the web based tutorials somehow having it in book form seems to help somehow…

In fact, just last night I’d been trying to figure out how ActiveRecord would practically work for me for building a little sample Camping app I was thinking of.

The idea (note small “i”) was just to build a little database driven app that I could use to keep track of who is currently borrowing my books. I could leave it running in a quiet spot of my website, maybe, where no-one but me could find it and thus I wouldn’t need user authentication (i.e., keeping it simple). It’s something that I could also have learned how to do in PHP, but that just wouldn’t be as cool, would it.

Of course reading the book made a number of things a lot clearer, making me think I should switch back to Plan A, to implement the Idea straight away in Rails. Bad idea. Walk before running.

isn't camping fun?

2006-11-28T09:57:44Z

I’ve started to get a little overwhelmed trying to figure out what’s what with Rails. I know it’s supposed to be trivially easy, etc etc, but I’m not a developer, just an inveterate tinker with no programming language skills to speak of.

So, I ran across Camping, an even smaller ruby-based web framework written by congenial park ranger _why the lucky stiff (he’s here and here too)

It seems graspable by the likes of I, as I try to learn Ruby at the same time, and the sense of fun about it is infectious. What’s camping, without pesky mossies, so of course someone’s written testing library for Camping called Mosquito. _why’s kind of geek humour is very hard to explain, but I like it.

And cartoon foxes too.

more tools

2006-11-26T09:07:10Z

Of course, there is yet more time to be wasted: how about getting a version control system up and running?

Luckily I’d done this before (TextDrive lets their web hosting customers set up a subversion repository on their servers) on one of my other iterations though this ground – and promptly filled it with a now stale version of Rails. That’s now deleted, and all that’s left is a text file which, were I at work, would be called a requirements document for the Idea.

The Idea has been kicking around in my head for nearly two years now. It won’t change the world, but it might be useful. I’ve already come across two distinct cases where it would have come in very handy, and from that there’s a generalisation of a gap that a web application could fill.

So my little doco describing all this came into being (according to the svn log) at 6:50am on the morning of 8 June this year. It needs a lot more added to it.

Using svn/svnX on the MacBook, and now svn/RapidSVN on the work laptop that lives at home, I can now do what I should really be doing before I start tinkering with the dev part of all this: working out the concepts, the entities, and how they relate. If Becky wants to use the MacBook I can switch to the Windows machine.

Without gritting my teeth too much, even.

building the platform

2006-11-26T01:59:34Z

Another pleasant way to while away the hours is to get all the bits and pieces required for Ruby on Rails development onto one’s machine.

You see, I’ve kind of done this ass-backwards, where I’ve picked a development stack – a trendy one – and then thought of an idea to use it with.

Anyway, there are two major ways of doing this on the Mac: either you download Locomotive, which provides a nice sandboxed little play area, or you do all the downloading, compiling, and installing stuff manually. Since getting my new MacBook I’ve been using Locomotive out of some strange fear of fiddling with the system too much. It’s nice, but I find it restricting in some hard to define way compared to the handrolled install I had on my old iBook. So I decided to go the manual route.

Now it turns out there’s at least two major ways of doing this, too: Dan Benjamin’s way, and the MacPorts way.

I started with the first of these. Unfortunately, I didn’t get far: I was getting persistent crashes of the Terminal in the middle of the “Make” steps (and sometimes before). So I gave up and tried the MacPorts method. I had a few crashes here too, but eventually got out the other side to where I needed to install the Ruby-MySQL bindings (don’t ask me exactly what they do, I’m just following orders). MacPorts wanted to download and install a whole new instance of MySQL, and I couldn’t figure out how to make it realise that I already had an install that I wanted to keep using (full of my localhosted sites used for development and testing). Not only that, but my existing install obtained directly from MySQL itself had several useful admin tools – like a prefpane for launching and terminating the service – that I wasn’t sure how to make work with the MacPorts version. I’m sure there is a way, but I was weary of trying to find it.

So I tossed MacPorts – I’ll come back to it another day, it’s a great tool. After a restart I seemed to be able to happily compile again, so I resumed the Benjamin method. The only departure from instructions I made was to make sure I had the latest version of everything in each case. It all seemed to compile OK.

So far, so good. I now have the complete stack, ready for use. I have a copy of TextMate, the editor du jour for Mac developers. I have two books on the subject of Ruby, and Rails. And I have an Idea.

Now I just need to figure out how the hell to implement it.

rubyish

2006-11-25T22:02:09Z

As previously noted, every couple of months I return to my long held ambition of writing a useful web application.

It’s happening again now. Not really the best time of the year for it, right at the beginning of the pre-christmas rush.

Anyway, this new section of the site will be where I put any old crap that comes to mind while I’m tying to learn how to develop my ideas. And this way it doesn’t have to bother most of my site’s readers who couldn’t give a fig for this particular sort of geekiness.

As well as providing a handy source of procrastination for me.