remi

jQuery AJAX

2009-09-28T00:00:00-07:00

A few years back, I watched the Peepcode episode Ajax with Prototype.js. I thought it was the coolest thing ever!
Compared to having to deal directly with XMLHttpRequest objects, it was so easy. But that was way back in 2007.

Now, jQuery is where it’s at. And doing AJAX with jQuery is even easier! Trivial, even!

In this episode, I’ll show you how to:

make arbitrary GET/POST/PUT/etc requests to your server and get the response
easily refresh part of the page with HTML rendered by your server
get JSON data from local and remote servers (we demo getting tweets from Twitter)
get and run remote JavaScript
make sure your jQuery event handlers effect newly created DOM elements (eg. added via AJAX)
and more :)

 1 $.post('/dogs', { 'dog[name]': 'Rover' });
       2 
       3 // you can actually try the following snippets right here, on the blog!  just open Firebug  :) 
       4 
       5 $.get('/index.html', function(html){ alert('got html: ' + html); });
       6 
       7 $('#content').load('/index.html #header');
       8 
       9 $.getJSON('http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=remitaylor&callback=?',
      10           function(tweets){ console.log(tweets.results) });
      11 
      12 $('a').live('click', function(){ alert("I get bound to new DOM elements"); return false; });

jQuery Plugin Development

2009-09-25T00:00:00-07:00

Creating plugins for jQuery is trivially easy and can help you:

clean up your javascript in individual applications
share re-used javascript between multiple applications
share your snazzy jQuery voodoo with others!

1 $.fn.color = function(color){
      2   return this.each(function(){
      3     $(this).css('color', color);
      4   });
      5 };
      6 
      7 $('a').color('red').css('font-weight', 'bold');
      8 
      9 (function($){ ... }){jQuery)

Ruby Basics

2009-09-13T00:00:00-07:00

People often ask me how to get started programming Ruby.

Whether you’re an experienced programmer, or you’ve never programmed before, this screencast will hopefully give you a good introduction to how to program with Ruby.

(see screencast below)

Try Ruby!

One of my favorite resources for learning Ruby is Try Ruby!, a web site that has a built-in Ruby console and it walks you through tutorials. It’s really quite ingenious. It tells you things to try and detects when you’ve tried that bit of code, at which point it brings you to the next page of the tutorial.

The Try Ruby! that’s currently online is slightly different from the original, and may currently have a few bugs, but it should be good enough to get you started.

Unfortunately, one of the Ruby community’s most beloved programmers recently mysteriously vanished, and he was the one that hosted the original Try Ruby!, so someone is trying to get it fully back up and running.

Installing and Playing

Really, the best way to learn any programming language is to download it and start playing around with it. Come up with some small task that you’d like to try to accomplish with the language and see if you can do it. Also, read other people’s code!

Luckily, Ruby is installed out-of-the-box on Mac OSX. It’s trivially easy to install on Linux (use your distro’s package manager). And there’s an installer for Windows that you can download and double-click to install (or use cygwin).

Additional References

There’s an online book available for learning Ruby that walks you through learning the whole language, from the very basics (for total beginners) to hardcore programming. Oh. And it has cartoon foxes.

It’s not for everyone and, a few chapters in, you might start to feel dizzy (or like you’re on an acid trip), but it’s a magnificent way to learn the basics. Every experienced Ruby programmer has read atleast the beginning of the book and it’s become a part of the community. It was created by Why the Lucky Stiff (aka _why), the programmer who recently disappeared.

If you prefer the usual boring programming language books, I recommend the Pickaxe book, which you’ll likely find on every Ruby programmer’s bookshelf.

Anyway, enjoy the screencast! I hope you enjoy learning to program with Ruby :)

Dev Fu!

2009-09-13T00:00:00-07:00

It’s been a few months since I’ve regularly posted new screencasts. In that time, I’ve gotten lots and lots of requests for screencasts and I can’t wait to record and release as many as I can.

The fact is: I’ve been busy!

The reason?

I Started My Own Company

For those that don’t know, my good friend @bm5k and I co-founded Dev Fu! a few months ago, a Phoenix-based Ruby on Rails company. And it’s been crazy!

Crazy fun, that is :)

Over the years, I’ve seen more and more of my developer & designer friends go freelance or start their own companies. I was always envious of them and hoped to go freelance myself, one day. Work from home? Set your own hours? Sounds like a dream!

Well, anyway … I did it. Turns out that it’s not hard at all to go out on your own!

Quit your day job
Setup your own company
?
Profit!

Steps 1 and 2 are easy, you can do both of them in 1 day! Step 3 is where all of the mystery lies. Inotherwords, it’s where all of the fun is :P

Screencasts

Anyway, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to think much about screencasting. I really miss screencasting, though, and I have a good list of suggested screencast topics that I would love to start digging into.

Starting this week, I’m going to try to release atleast 1 screencast a week.

For now, I’m not releasing on a particular day. Very soon, however, I’ll probably pick a day of the week that I’ll always release a screencast on, so you’ll know which days to check my RSS feed :P

Watch for new screencasts! Hope you enjoy!

Streaming Screencasts with Viddler

2009-07-01T00:00:00-07:00

You asked for it, so here it is!

Finally, if you don’t want to wait for my screencasts to fully download, you can watch them streamed!

I tried out Viddler, Vimeo, Viddyou, and YouTube - all good services. Viddler has treated me the best, so far, so I’m starting to upload my screencasts to Viddler and start embedding them in my blog posts.

Ofcourse, you’ll still be able to download the full screencasts in the formats that I currently support:

xvid encoded avi
x264 encoded mp4
ogg

Let me know (in the comments) how you like the streaming Viddler videos. I’ve actually found that the videos looks better if you click the full screen button (atleast on my tiny 1280x800 laptop screen).

Are the available formats working well for everyone? The Viddler streams? Let me know!

Enjoy!

Rack::OpenID::Proxy

2009-06-30T00:00:00-07:00

Why?

If you have a Ruby web application that you want to use OpenID in, check out Rack::OpenID.

If you …

have lots of applications and you only want to implement one OpenID consumer OR …
you have a web app running in an environment (like Google AppEngine) where OpenID consumers don’t work properly

… check out Rack::OpenID::Proxy.

If you don’t need a proxy to be an OpenID consumer, this likely isn’t for you. I created this because we’ve been using Google AppEngine and OpenID doesn’t work very well on AppEngine.

How?

Rack::OpenID::Proxy runs as a standalone Rack application (or it can be run as middleware).

Let’s say you run this proxy on Heroku at http://openid-proxy.heroku.com.

From a different web application, when you want to authenticate a user against OpenID, redirect them to http://openid-proxy.heroku.com/openid?url=the-users.open-id-provider.com. This will redirect the user to the OpenID providers’ login and then redirect back to whatever URL your request originally came from (via the referer) with an extra querystring, eg: http://yoursite.com/original-path?token=1234abcd

Now the user is back on your site and has been through the OpenID process (via 1 simple redirect). To get the OpenID response (to find out if the login was successful), you can fetch the response via: http://openid-proxy.heroku.com/openid.json?token=1234abcd

Here’s an example consumer implementation written in Sinatra:

 1 require 'sinatra'
       2 require 'open-uri'
       3 
       4 PROXY = 'http://my-open-id-proxy.com'
       5 
       6 get '/' do
       7   if params['token']
       8     # this is the redirect coming back from the proxy.
       9     # the OpenID response is accessible using the token we were given.
      10     response = open("#{ PROXY }/openid?token=#{ params['token'] }")
      11     "OpenID response: #{ response }"
      12   else
      13     haml :openid_login_form
      14   end
      15 end
      16 
      17 post '/login' do
      18   # redirect to the proxy to do the OpenID authentication for us.
      19   # the proxy will redirect back to this app with a token param.
      20   redirect "#{ PROXY }/openid?url=#{ params['openid-url'] }"
      21 end
      22 
      23 __END__
      24 
      25 @@ openid_login_form
      26 
      27 %form{ :action => '/login', :method => 'post' }
      28   %label
      29     OpenID URL: 
      30     %input{ :type => 'text', :name => 'openid-url' }
      31   %input{ :type => 'submit', :value => 'Login via OpenID' }

http://github.com/devfu/rack-openid-proxy

Rack::OpenID

2009-06-26T00:00:00-07:00

I was looking for an easy way to add OpenID authentication to Rack applications and I found Rack::OpenID, a Rack middleware for OpenID.

If you want to have a user redirected to their OpenID login, simply return:

1 [ 401, { 'WWW-Authenticate' => 'OpenID identity="my-open-id-url.com"' }, [] ]

If you use Rack::OpenID, that will redirect the user to login via OpenID, after which they’ll be redirected back to the URL they were redirected from with env["rack.openid.response"] set to an OpenID Response object.

Here’s a simple Rack app that using Rack::OpenID …

 1 require 'rack/openid'
       2 
       3 use Rack::Session::Cookie
       4 use Rack::OpenID
       5 
       6 run lambda {|env|
       7   request = Rack::Request.new env
       8   session = env['rack.session']
       9 
      10   # /logout should clear the session and redirect back to /
      11   if env['PATH_INFO'] == '/logout'
      12     session.clear
      13     [ 302, { 'Location' => '/' }, [] ]
      14 
      15   # if we got a response from OpenID, save it in the session and redirect back to /
      16   elsif openid_response = env['rack.openid.response']
      17     session[:openid] = openid_response
      18     [ 302, { 'Location' => '/' }, [] ]
      19 
      20   # if we POST the form (with an openid_url field), redirect the user to login via OpenID
      21   elsif openid_url = request.params['openid_url']
      22     [ 401, { 'WWW-Authenticate' => "OpenID identifier=\"#{ openid_url }\""}, [] ]
      23 
      24   # display a page with a login form and the user's current logged in status
      25   else
      26     if session[:openid]
      27       if session[:openid].status == :failure
      28         login_status = "Login Failed: #{ session[:openid].message }"
      29       else
      30         login_status = "Logged in as: #{ session[:openid].identity_url }"
      31       end
      32     end
      33     [ 200, { 'Content-Type' => 'text/html' }, %{
      34       <a href="/logout">Logout</a>
      35       <p>#{ login_status }</p>
      36       <form action="/" method="post">
      37         OpenID URL: <input type="text" name="openid_url" />
      38         <input type="submit" value="Login" />
      39       </form>
      40     } ]
      41   end
      42 }

http://github.com/josh/rack-openid

Rack::OAuth

2009-06-23T00:00:00-07:00

Rack::OAuth is a Rack middleware for easily integrating OAuth into your Ruby web applications.

If you’re using a Sinatra application or Rackup file, all you need to do is:

1 use Rack::OAuth, :key    => 'your-oauth-app-key',
      2                  :secret => 'your-oauth-app-secret',
      3                  :site   => 'http://twitter-or-whatever.com'

If you’re using Rails, all you need to do is:

1 config.middleware.use Rack::OAuth, :key => '...', :secret => '...', :site => '...'

Then, whenever you want to have your user redirected to authorize OAuth access, redirect them to /oauth_login.

After the OAuth authorization is complete, they’ll be redirected back to /oauth_complete.

Ofcourse all of these paths are configurable and there are more configration options available. To find out more, check out the screencast or checkout the code at:

http://github.com/remi/rack-oauth

jQuery Basics

2009-06-16T00:00:00-07:00

I was about to make a short screencast showing how to use a jQuery plugin I created when I realized … there are still web developers out there who haven’t used jQuery!

So … developers who aren’t yet fully comfortable with jQuery … this one is for you!

I show you how to:

Download jQuery to use in your apps (or just the Google Ajax Libraries version)
Browse the jQuery API via Visual jQuery
Select elements on the page, eg. $('a')
Do stuff with elements on the page, eg. $('a').css('color', 'blue')
Method chaining, eg. $('a').css('color', 'blue').text('foo')
Unobtrusive JavaScript (UJS) with jQuery, ie. event handling with jQuery
Running stuff once the DOM is fully loaded, eg. $(document).ready(function(){ ... })
Writing your own jQuery functions so you can say $('a').myCoolFunction()

I think I’ll do another screencast on Ajax with jQuery … but I hope this shows you the basics!

1 $(document).ready(function(){
      2 
      3   $('li').css('color', 'red');
      4 
      5   $('h1').click(function(){
      6     alert('clicked on header with text: ' + $(this).text());
      7   });
      8 
      9 });

Rack::Staticifier - Rack middleware for static caching

2009-06-15T00:00:00-07:00

While at RailsConf this year, I got bored and coded up a Rack middleware for static caching.

Rails has a way to staticly cache pages built-in but not all Ruby web frameworks do, so I figured this would make a good piece of middleware.

( Also, I knew that I wanted to create Staticify and it would require Rack::Staticifier )

 1 # this will cache ALL responses in a 'cache' directory
       2 use Rack::Staticifier
       3 
       4 # this will cache ALL responses in a 'public/my/cached/stuff' directory
       5 use Rack::Staticifier, :root => 'public/my/cached/stuff'
       6 
       7 # this will only cache requests with 'foo' in the URL
       8 use Rack::Staticifier do |env, response|
       9   env['PATH_INFO'].include?('foo')
      10 end

http://github.com/remi/rack-staticifier

Staticify - static caching for Ruby web applications

2009-06-14T00:00:00-07:00

After the Dev Fu! site was launched, one of the first responses the site received from Twitter was from fellow Phoenix Rubyist James Britt.

James makes some really interesting and valid points.

We chose Wordpress for Dev Fu because there are bagillions of free Wordpress templates available online and we wanted to use one to get the site up and running quickly.

That said, I’m not personally a big fan of WordPress. Atleast not for my personal sites.

As James pointed out, there are a number of Ruby-based tools for making static websites:

Up until yesterday, remi.org was running on Jekyll and I’ve used StaticMatic for client sites before.

My problem with these tools is that they all require you to learn their framework. They all have their own ways for how you’re supposed to organize your views and static assets. Some use different templating languages. Some have special ways to manage navigation. And more.

I love the idea of generating static HTML sites in Ruby, but I like to code my sites myself. I have my own preferences and ways I want to keep things laid out. Some of these tools are overkill for what I want. Others have to be hacked to get them to work the way I want them to.

So … I made Staticify.

Staticify isn’t a framework. It does nothing more than staticly cache URLs for you from any Ruby web framework, eg. Rails or Sinatra.

http://github.com/remi/staticify

FollowLists: a better way to #FollowFriday?

2009-04-24T00:00:00-07:00

#FollowFriday is a neat use of a #hashtag to share the names of good tweeps to follow with your fellow tweeps.

That said, lately my timeline has looked more like this on Fridays …

… and that’s more like spam!

What we really need is a way to create and manage lists of twitter users and then share those lists with others.

Enter FollowLists.

FollowLists is basically like TinyURL, but for sharing tweeps instead of websites :)

Deploying Ruby Web Applications to Heroku

2009-04-23T00:00:00-07:00

Tonight, at the Phoenix Android meeting, someone asked if I knew any good Ruby / Rails web hosts. Something easy for someone who’s just learning Rails and wants to be able to essentially copy/paste their code to a server and have it “just work.”

The first (and only) service that came to mind was: Heroku

Heroku is a sweet Ruby web application host that makes it ridiculously easy to host your applications. Basically, you can take any existing Ruby / Rails web application you have and git push it to heroku … and it gets automagically deployed. That’s it.

Up until recently (maybe even today?), Heroku was in Beta and 100% free. It looks like they’ve finally released some pricing information but there is still a free plan so Heroku is still a great choice for quickly and easily deploying a Ruby web app.

Anyway, that’s all. I have a bit of a head cold so I sound a little funny and I’m doing 100 times more “ummmm” than usual … but, otherwise, I hope folks will find this useful. In the first 5 minutes, we create AND deploy and Rails application :D

How I Record My Screencasts

2009-04-16T00:00:00-07:00

Someone recently asked me how I record my screencasts. Instead of answering him directly, I figured I would make a post to let everyone know :)

My Setup

My screencasting setup is relatively simple, I use:

recordMyDesktop for recording the screen and audio capture to an ogg
a cheap USB headset (which I bought for using Skype) for the audio capture
a VM instead of my actual local desktop (currently using VirtualBox but I’ve used VMware Server too)

I don’t record my local desktop because:

It’s not optimized for a smaller resolution, eg. 800x600 (which I currently record at)
I can guarantee its state. It’s very easy to screencast then revert the VM back to an old state
Easier to not accidentally record private personal / client projects and whatnot

Recording Software

Way back when, I used to use vnc2swf for screencasting. It’s awesome for making a quick and dirty screencast because, when you’re done, it’s ready to view online. It also works very well, in my experience, on older computers (recordMyDesktop dropped too many frames to be usable on my last laptop). It has a few problems though … it doesn’t work well if you’re using Compiz and converting from the generated swf to other formats is really insanely difficult and CPU / hard drive intensive.

Once I got my new laptop (from this decade :P), I discovered that recordMyDesktop runs great on it, so I switched. I also like recordMyDesktop because ogg’s are pretty easy to convert from and conversions look pretty good!

My favorite thing about my setup is that I created keyboard shortcuts that run scripts which start & stop recording so I never have to worry about booting up apps or anything. I just press a combination of keys and the recording starts. It even finds the VM on my desktop and draws a black box around it so I know that it’s recording the right part of the screen :)

Conversion & Web Hosting

The thing that took the longest with my screencasting setup was getting video conversions working just right … and I’m pretty happy with the way they’re currently working. I have a set of scripts for converting a video to an x264 encoded mp4 or to a xvid encoded avi, as well as a script for grabbing the first frame of the video to use as a thumbnail. I actually don’t use these scripts manually anymore, but getting them working the way I wanted to took a bit of tweaking.

Once I finish recording a screencast and I’m ready to convert it and deploy it online, I run a script that does all of the conversions then uploads all of them to Amazon S3.

That’s It

That’s pretty much it. I created a little macro-type thing on my blog that embeds screencasts in a blog post if I just give it a header like video: rack-middleware. Sometime soon-ish, I plan on redesigning my blog and specifically creating it with screencasts in mind. I didn’t know I would be screencasting as much as I am when I created my current blog.

Hope someone finds this useful! Enjoy.

Ruby on Windows: Cygwin, Git, Rvxt, and more

2009-04-15T00:00:00-07:00

In my previous screencast, I showed you how you can get up and running quickly with Ruby on Windows.

In this screencast, I show you how I think you can get up and running correctly with Ruby on Windows.

With Ruby development, it’s generally assumed that the developer is on some kindof a unix-style environment. This generally means developing on:

Apple OS X
Linux
Windows Cygwin

Windows has some seriously shortcomings as a development platform. The cmd.exe shell is not nearly as powerful as the shells that are typically used by unix-y systems, eg. BASH. Also, Windows doesn’t come out-of-the-box with the tools needed for compiling code nor does it come with a package manager or something to make it easy to install these tools and their dependencies.

Enter Cygwin

Cygwin provides a Linux-like environment for Windows. It can give you all of the commands that developers generally assume you have like:

ssh
make
gcc
rsync
git
and much, much, much more

In this screencast, I show you …

how to download & install Cygwin and install some packages, eg. Ruby and Git
how to download & install RubyGems and install some gems, eg. Sinatra and Rails
how to generate an ssh key, associate it with a GitHub account, clone a GitHub project, & update it
BONUS: how to update Cygwin to use the Rxvt terminal (instead of Cygwin running in cmd.exe)

NOTE: In the screencast, I clone a git repository from GitHub before showing you how to associate your git with your github account … keep watching. I realize this mistake later in the screencast and show you how to do that.

Ruby on Windows: Quick and Dirty

2009-04-14T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve coded up some Ruby web applications, eg. little Sinatra apps / prototypes, for some developer friends of mine who are on Windows and haven’t used Ruby before.

I wanted to show how easy it is to get up and running with Ruby quickly on Windows.

NOTE: this isn’t the prefered way to do Ruby development on Windows, in my opinion. Instead, I personally think you should use Cygwin. But, if you just want to get a Ruby app up and running and you won’t be doing too much development, this should work fine for you.

In this video I show you how to:

Download and Install Ruby on Windows
Install some RubyGems
Create and run a simple Sinatra application
Download a Sinatra application from GitHub and run it

I don’t show you how to get git up and running on Windows, because I prefer Cygwin for doing that.

If you want to see howto get up and running with Ruby, RubyGems, git and more on Windows, checkout out my next screencast: Ruby on Windows: Cygwin, Git, Rxvt, and more

RubyFlow is protecting you from great articles!

2009-04-06T00:00:00-07:00

Hey everyone, this is a really short post! Sorry, no screencast today … hopefully in the next day or 2 :)

Anyway, do you read RubyFlow? RubyFlow rocks and lots of great articles are posted to it daily … BUT you’re not getting all of these updates if you follow its official RSS Feed

Some days, there might be 5 or more posts to RubyFlow but only 1 or 2 of them show up on the official RSS Feed because you need to be “approved” for your article to show up in the feed.

If, like me, you want to see everyone’s RubyFlow posts, here’s a feed that show’s ALL RubyFlow posts:

http://feed43.com/rubyflowraw.xml (caution: may contain spam, altho i haven’t seen any yet)

( by the way, Feed43 looks pretty cool … I didn’t set this up, though. This is a URL Peter Cooper gave me )

Enjoy!

PS. While I’m on the topic of good feeds for Ruby news, here are a few of the feeds I follow … feel free to comment with some of your own recommendations :)

Those are my main Ruby feeds … any additional recommendations?

Building your own Sinatra clone: Part IV

2009-04-03T00:00:00-07:00

See Part I for an introduction and a full listing of all episodes in the series.

In this screencast:

we discover that our helpers are shared between all applications (bad!), so we make them unique to each application
we add support to use Rack middleware
we review some updates that I made to the code, offline

Intro to Sinatra

2009-04-02T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve been recording my screencast mini-series on Building your own Sinatra clone and I realized … some people out there still haven’t used Sinatra!

Hey you! Ruby developer who hasn’t used Sinatra! This is for you :)

This should get you up and running with Sinatra, if you haven’t used it before. If you have used Sinatra before, this might not be the screencast for you. Although, I basically do a total braindump of all of the Sinatra features that I’m aware of, so … you might learn something new.

If you have used Sinatra before and you want to learn more, I recommend checking the Sinatra Documentation.

If you have not used Sinatra before, then check this. Even if you only watch the first 5 minutes, you’ll have enough to get you up and running in no time!

Building your own Sinatra clone: Part III

2009-04-01T00:00:00-07:00

See Part I for an introduction and a full listing of all episodes in the series.

In this screencast, we start adding helper methods like #request, #response, and #params. We also create a Responder to that the main application and response blocks (eg. get(){ ... }) are evaluated in different contexts.

Building your own Sinatra clone: Part II

2009-03-31T00:00:00-07:00

See Part I for an introduction and a full listing of all episodes in the series.

In this screencast, we test-drive the creation a new SinatraClone library.

We re-implement most of the features prototyped in Part I, but now using a real, organized library.

Building your own Sinatra clone: Part I

2009-03-30T00:00:00-07:00

Have you ever wanted to build your own web framework? Do you want to learn howto create Rack applications?

The first time I found out about Sinatra, I had already created my own Rack-based web framework and I wasn’t particularly interested in Sinatra. It’s really just a pretty DSL for Rack. Those days, I used Camping for micro web applications. Nowadays, I use Sinatra all the time … it rocks! And, as Yehuda recently pointed out, Sinatra is getting lots of hype lately. And so is Rack!

So, what better time to learn how to use Rack to implement the Sinatra DSL, yourself!

Episode Guide

Part I: Simple proof of concept script, at_exit, Rack review, simple routing
Part II: Test-drive the creation of our new, organized SinatraClone library
Part III: Creating #request, #response, #params helpers and the Responder class
Part IV: Make helpers unique to each app, add Rack middleware support, review offline updates
Part V: TBA - I hope to create more someday, I have lots of implementation ideas :)

Notes

Once this series is complete, we should end up with a gem that, ideally, can be used as a drop-in replacement for Sinatra. But does that mean you should use it? This series of screencasts is created for learning … specifically to show people how easy it is to write libraries like Sinatra. That said … I don’t expect anyone to actually use this library, once it’s been created!

Also, I never look at the source code for Sinatra for this series - where would be the fun in that? Everything we implement is fresh (or totally rotten). Reinventing the wheel isn’t very practical unless you’re trying to learn howto invent a wheel, yourself.

Enjoy!

Rack: Part III => Middleware

2009-02-28T00:00:00-07:00

Part 3 in my screencast mini-series on Rack … checkout parts 1 and 2:

In Part 3, we cover:

What is Rack middleware?
How to write your own Rack middleware
How to use your Rack middleware from any Rack app, from the Rackup file
How to use your Rack middleware from Sinatra and Rails 2.3 apps using their built-in middleware support

Rack: Part II

2009-02-24T00:00:00-07:00

This is a follow up to my first Rack screencast, Rack Basics.

In this screencast, we cover a bit more of the basics. Instead of playing around in an IRB shell, we create an executable Rack application using a Rackup file (the conventional way to run Rack applications).

We use some Rack middleware and learn howto to read Rack Requests a bit easier and howto generate Rack Responses a bit easier. We also catch some exceptions and get our Rack apps reloading.

I hope you enjoy this screencast. Next up in the Rack screencast mini-series: Rack middleware! You’ll learn how middleware works, how to create your own, and and examples of how to use lots of pre-existing Rack middleware.

Camping Screencast

2009-02-23T00:00:00-07:00

This is a screencast I made that covers nearly everything about creating Camping applications, way back when. I figured I should actually post this incase it’s helpful to someone.

Note: I personally believe that Sinatra is the “modern Camping.” Camping was created before the days of Rack. Sinatra, on the other hand, is a relatively thin DSL that sits on top of Rack. There’s been some interest in creating ’Camping 2.0’ based on Rack, but I don’t know how far along that project is. Sinatra is the current Ruby micro web framework of choice!

These days, if you need something easier than “native Rack” but less heavy than Rails / Merb / etc … try out Sinatra!

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