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Tomcat-rails is now called Trinidad

2009-07-07T16:54:00Z

One month ago I released Tomcat-rails, a little gem to simplify my development process with tomcat.

To get feedback I decided to send some emails to several mail lists. I was really interested in answers from jruby and tomcat users and developers, perhaps they could send me some advice to improve my code or ideas for new features.

I got good feedback from the jruby-user list, people used it with good results, others bump into problems with jruby-rack... but the answers from tomcat-user lists actually took me by surprise, just two or three minutes after I sent the email the first reply asked me to read the tomcat's legal page, from his own words, the name of my project didn't conform to the guidance set out in the trademarks section, and specifically in this point:

If you use the words "Tomcat" or "Apache" in your product name then you must call your product "... for Apache Tomcat" or "... for Tomcat". You may not call your product "Apache ..." or "Tomcat ...".

Some days after, the same guy sent me an email directly to remember me that I had to change the name of the project, and of course, reading the internal lists of the ASF I know the project got some mentions.

Well, the problem just finishes today, from now this project is called Trinidad. In few days the old repository and the web page will be remove, the new web page and the repository are still hosted in github but I also set up the project in rubyforge, so install the gem is even easier:


jgem install trinidad

Remember if you find a bug, you have improvements over my code or just have suggestions for new features, you can use the repository issues' page.

Tomcat-rails, develop rails app within tomcat

2009-06-11T14:55:00Z

This days I'm working every day with this stack, jruby+rails+tomcat. I was quite tired to have to pack the application and restart tomcat every time I wanted to test every slight change, so as a result, I wrote a script to use an embed tomcat within my application and this morning I wrapped it as a gem.

There is a lot of work to do but you can already download it from github.

It's usage is quite simple, just install the gem with jruby, go to the root directory of your rails app and run jruby -S tomcat_rails, or copy and paste this lines:


  jgem install calavera-tomcat-rails -s http;//gems.github.com
  cd myrailsapp
  jruby -S tomcat_rails

Any feedback will be really appreciated.

Rails template for Google app engine

2009-04-09T15:59:00Z

I know, there is already too much buzz out there that talks about the new GAE's java support but I was sure I end up trying it.

I was following the Ola's post, it's quite simple to configure a rails project to deploy it on GAE, but I didn't want to repeat all those steps every time I'll deploy a new application, so I just wrote a rails template that adds all that stuff to my projects.

I'm waiting Jeremy'll add it to the templates repository, meanwhile you can grab it from my forked repository.

By the way, if you've already worked with rails templates you know they provide a git command that I'm not using in my template. That's because that command doesn't work outside the app root directory. I've already submitted a patch to the rails' lighthouse to solve it. Please vote it!!

Rails Hackathon in Madrid

2009-01-09T11:05:00Z

Last month some friends of mine organized a great event called Monsters of Ruby. The topic was Ruby without Rails, and the challenge was mix random technologies and create a simple web app, my teammates and I suffered with SproutCore, Ramaze and Sequel.

Following its essence I'm organizing a new event called Rails Hackathon next February 7 in the 11870.com's office. The topic will be dive into the Rails core and send as patch as we can to the issue tracker.

Our office is not too much big so I've decided to close this event to 20 people, some of them have been already invited but there are some available places yet. If you are a Rails core contributor or you want to be and you enjoy diving in foreign source code send me a mail to calavera AT apache DOT org and I'll include you in the list.

European Ruby Konference 2009 in Barcelona

2008-12-11T09:56:00Z

I'm glad to announce that we have dates and venue for the next Euruko 2009 in Barcelona, May 9 and 10 in the Citilab, a beatiful place that hosted other big international conferences like DrupalConf or OpenOffice.org Conference.

You can see the official announce in the Euruko web page, we'll open the call for papers in the next weeks, stay in touch!

Abdera gets the graduation

2008-11-20T17:53:00Z

Although I don't speak pretty much on Apache Abdera, I've been involved in the project for more than a year.

Today, two years later Abdera is finally graduated and in the next weeks we're moving our home to abdera.apache.org as a Top Level Project in the ASF. So, now the question is... when will we release a new version of Abdera? and the answer is... we're working on fix every major bug that we have in our jira, and we have to look over our documentation, but we'd like to release a new version as soon as our infrastructure will be migrated.

Meanwhile contributions are welcome, if you find a bug or you think that you can improve our documentation, please don't hesitate to drop us a line.

Google Test Automation Conference 08

2008-10-25T17:28:00Z

Yesterday, the third edition of the Google Test Automation Conference finished, and, although my speech was a little disaster, I'm glad. It was a challenge, this was the first time that I gave a speech in english and I chose to do it in front of the main experts in testing in the world.

I'm trying to upload the slides to slideshare but I have several problems converting the file, so, if you want to get them you can download the pdf from my server.

Update: I finally got to upload the presentation to slideshare, you can take it a look here:

GTAC: AtomPub, testing your server implementation<object height='355' width='425' style='margin:0px'><param name='movie' value='http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=gtac-atompub-testing-your-server-implementation-3825&stripped_title=gtac-atompub-testing-your-server-implementation' /><param name='allowFullScreen' value='true' /><param name='allowScriptAccess' value='always' /><embed allowfullscreen='true' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=gtac-atompub-testing-your-server-implementation-3825&stripped_title=gtac-atompub-testing-your-server-implementation' allowscriptaccess='always' height='355' width='425'></embed></object>

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: conference automation)

Next three weeks in the states

2008-10-20T16:37:00Z

Right so, Tomorrow I'm flying to Seattle to speak in the Google Test Automation Conference and to seitze the opportunity I'm going to visit some friend in San Francisco next week. After that, I'm going to New Orleans to attend to the ApacheCon where I'm talking on Abdera in the Fast Feather track.

If you're in my route and you want to spend some time taking a beer and talking on open source, rails, java, atom or something, just drop me a line to calavera at apache dot org or leave me a comment in this post. See you there!

rubyMetrics 1.2 supports Rails stats

2008-09-18T12:03:00Z

I've just released the version 1.2 of the rubyMetrcics plugin for Hudson, and I've added support for Rails stats, so, if you check the right option hudson generates the report and its trend graph:

You can find more info into the plugin page.

Ruby Metrics plugin for Hudson

2008-09-12T13:53:00Z

I couldn't keep quiet after I read this Arun Gupta's post, so I've just released the first version of the Ruby metrics plugin for Hudson.

This plugin aims to collect a bunch of ruby metrics tools and integrate them with Hudson. The first release allows to integrate Rcov reports into Hudson and builds a trend graph with the coverage of your project between releases.

You can find more screenshots in the plugin wiki page. Enjoy it!

When readability is better than metaprogramming

2008-09-08T10:15:00Z

This morning I've bumped into this code:


latitude = phif + (x2frac * x2poly * (x ** 2)) + 
  (x4frac * x4poly * (x ** 4)) + 
  (x6frac * x6poly * (x ** 6)) + 
  (x8frac * x8poly * (x ** 8))

longitude = central_meridian + (x1frac * x) + 
  (x3frac * x3poly * (x ** 3)) + 
  (x5frac * x5poly * (x ** 5)) + 
  (x7frac * x7poly * (x ** 7))

And quickly I've thought that it could be refactored easily with a loop like this:


latitude = phif
longitude = central_meridian + (x1frac * x)

(2..8).each do |n|
  latitude += eval("x#{n}frac * x{n}poly * (x ** #{n})") if n % 2 == 0
  longitude += eval("x#{n}frac * x{n}poly * (x ** #{n})") if n % 2 != 0
end

both pieces of code work fine, but sincerely, my mind is getting used to understand the first one better than the second one, so I've ruled out my refactor and I've kept the original version.

Greasemonkey script for pootle

2008-08-26T12:27:00Z

I think one of the most unpleasant tasks when you internationalize a web page is locate missed sentences and translate them.

Pootle allow us to keep a centralized translation repository where translators can work together. But pootle sentences navigation is a little weird and you always finish searching sentences by hand.

This morning I've written a little greasemonkey script that allows you to select a sentence into a web page and search it into your pootle server. The script records one command action for each one of the languages that you've configured and then, they can be invoked from the greasemonkey user script tab.

If you've already installed greasemonkey you can add the script from my github accout.

Apache Abdera supports AtomPub-multipart creation

2008-07-24T20:59:00Z

One of the most weird stuff in the AtomPub specification is the media creation flow. First, you need to send a request in order to post the new media resource and once the response is correct you can update the media link entry related with it.

In order to avoid the second step, the Picassa team added to their api a new way to add photos, and now, they allow to send a multipart file that wraps the photo and its metadata.

This atom extension is been covered by an IEFT draft that Joe Gregorio published, and this morning I've updated the Abdera trunk in order to implement this specification.

You can read more into the Abdera wiki. Enjoy it.

Speaking: AtomPub at GTAC 08

2008-07-16T11:47:00Z

This October I'll be presenting at Google Test Automation Conference on testing of AtomPub implementations. The talk will discuss the best practices in order to test AtomPub implementations, why testing an extensible standard could become painful and how to get started with some useful tools.

GTAC is one of my favorites conferences, people talking about testing, just one track and no fees. If you are considering applying for attendance, I suggest it. But if you are actually interested in testing and you didn't know it, you should consider applying.

The ape 1.5 released

2008-07-02T21:31:00Z

Yesterday I released a new version of The atom protocol exerciser. We have been working in order to simplify its architecture and create a modular system that anyone may extend.

Now it works from the command line as well the web interface. We've added some rake tasks that you can use for exercise your server implementation and you can select the output format just invoking the correct option:


 $ rake ape:go:text['service document uri']
 $ rake ape:go:html['service document uri']
 $ rake ape:go:atom['service document uri']

It allows some configuration options through its config file $APE_HOME/aperc:


Ape.conf[:REQUESTED_ENTRY_COLLECTION] = 'collection name'
Ape.conf[:REQUESTED_MEDIA_COLLECTION] = 'collection name'

And finally, this last release allows to create and add new tests easily. The test cases must to extend the Ape Validator class and override the validate method.


module Ape
  class CustomValidator < Validator
    def validate(opts = {}) end
  end
end

We've implemented a little system for select the variables to use in your tests, just call the requires_presence_of method into the class declaration and pass the variable name that you require.


module Ape
  class CustomValidator < Validator
    requires_presence_of :entry_collection #OR
    requires_presence_of :entry_collection => 'comments' #OR
    requires_presence_of :media_collection => {:accept => 'image/png'}
    #...

Once your custom validator is ready you just need to move it to $APE_HOME/validators.

But if you really want to learn how to write your custom validator you just need to take a look at the source code.