January 30, 2009 – Robert Evans

We’ve been pretty busy this month with Travel & Gather getting the foundation of the application built. As I said in our last post, we are using Ruby on Rails to build TAG and are using several Rails plugins which I wanted to track. Also, since I have done a lot of Merb development including contributing to Merb itself, I wanted to track Rails as Merb gets integrated in for Rails 3.0.

An obvious choice is using Git Submodules to manage each plugin and rails itself. The only part about that is maintaining each submodule, which can be a bit cumbersome. Ideally, I’d just like to run a rake task that will update everything for me. So, I did just that and wrote Git Tools, a Ruby Gem that makes managing Submodules a breeze.

The basic premise behind this is that you’d use a YAML file to declare all of your submodules and then write a rake task that can update everything. Here’s a quick example of a rake task that will update all of your submodules:

  require ‘git_tools’

  configration = File.join(RAILS_ROOT, "config/submodules.yml")
  
  desc "Update all Submodules"
  task :update_all => :environment do
    GitTools::Submodule.update_all(configration)

  end

Pretty simple, eh? I’ve also added in some goodies for handling things like a first time checkout where you would need to init and update your submodules. I’ve also added a way to remove the git cache and have a rake task for each git submodule, individually.

You can get the Git Tools Gem at GitHub, either by checking it out or doing a gem install, specify GitHub as a source for Ruby Gems.

Also, check the Readme file at Github as it has more information on how to setup everything.

January 04, 2009 – Robert Evans

We hope you had a wonderful holiday break, we sure have. We’ve been busy prepping for development of the new Travel & Gather web application. We’ll be using this blog to talk about the development of the application, such as design decisions, feature implementations, and perhaps some business decisions made along the way.

We have a small team of 3, John Moorhead, Jake Stutzman, and myself Robert Evans. Each of us will talk about different aspects of the development process and our thoughts behind why certain decisions were made to give some insight into what Travel and Gather is and will become. We also have a Travel Blog, which we call a TAGaologue that you might also find interesting.

Over to the right, we have a beta sign up where you’ll not only be notified of when we release our beta and be able to part of the beta test, but you’ll also get more of an insiders view on what we are up. These things won’t be made public here or anywhere else, just to those who have signed up, so go sign up now!

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