Topic: Ruby / free RoR book download: build your own RoR app

Andrew,

You may also visit Satish’s rubylearning.com for free online course on ruby. He also points you to other learning materials that will surely help any newbie rubyist.

Best.
alain

Topic: Ruby / Keeping up with the best Ruby blogs

Hello!

I have been spending quite some time now searching the ruby universe and I’d like to share these new ones I just found out;
http://rubyflow.com and http://whatsupinruby.com

Best.
alain

Topic: Ruby / Ruby class methods

I was experimenting with Ruby class methods this morning, and wound up with a fairly lengthy demonstration script. What do you think? Did I miss anything or get anything wrong? Anything you don’t understand?

http://blog.westarete.com/2008/02/15/exploring-...

Topic: Ruby / Rails' Architecture

At this meetup, Scott and I started talking about really understanding Rails’ architecture, from a conceptual point of view. After a bit of searching, I came up with this blog post on Rails’ architecture: http://cfis.savagexi.com/articles/2007/09/05/ra…. Unfortunately, this post talks a lot about design patterns, etc. that don’t make a lot of sense to me. Does anyone have a more… primitive explanation of what all this means?

Topic: Ruby / Heroku.com

I would like an invite. I registered, but it is taking a while.

Topic: Ruby / Idea for a RoR plugin

The RoR plugin that would let you write your css files in ruby (erb, ie style.css.erb) which would compile to css. That way, you could write perfectly standard css code, and it would output several css files that are quirks compliant.You could make several stylesheets like layout.css.erb and tabs.css.erb and so on… and once you’ve out your app in production, it would flatten all of them into one file, and minify it.

Topic: Ruby / Another blog, and a great tutorial on REST concepts

An idea just struck me: I think with all the RESTfulness, rails might be evolving from an MVC to an RV (resource-view) framework. What do you think?

Topic: Ruby / Keeping up with the best Ruby blogs

Recently, a subreddit was created specifically for ruby: http://ruby.reddit.com . It should be a good source of information.

Topic: Ruby / Another blog, and a great tutorial on REST concepts

In trying to wrap my head around rest concepts, I came up with the following table that sort everything nicely (for me, anyway):

http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgn2nsft_27c2…

Does this make sense? Is there a better way to describe and categorize these things? Disclaimer: I plan on buying the O’Reilly RESTful Web Services book; maybe there’s a much better way to think about REST in the book.

Topic: Ruby / Heroku.com

That. Is. Awesome.

This is scary. Just the other day I was thinking to myself “Wouldn’t it be great if someone would think up a way to a CMS like ruby on rails application, where you create, develop and edit your application online instead of on your own desktop. And here it is. Wow.

Topic: Meta / Topics for Wed, Dec 13

Rails 2.0, specifically ActiveResource, and Restful improvements

Topic: Meta / Topics for Wed, Dec 13

Does anyone have anything that they’d like to present at tomorrow’s meetup?

• New features in Rails 2.0 (which was just released)
• An Introduction to Testing with RSpec

Thoughts? Preferences?

Topic: The Lounge / Plotting in jQuery

Wow, that looks great! Thanks for posting this Andrew. I’ve been looking for a graphing method that’s lighter weight than Gruff Graphs, but isn’t flash based. These even work great on the iPhone (no flash support there). Plus, I presume that you could easily use JSON to grab the data for dynamic graphs from the server (which can serve it as easily as something like this):

respond_to do |format|
  format.html
  format.json { render @data.to_json }
end

Topic: The Lounge / Plotting in jQuery

I know there’s been a bit of interest in jQuery, so I thought I’d mention this plugin to jQuery that lets you plot data: http://ajaxian.com/archives/plotting-in-jquery

Topic: Ruby / Using Microsoft Access MDB files from Ruby

Here’s a small Ruby script that I used to open and modify a Microsoft Access database file:

http://pastie.caboo.se/123692

I wrote it to hack around a limitation with Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 where it can’t move your entire photo library to a different location properly. I found out that they use the Microsoft Access database file format, and decided to use Ruby to modify all the paths in the database to point to the new location (I opened the file in Access first to figure out the structure and table and field names).

The script doesn’t use any non-standard gems. However, it does need to run on Windows, since it relies on Microsoft’s Jet engine library (the engine that drives access to MDB files) via the “win32ole” gem that comes with Windows Ruby distributions.

For reference, I did get it working with ActiveRecord via a whole other set of gems, but it’s not really worth the effort for a small project like this since one of the gems is problematic to build on Windows. Instead, I’m posting this simple version here. No ActiveRecord elegance, but no time spent on setup either.

I’m posting it here in case anyone finds it useful. I think it’s also a nice demonstration of Ruby’s versatility.

Topic: Ruby / Heroku.com

I just got an invitation to heroku (an instant rails hosting/online editing app). I was thinking we could try using it during ruby meetings, since anything you create/change is instantly live. Let me know if anyone needs an invite (invitees skip the waiting list).

Topic: Ruby / Good RoR plugins

Regarding jq4r,there’s another one called jRails

Topic: Ruby / Links for SQL Tree Extensions, Mercurial VCS

Cool, thanks for the links, Russ.

For everyone who wasn’t at the meetup last night, Russ recommended Mercurial as one of the better version control systems (VCS) for people who haven’t used a VCS before. Easy to use and understand, and doesn’t require a server at first—you can just download and start using it.

We got on the tree vs. nested set vs. “connect by” topic when Tony was talking about using nested sets vs. conventional trees in your database. Conventional trees (using a parent_id column that points back into the same table) are the obvious method for representing a hierarchy in a database, but the SQL language doesn’t provide any elegant way to traverse such a structure or select cohesive subsets of the tree. Nested sets are a functionally equivalent way of representing the data, and while they’re not as obvious or easy for humans to grasp, they match SQL’s capabilities well and allow for the types of queries that you’d commonly like to do on trees. Here’s Tony’s follow up in another thread which includes a link to a comparison of the two techniques.

Russ brought up the fact the Oracle (and PostgreSQL with a recompile) have an extension to the SQL language that provides the best of both worlds; you can structure your trees the “obvious” conventional way, and the language extension provides an easy and efficient way to then work with the trees.

Topic: Meta / Topics for Wed, Nov. 14

Tony,

Thanks for putting together a great talk! I really enjoyed hearing about your plugin Caramel and its development process. I’ll make a separate post shortly about how to make the plugin publicly available.

I think we’re all going to wind up checking out ActiveScaffold too. That seems like something that just about every Rails developer will have a use for at some point.

The timing worked out totally fine. I’m glad to have other people who are interested in presenting too, and it felt like your talk took up the appropriate amount of space. There are plenty of other opportunities for me to talk about RSpec. Besides, this gives me a chance to do a little more prep on it anyway.

Topic: Meta / Topics for Wed, Nov. 14

Hey Scott,

So sorry for hogging all the time tonite! I didn’t check back here before the meetup and I had no idea you had planned to do something on RSpec! I would have loved to hear what you have to say about it and I feel everyone definitely missed out! Bummer…

Anyway, please don’t hesitate to kick me in the shins next time you see me.

Here’s the article (with a much better explanation than I originally provided) on Nested Sets versus traditional “tree” -based table structures:

http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/hi…

Topic: Ruby / Links for SQL Tree Extensions, Mercurial VCS

Here’s a nice page that explains the Oracle “CONNECT BY” SQL extension, which lets you work with trees easily and efficiently:

http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/trees.html

Postgres has a connectby() function which does something similar, but unfortunately it isn’t built by default (it’s in the contrib/ folder in the Postgres sources).

Here are some links for the Mercurial version control system:

Homepage           http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/
Book               http://hgbook.red-bean.com/
Windows GUI        http://tortoisehg.sourceforge.net/
Subversion client  http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/hgsvn/

The first couple of chapters of the Mercurial book are an excellent read if you have time to go through them. There are also shorter tutorials on the Mercurial home page.

Part of what I said about the Mercurial Subversion client turned out not to be true. It can only “pull” changes from a remote Subversion repository, not “push” them back. To get changes back to the Subversion repository, you currently have to check them in with the normal svn client.

- Russ

Topic: Meta / Topics for Wed, Nov. 14

Hey Andrew, sorry you can’t make it. I’ll try to post some material online so that everyone who couldn’t make it can at least check it out.

Topic: Ruby / Good RoR plugins

Just read about the make_resourceful plugin; seems like it would be really useful for RESTful development. One gotcha is that it requires haml.

Topic: Meta / Topics for Wed, Nov. 14

Hey guys,

Something just came up, and it looks like I can’t make it.

Topic: Meta / Topics for Wed, Nov. 14

So Tony has volunteered to take the first 45-minute slot, talking about ActiveScaffold and Caramel.

We have a second 45-minute slot open. Any volunteers?

If no one else volunteers, I’d be happy to do a talk about testing, focusing on RSpec in particular.

Why write tests for your Ruby applications? Because you’ll be able to build larger, more complex programs than you could otherwise, and you’ll spend more time writing code and less time debugging.

Why use RSpec for testing? Because it’s arguably easier to understand and use on a daily basis than the default Test::Unit that comes with Ruby and Rails.

• An overview of what testing is, what it looks like, and what you should test
• step-by-step instructions for setting up RSpec on your rails project
• resources and references for using RSpec
• integration with your editor or IDE