RSS FeedSpeakers for the main sessions of RailsConf 2008 are available now. A number of Columbus/Cincinnati Rubyists are showing: Jim Weirich, Joe O’Brien, Aaron Bedra, Dan Manges. I wish I could go. Oh well, maybe next year
On another note, Blip TV has a number of the keynotes from RailsConf 2007 online.
With Rails 2.0 out now, it’s time to explore the new source. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been 2 years since I first checked out Rails 1.0 for the first time.
To update your Rails code, you can run
gem update rails
However, when I tried to run this command I was unfortunately greeted with a nasty error, when getting to update ActiveRecord.
Attempting remote update of activerecord
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Zlib::BufError)
buffer error
According to a Ruby Form post, I found a solution to the problem, updating ruby gems.
While you could run this line to update RubyGems to 0.9.5, I don’t recommend it.
gem update --system
Instead download rubygems-0.9.4, unzip it and then run
ruby setup.rb
This will allow you to continue to use Mongrel, because there are some incompatibilities with Mongrel running on Win32 with RubyGems 0.9.5. See the following:
and then update rails as you would expect.
gem update rails
Voila!
After many months of hard labor, I am emerging victorious with my first large-scale web application called Rankaroo. Rankaroo helps you organize your interests, share them with others, and connect with like-minded people. Everyone is a guru at something. Whether it’s that you know about ski lodges in the Alps or Greek Mythology or Hip Hop, whatever it is you have something to keep organized and share with the world. As we each share our interests we all benefit from mutual discovery.
In the traditional browser way of storing your favorites, you would put your favorites in a hierarchical set of folders and hope that you can remember where you put them later. A few years ago, some sites like del.icio.us introduced the idea of eliminating the hierarchy and using tags instead (basically words). But while this makes it easier to find things later, it’s relatively difficult to find a cross section of these tags, plus you basically throw out your normal grammar in favor of an alphabet soup of words.
Rankaroo is based strongly on the Connect-by-Clicks technology. Connect-by-Clicks is a system that turns simple language into connective tissue. It works as following.
You want to categorize the following web site. http://espn.go.com
Just type a simple phrase. For instance. espn sports news and scores
What Connect-by-Clicks does is creates interconnections between these words. So, later you could find this favorite by going to sports -> scores or espn -> news or espn -> sports -> scores.
While this is cool in itself, it’s not nearly as cool as when hundred of people are all doing the same. If my friend, Joe, enters a favorite on his basketball team and categorizes it by the phrase knicks basketball team scores, if I was searching for scores, I would find out about his basketball team.
You’ll have to experience the power of Connect-by-Clicks yourself to see what I mean.
It’s been eight months since I met Ruby for the first time. I feel like I’m spoiled as a programmer now. But, honestly, sometimes I just take it for granted. I thought I’d take a mental trip back in time to the days when I was a PHP programmer and recall what I was amazed by.
December 2005
setting: sitting in front of a warm fireplace in Columbus, Ohio
“This book is so cool,” referring to Agile Web Development with Rails. “It’s so amazing that these high level operations are really all you have to think about. It’s like I can actually think conceptually and write code at the same time. These scaffold generators are cool, but I don’t really understand how they work. And what’s this iterator thing all about.”
March 2006
setting: sitting on a warm balcony in Orlando, Florida
“This book is so cool,” referring to Agile Web Development with Rails. “I wish I finally understood how all of this testing stuff works. Those Ruby on Rails podcasts are intense. Those people on that program are intense. What’s all this about meta-programming? Oh, well, one of these days. But until then, at least I’ve got an enterprise app under my belt. This would have taken me three times as long in PHP.”
July 2006
setting: sitting on a warm porch in Lewis Center, Ohio
“This book is so cool,”
referring to Agile Web Development with Rails. “These Ajax Scaffold Generators are so cool. I just built a time-tracker for my new company in a day. It’s nice that Rails has built in support for Ajax. I remember wondering in PHP how the heck would I do that all too often. I’ve got to finally read Rails Recipes. I just hate reading pdfs. But now I’ve finally got it in a book.
October 2006
setting: sitting in my warm office in Lewis Center, Ohio
“This book is so cool,”
referring to Agile Web Development with Rails. “I can’t wait for the second edition to come out on paper. I should really read that testing chapter again. I wish test fixtures weren’t so brittle. One of these days I’ll understand it better….”
Okay, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything. The last month has been pretty darn busy. The Wagaman Clan migrated from Orlando, FL to Lewis Center, OH (in the Columbus, OH area). We bought a house and I have started as a full-time freelance web developer. Currently I am working on a Ruby on Rails project full time until at least half-way through September. I just started on another short term contract today as well.
Thus far things have been going pretty well in the freelance arena. I’ve been used to working in the “enterprise” arena, so it’s a little change of pace, but I like it. To maintain my work records I am over half-way through developing a TimeTracker application in Ruby on Rails. It keeps records for my work sessions, contracts, invoices, customers, and more. It’s really cool developing custom software that you can use as well. It’s teaching me a lot about Agile Web Development.
Well, that’s about all for tonight. Tune in again, sometime…
Very few programming books have been revolutionary to me (OK, maybe it’s just this one. The authors of this book make it easy to understand the way rails works so well as an agile web development framework. Granted, after reading a few pages I had to go buy the Pickaxe book because I was a ruby virgin, but that’s all for the better. This is the kind of book that I would read all over again, just to pick up more.
I can’t wait to read the upcoming version 2 (on Rails 1.1)
Richard White has been working an AJAX based scaffold for Ruby on Rails. He recently released Version 2.2.0. He recently released Version 3.1.2 (oops :)).
Scaffolding is Rails way of simplifying CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) of your model. Although, scaffolding won’t help you create model associations (you have to actually write ruby code for that), it gives you a quick jump start to get you up and running.
Check out the demo at ajaxscaffold.com to see AJAXCRUD.
Rails, the web application framework we all love so much, is now on to version 1.1.
So, What’s new in Rails 1.1? Scott Raymond wrote an incredible article outlining the new features/changes.
Also, the up-and-coming Rails Recipes (well, actually it’s already released as a beta book on pdf) has a number of recipes that use Rails 1.1. I would say that I’ve read this entire book, but that means beta version 1. Since then Chad Fowler has released a ton of new chapters.
This is a must-buy for the newby railer, which is half of the rails audience. You can order the beta book from the Pragamtic Programmers. I need to buy stock in their company, because I like their books so much.
