Mar 25 2008
ActiveResource incomplete
Fábio Akita
Last week I presented ActiveResource’s capabilities to some friends. In summary, it’s a great library, but not perfect just yet, and should improve in the next versions. On the other hand, the majority of ‘REST’ APIs available – as they say – are not actually RESTful. Flickr and YouTube come to mind. Check out this link to learn on how to talk to Twitter. This other link to learn how to extend ActiveResource for non-REST APIs and this link to understand how to consume YouTube feeds. But besides that I found out a small surprise: ActiveResou…...
Feb 12 2008
FreeImage on Leopard. Problems Installing 3.10.0
Fábio Akita
If anyone is trying to install the ImageScience gem (sudo gem install image_science) for your Rails projects, and used MacPorts, you might be having strange problems. The usual command: sudo port install freeimage Will fail miserably. That’s because the newest FreeImage port, version 3.10.0, is broken. If you check it out at /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles/freeimage/FreeImage3100.zip, the checksums are invalid as the port command states. I tried to download directly from sourceforge.net. But this zip is corrupted. Can’t unzip it manually…....
Dec 28 2007
A RSpec matcher for ActiveRecord validation
Rodrigo Kochenburger
One thing that i don’t like about ActiveRecord is the way that it deals with validation messages. I don’t like the fact that it actually push a complete message into the errors stack. Just to explain it a little better let me illustrate the situation with some code. The current behavior is the following: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 class User < ActiveRecord::Base validates_presence_of :username end @user = User.new @user.valid? # => false @user.errors.on(:username) # => ["can’t be blank"] I really think it would be better to store the …...
Dec 27 2007
Why Ruby on Rails?
Fábio Akita
For the last 3 years a lot of people have been asking “Why should one use Ruby on Rails when my framework X is clearly superior?” or something like this. That’s a good question, raises a lot of good points but the way those discussions end are a real shame for the whole community to say the very least. I can’t praise myself too much either because I was part of some flame wars as well and I don’t like what I said in some occasions as well. Yes, I acted like a troll myself and for that I apologize. ...
Dec 21 2007
A good REST presentation by RailsEnvy
Rodrigo Kochenburger
I just watched a really great presentation by Greg Pollack from RailsEnvy about REST, RESTful and why it is a good architecture for both webservices and applications. It doesn’t matter if you’re new to Rails or REST, or if you are already a expert, you should watch it. Direct link to movie …
Dec 15 2007
Tests, behavior and verification
Rodrigo Kochenburger
Test vs. Behavior Test-Driven-Development (TDD) is an approach to software development where developers write tests before actually write code. There are many good reasons for doing that but certainly there are a few more important: Writing tests first allows the developer to focus only on the code that he needs to write to accomplish the involved task/feature, reducing the amount of unnecessary code. Tests are also a documentation of the application. It contains verifications of how the application should behave in specific cases, and sinc…...
Dec 10 2007
The First Rails 2.0 Screencast
Fábio Akita
Page down for brazilian portuguese article Disclaimer: This video is hosted at Veoh and can be re-linked to any website without modifying either the video or audio. I am uploading it to Google Video and Vimeo (recommended). Update 12/12: For those of you that think I was too fast in the video, I just posted a Tutorial with most of the content you can see in the screencast plus a few bonuses. I’ve split it into Part 1 and Part 2. Enjoy! The First Screencast Rails 2.0 was released officially last friday and it was a coincidence because I woul…...
Sep 19 2007
Economics ensures continuity of Moore’s Law
Carl Youngblood
There is an interesting discussion on Slashdot about Moore’s Law. The gist of it is that even though Moore’s predictions were originally based on a specific technology with physical limitations, companies have become so dependent on the revenues that come from the sale of faster systems and other add-ons that are based on these faster systems that they have a strong economic incentive to do the research and development necessary to maintain Moore’s Law, even if the underlying technology on which it is based changes. ...
Sep 06 2007
Personal finance meets web 2.0
Carl Youngblood
This really seems to be the year of personal finance apps. Wesabe was the first out of the gates but it looks like it will shortly gain additional competition from a number of interesting startups, including Mint, Jwaala and Geezeo—admittedly weird product names (except Mint, which I like for its elegance and simplicity), but potentially breakthrough applications. Back in 2000 I was working on a personal PHP application that connected to my online bank accounts and automatically categorized my transactions, alerting me of any potential bud…...
Aug 23 2007
Hoedown rough cuts finished—next stop, RubyConf!
Carl Youngblood
I’m really excited to announce that Confreaks will be recording RubyConf this year. We also have a number of enhancements we are planning for our work on the Hoedown, including searchable transcripts of every presentation. ...
Aug 14 2007
Confreaks records Ruby Hoedown
Carl Youngblood
Coby Randquist and I, as part of our Confreaks side business, went to the Ruby Hoedown in Raleigh, NC. We were contracted to record the entire conference and place the content online. The first video has been posted and can be found here. It was quite an adventure, and we hope to do a lot more of this in the coming months. ...
Jul 28 2007
Interview with Fabio Akita
Carl Youngblood
I recently spent a few enjoyable hours chatting with Fabio Akita about my involvement in the Ruby community and my thoughts about software development. Fabio is one of the developers I manage as part of my job at Surgeworks. He is a very skilled programmer and a great guy to work with. ...
Jun 05 2007
MWRC Videos Now Available
Carl Youngblood
It has been a long haul, but we finally finished our post-production work on the 2007 MountainWest Ruby Conference. During this process we developed a lot of scripts to make our future work easier and also learned which processes could benefit the most from better equipment. Hopefully we’ll be able to use these skills in the future. Chad Fowler would like us to record this year’s RubyConf and is seeking corporate sponsorship to help defray the costs. If your company is interested in supporting this effort, please contact me or Chad. Confrea…...
May 24 2007
Making migrations easier
Carl Youngblood
One of my most common problems when developing migrations for a rails project happens when I make a mistake in my migration code that causes the migration to fail to complete successfully. When this happens, it is often the case that some of the commands in your migration executed successfully. This means that when you fix your bug and try to run the migration again, it will fail because it will attempt to run the previously successful commands but will complain that the changes they refer to are already there. There are some workarounds fo…...