casperfabricius.com

I have darebusters.com running on Heroku and I have a worker running Delayed Job (DJ) activated. This allows me to handle heavy tasks such as video processing and payment transactions asynchronously, so the dynos can get right back to serving requests.

I also use DJ to send out emails, and a typical asynchronous call sending a message from one user to another – scheduling a delayed job – used to look like this:

UserMailer.send_later(
  :deliver_message,
   @recipient,
  current_user,
  params[:message]
)

Since darebusters.com is an internationalized website currently offering users the choice between English and German, this has proved a slight challenge, however. We have the usual internationalization (i18n) bells and whistles: Flags to select the language, and remembering the user’s language selection in session, cookie and in the users database table. By default, a delayed job will simply run with the default locale of the site. It has no way of accessing the context it was invoked in, so it cannot set the locale from session or cookie. The job only knows what it can work it from the arguments it was created with.

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Rails, say hello to .NET.

IronRuby went 1.0 at April 12th, and it runs Ruby on Rails for real. I demonstrated it myself to a packed room of (mostly) .NET developers at Community Day. There was a lot of buzz around IronRuby more than two years ago – back then, the hype around Ruby on Rails was at its peak and the .NET developers wanted in. It took a lot longer for IronRuby to go gold than many of us had hoped, and meanwhile ASP.NET MVC made its entry. Many ASP.NET developers were aware that the “webform” abstraction with its events, viewstate etc. is leaky and broken, and when Microsoft finally presented this “official” alternative to webforms they rallied to it and rejoiced, for now they had their own Rails-clone, but with a proper programming language and thorough IDE-support.

My presentation compared ASP.NET MVC to Ruby on Rails. The conclusion is ambiguous. I thought I’d be able to crush ASP.NET MVC with the pure greatness of Ruby and Rails, making it obvious to everyone which was the better framework and language. While Rails do support a lot things that ASP.NET MVC is nowhere near of having, the latter does – at least with the recently released version 2 – have the central elements of a proper MVC framework in place. What’s more surprising is that C# 4.0 is so much less clunky than C# 1.0, so in some comparisons of syntax Ruby is not even the obvious winner when it comes to readability. Take this example:

Before LINQ, C# would have never been able to map a collection in a such an elegant manner. In my biased opinion, I still find the Ruby version prettier and more readable, but the fact is that C# is not that far behind. It’s another syntax paradigm for sure, but it’s compact and it’s readable – that’s not bad at all.

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I usually write very long blog posts. Not this time! This is just a small tip, the first of hopefully many learnings I’ll make as I am working with my first project in Rails 3.

Bundler (Github | Website) is the new way to manage gem dependencies in Rails and other Ruby applications. If you haven’t heard about it, there is (of course) a great introduction at Railcasts. It’s pretty easy and straight-forward to use, especially if you are used to the config.gem format of Rails.

However, one very common use case in Bundler’s Gemfile that is not explicitly documented anywhere I’ve seen, is how to configure gems to be installed in both development and test environments, but not in staging and production environments. You have probably seen the examples of how you can assign a gem to a specific environment using the :group option or method. So you’d probably write something like this:

group :test do
  gem "rspec-rails", ">= 2.0.0.beta.1"
end

group :development do
  gem "ruby-debug"
end

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