Category Archives: rails

My first week with Sublime Text 2

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One dark evening in January around 30 geeks gathered at Podio for the monthly meetup in the Copenhagen Ruby Brigade. The only topic on the agenda was a grand showdown between code editors, but with such different editors as Emacs, Vim, Textmate 2, Chocolat, Sublime Text 2 and RubyMine in play, it was more than enough to cover an entire evening.

At the time I thought Chocolat might be the next big thing, but after only two rather frustrating days I went back to Textmate. I still had to present Chocolat at the meetup, but wasn’t able to say many nice things about it. I also showed off a few features in the Textmate 2 alpha such as multiple carets (uuh), but as Jesper Christiansen was quick to show us, Sublime Text 2 could easily match these. During the meetup I started to realize that Sublime Text seemed to be everything many of us had hoped for in Textmate 2, but in software that was available today in a polished, fully functional version, not a just a rather buggy alpha preview.

So I decided to dedicate last week to Sublime Text 2. I installed it Monday and purchased it Friday without looking back. And I’m still using it today. As a heavy user of Textmate for the past 6-7 years I felt right at home. ⌘+T brings up a file switcher that is slightly more clever and drastically faster than PeepOpen, and with that working I could start writing code straight away without feeling less productive than in Textmate. Speaking of the file switcher, I also really like that it instantly shows the file you highlight as a preview without actually opening it in a tab. This makes it easy to quickly browse around for the right file without opening a horde (a circus?) of tabs.

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Launch: bog.nu

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A few days ago a new Danish community for book lovers and consumers seeking the best book prices was launched: bog.nu (which translates to “book.now”.) The website has (of course) been implemented in Ruby on Rails during the last couple of months by Jesper Hvirring and yours truly for the Danish publisher Forlagsgruppen Bindslev.

On one level it can be used simply to compare the prices of one or more books at the leading Danish internet bookstores. The site allows the user to put several books on her virtual bookshelf, and then make a price search showing where she can get all the books cheapest in total, including shipping and handling.

On another level bog.nu collects all the latest reviews of new Danish books, and calculates a “meta score” from 0-100 based on all reviews. This allows users to rank their searches not just by typical parameters, but by how well they have been reviewed. This makes it easy to find, say, the best Danish comics.

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Learnings from Rails Rumble

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Jakob Skjerning, Laust Rud and I has just finished the 48 hour coding marathon that is Rails Rumble. In just two days we have build a web based space trading game from scratch in Ruby on Rails called SpaceShippers. It’s online, it’s working and some even think it’s rather fun. Jakob live-blogged about it.

So why did three guys choose to spend their weekend hacking away at space game? Not because we expect fame, riches and the 1st prize in Rails Rumble, that’s for sure. Before the weekend, none of us had even checked what the competition prizes was. Not because it’s our only chance to code Ruby on Rails – all three of us do that in our professional working life every day. But all three of us are consultants, and we mostly code what other people want us to, not what we want to. And let’s be honest, inside every highly professional business programmer there’s a little game developer trying to get out. Computer games are great fun, and they don’t need fully fledged 3D environments to be good – although it often helps. We considered many other ideas, but I think we ended up during a game because we knew it would be motivating to build something to be entertaining, rather than just another tool or mash-up site.

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AJAX sign in and sign up with Devise

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I would never recommend a client to have login and registration in “pop-up” dialogs instead of plain pages, but sometimes clients choose to kindly ignore my well meant advise and ask me implement such things anyway. I’ve just finished version 1 of an upcoming web application implemented with Rails 3 and – of course – Devise for authentication, and this app just happens to have sign in and sign up taking place in dialogs (or overlays) and submitted to the server via AJAX. I expected this use of Devise to be pretty common use case, but the implementation turned out be pretty tricky.

Devise is a pretty amazing authentication system. It’s modular, flexible, highly configurable and lots of extensions have already been built. It does, however, make the assumption that you want to redirect the user to a new page after he has been authenticated. When sign in takes place in a dialog that is submitted via AJAX, a redirect to the frontpage or somewhere else is not of much use. In this case we need to respond with a javascript snippet that either makes a client-side redirect, or – better yet – simply closes the sign in dialog and updates any elements on the page that depends on sign in status.

For this particular web application, the scenario was even more complicated. When an unauthenticated user wanted to comment on something, the sign in box would have to pop up in a dialog. If the user wasn’t registered with the site, he could click a link to get the sign up shown – still in the same dialog. Whether the user registered or just signed in, the dialog should finally display the form for writing a new comment. All this would have to take place through AJAX without the actual page location ever changing, and here is how I implemented it.

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Google Apps OpenID with Rails and Devise

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Key points

The story

I’ve been working on a client project consolidating most of their various internal databases, spreadsheets and ad-hoc lists into a coherent and centralized web application – employee lists, inventory and so on. Early on the client said to me: “Since we are using Google Apps for email, calendar, document sharing and pretty anything else it can do, it would be really nice if we could simply login to the application you are building using our Google Apps logins.” I said: “Sure, how hard can it be?” It was a fair request that made a lot of sense. After all, everybody hates another login to remember, so wouldn’t it be nice if the employees was simply – “as by magic” – instantly signed in to this new application?

I knew a lot of people was doing sign in with ordinary Google accounts. I had also implemented it myself for darebusters, although the easy way using the very nice RPX solution from JanRain. I could see that I could integrate with Google Apps using both OpenID and OAuth. I had some vague ideas about OAuth being “newer” and “cooler” than OpenID, and also I was using Warden and Devise for authentication, for which a nice OAuth extension existed, so I set out to authenticate against Google Apps with OAuth.

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Delayed Job with i18n

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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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Bundler and Rails 3 environments

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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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Community Day ’10 is coming up

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I did a well-received talk on ActiveRecord at last year’s Community Day. Community Day ’09 was the first of its kind in Copenhagen, and it was quite successful in bringing developers with different technical backgrounds together as well as attracting students – probably because of the free beer :)

Community Day in Copenhagen is back again this year, so reserve May 27 if you are near Copenhagen and like free tech-talks, networking and beer. This year Daniel Frost, the Microsoft evangelist that makes it happen, has involved me and several other developers actively in the planning of the day. With CD ’10 we have raised the level of ambition – bigger venue, more people, more talks and if course more fun.

We will have 20 sessions distributed on four concurrent tracks covering a surprisingly wide number of topics – very few of the talks are on Microsoft-technologies, in fact so few that we might loose a few of those .NET consultants who thinks anything non-MS are not worth listening to ;) Still, if you are doing anything at all related to the web (and most of us are, right?) you will surely find topics such as HTML 5, Single Sign On, Azure, Advanced jQuery etc. interesting.

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Multiple Ruby versions with RVM

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Rails 3 is just around the corner. It is optimized for the better performance and superior features of Ruby 1.9, but it also plays nicely with version 1.8.7. Ruby 1.8.6, on the other hand, cannot run Rails 3. This might not be a problem for you at all. If you are on a Mac, you were probably faced with Ruby 1.8.7 last year at the latest, when the upgrade to Snow Leopard changed the built-in Ruby version from 1.8.6 to 1.8.7. Most applications built for 1.8.6 runs fine on 1.8.7 – but many servers and deployment environments still runs only 1.8.6.

For me, the situation is like this: My standard version of Ruby on my development machine is 1.8.7. I deploy to many different environments, some (the ones I have a degree of control over) runs 1.8.7 and others (such as Heroku and some customer’s servers) runs 1.8.6. I can test and code away happily only to get some ugly exceptions when I deploy because I have called count on an array instead of length. Further, I also want to play with the new features of Ruby 1.9 and run Rails 3 on it. And that’s not to mention that I also use alternative Ruby implementations such as JRuby for projects where I need to tap into Java libraries.

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