Tag ‘Rails’

How long will it take to understand Rails 3 in and out?

Brad Midgley

According to David Heinemeier Hansson, you will never understand it all. Case in point? David himself.

That was the gist of his answer to how a new change to the way rails 3 renders actions in the browser would be handled for older browsers.

DHH gets involved in the parts he cares about and doesn’t worry about the exact details that have been delegated to someone else. He says we should not worry about knowing the whole framework because he doesn’t either.

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We’re hiring! Ruby on Rails/Rhodes developer

Mauro Dalu

job-opening-hire-rails-rhodes-developerOffshore software developer position using Ruby on Rails and web technologies to build web applications for desktop browsers and targeting mobile devices. Also using Rhomobile to make native mobile applications.

Candidate should be a remote worker, must use an Intel Mac running OSX 10.5 or 10.6, should have strong communications skills, good written and spoken English. Availability on IM or Skype required during work hours.

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Linux kiosk

Brad Midgley

I recently did some maintenance on a linux-based kiosk project. It runs linux and has a rails application serving content. Firefox is running in a kiosk mode and there is no keyboard or mouse present.

In adding a touchscreen from a different vendor, I found some details that can help make a kiosk application more responsive to touchscreen taps.

If you use linux in a touchscreen implementation, I recommend staying away from linux drivers offered by the vendor if possible. These were

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Using cucumber and webrat for remote web testing

Cucumber and webrat serve as a powerful combination of tools for testing your web applications, but in its most common mode webrat can only test your application locally. Is it possible, you may ask, to use webrat to test a remote web site? The answer is yes, with a little tweaking. Webrat has a configuration option that tells it to use mechanize (a screen-scraping tool for ruby) instead of the built-in rails view testing system.

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RadiantCMS customized

Brad Midgley

Kolob Canyon greenery

We are working on a very interesting project right now that allows us to adapt RadiantCMS to serve several different functions in a big picture system.

Radiant is a powerful content management system that has very good design for factoring out redundancy in your web content. Think of the Don’t-Repeat-Yourself principle applied to the web content, where we unfortunately put up with duplication far too often.

I was impressed with

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best railsconf title

Brad Midgley

The best title had to be When to Tell Your Kids About Client Caching. Parents might identify more with this. Interesting stuff in any case.

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Ruby performance work

Brad Midgley

Railsconf had several performance-related talks. This one went over a lot of interesting territory.

  • Who knew the Date class performed so badly?? Use equivalent ops in Time or get date::performance
  • Use String::<< instead of String::+=
  • Tune your custom sql with virtual attributes

It’s surprising that things we might not think are performance issues are problematic in ruby. One reason to optimize after you gather metrics that identify problem areas.

rowing

(Image courtesy of rowingbike.com)

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RubyMine

Brad Midgley

During his talk at railsconf, Gregg Pollack showed off Jetbrains Rubymine, an awesome IDE for ruby & rails. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Jetbrains had a spike in their downloads coinciding with the talk. It is a nice IDE. I was happy to see it includes git support out of the box (I only had to set the path to the git executable).  I like the web preview for rails applications. On the downside,

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