The
Palm
Civet

since discovering sinatra, the ruby DSL that feels like rails’ elegant little brother, i’ve been trying to find a use for it in my typical projects. hence, padrino has me really excited. it seems to have almost all the features i could think of needing =>

* agnostic support for orm’s (for me, activerecord or mongomapper)
* support for less, sass, haml, and erb
* typical necessities: html and form tag helpers, mailers, logging, routing
and the kicker:
* a built-in admin generator based on your model’s attributes

padrino definitely has some exciting potential for wicked fast application development.

personal rails development rule #342: don’t check your email while coding.

mailtrap is a super simple mock SMTP server for rails development. it also comes with a mock pop3 server if you want to use it with a GUI like apple mail, but i prefer to just tail the log file in a terminal window. getting up and running with mailtrap is super easy: =>

# install the gem
gem install mailtrap
# start mailtrap
mailtrap start
# tail the log
tail -f /var/tmp/mailtrap.log

want your emacs’ rinari rails minor mode to use your rvm’s default ruby version? (answer: probably). it’s as easy as slapping this lisp in your emacs set-up.

i’m pleased to announce the launch of hifiving.com, a web application for making lists of things. those things can be videos, audio, links, images, or just plain words. it has been my pet project for quite some time, so i’m glad to get it up and running. please try it out and help spread the word!

in terms of development, the back-end is made with ruby on rails and a handful of other rubygems. i also did the design and front-end development. sprockets and less were heroes here. this is also my first experience using heroku for hosting, which has been great so far.

RIP facebook connect and good riddance - trying to integrate facebook access to a web application used to be embarrassingly inelegant when compared to something like twitter and the oauth protocol. luckily facebook’s new graph api is fantastically simpler and the oauth2 rubygem makes account access and permission granting a cinch. need proof? check out the sinatra and rails examples.

if you are a tumblr user and are partial to writing & coding in monospaced font, check out this easy-to-use rubygem for plain-text blogging and command-line publishing. this post was my first trying it out.

“coffeescript is a little language that compiles into javascript. think of it as javascript’s less ostentatious kid brother — the same genes, roughly the same height, but a different sense of style.”

in my flirtation with learning a server-side javascript framework like node.js, the syntactical heaviness of javascript has been a big deterrent. i’m usually not a fan of writing something that gets run through a compiler (like haml), but in the case of javascript, i might just be willing to try it out. a few quick examples =>

# Assignment:
number: 42
opposite_day: true
# Conditions:
number: -42 if opposite_day
# Functions:
square: (x) -> x * x

turn into =>

var number, opposite_day, square;
// Assignment:
number = 42;
opposite_day = true;
// Conditions:
if (opposite_day) {
  number = -42;
}
// Functions:
square = function square(x) {
  return x * x;
};

like a responsible kid brother, coffeescript does not interfere with javascript frameworks and will pass through jslint duty-free.

i’ve been very persuaded by john nunemaker’s passionate writing that mongo db might be the next new thing i have to try. sure, sql databases are the norm, but mongo’s document-based database format rings truer to me the more of a rubyist i become.

gridfs is mongo’s way of storing file uploads within the database and with the release of its new ruby driver, using grid FS is faster and easier. check the simplicity in this example code =>

db = Mongo::Connection.new.db('testing')
grid = Mongo::Grid.new(db)

# returns object id
id = grid.put(File.read('mr_t.jpg'), 'mr_t.jpg')

# get the file using object id
file = grid.get(id)

# read the file from grid fs
puts file.read

# delete the file
grid.delete(id)

the active development of john’s mongomapper gem for rails models and grip plugin for gridfs should definitely be on anyone’s radar who is exploring nosql options.

more rails development means more time in the script/console and irb, but it can quickly become a headache with doing ugly things like returning activerecord objects. for that, hirb’s table view is a lifesaver. check out this example output =>

irb>> Tag.last
+-----+-------------------------+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+
| id  | created_at              | name          | namespace | predicate | value |
+-----+-------------------------+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+
| 907 | 2009-03-06 21:10:41 UTC | gem:tags=yaml | gem       | tags      | yaml  |
+-----+-------------------------+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+
  1 row in set
  =>true

if you want to get more snazzy, you can define your own views for a more custom output. git it at hirb’s github page.

to enable hirb by default in any local rails application, add this to your ~/.irbrc file =>

if ENV['RAILS_ENV']
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'hirb'
  Hirb.enable
end

as a heavy jquery w/ plugins user, it is easy to end up with quite a few javascript files included in the header. thats where sprockets, a javascript organization and compressor library written in ruby, comes in.

what turned me onto trying sprockets was the success i’ve had with less, the dynamic css library. the one thing i was bummed to not see in the sprockets documentation, however, was the ability to run a script that would watch for file changes and keep the master .js file constantly updated, like you can with less.

luckily ‘the google’ revealed a simple rake file gist (which i’ve forked and modified) for just that. given a directory structure of js/src (for your source files) and js/o/scripts.js as your master work file, save this file as rakefile.rb in js/ and just run =>

rake watch

now, changes to your work file will be detected and updated js/scripts.js and js/scripts-min.js will be compiled.

update: if you use rails, the sprockets plugin is much better.