where form meets function » ruby on rails

Introducing Trendy

Paul — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:37:43 +0000

Download the trendy gem, or visit the github for trendy.

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I’ve made another gem! It’s called Trendy, and it is a simple wrapper for the Twitter Search API, but the only the part of it that concerns trending topics.

I’ve initially made it pretty simple, so I was able to learn a lot about jeweler and rspec – because I developed this gem using Behaviour/Test Driven Development – that is: I wrote failing tests first, then wrote the code, got it passing, then refactored the code.

Right now, Trendy only works with current topics; in the future, it will support past trending topics.

Introducing YamlSeeder

Paul — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:50:59 +0000

Download the gem here (gemcutter.org)

Visit the GitHub source here (github.com)

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I’ve finally created a gem for Ruby on Rails apps. It’s called YamlSeeder, and its at version 0.0.1, naturally.

YamlSeeder takes foxy-fixture-like YAML files and seeds them into your Rails app, using ActiveRecord.

Why I Made It

Originally, I stored all my seed data in YAML fixture files, and loaded them using Fixtures.create_fixtures. This had the benefit of being easy to work with, and easy to maintain. The downside was that it directly inserted the fixtures by SQL into the database’s tables. But I wanted to use the callbacks and validation methods provided by ActiveRecord when seeding. (For example, I wanted to generate a permalink field when saving using “before_save”.)

I modeled YamlSeeder after Fixtures.create_fixtures in ActiveRecord. It supports the belongs_to association, but no other – this will come in a future release.

How Do I Get It?

the easiest way is to type:

gem install yaml_seeder

But for more information, download the gem here. For the current source code, visit my GitHub here.

The Problem with Ruby on Rails

Paul — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:59:31 +0000

I love Ruby on Rails, it’s so cool. It’s elegant, and it’s so easy to get started creating a functional website. However, the development of the framework moves far too fast. As a result, documentation become out-of-date fast. This makes it incredibly hard to follow any sort of tutorial, blog post, or advice given in forums.

Case in point: the introductory tutorial for the “bible” of Ruby on Rails development became out of date when Rails 2.0 came out. (We’re still waiting for an new edition of the book, which no doubt will be out of date by the time it prints.) Instead of preserving older functionality, the development team removes it, which is fine, but they either need to slow down to let the students catch up, or provide a way for students to learn Rails without changing so much so frequently.

As a student of Ruby on Rails, I don’t want to be constantly looking to see what has been “deprecated” since the time my book or article was posted.

Any body have any ideas on how to cope with this?