Holland On Rails Weblog Feed

JSONP

jeroenbulters@gmail.com (Jeroen Bulters) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:21:35 +0200

Unfortunately, by default there is no ~~JSONP mime type defined in Rails~~usage of the JSONP mime type defined in the documentation of Rails. So you’re left a bit in the void on that part. ~~I thought Rails was a one stop solution.~~…

Luckily, the solution is easy:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base protected def render_json(json, options={}) callback, variable = params[:callback], params[:variable] response = if callback && variable "var #{variable} = #{json};\n#{callback}(#{variable});" elsif variable "var #{variable} = #{json};" elsif callback "#{callback}(#{json});" else json end end render({:content_t ype => :js, :text => response}.merge(options)) end end

And you’re able to render your jsonp replies by calling:

format.js {

do your thang render_json result.to_json }

~~Still, it’s a shame you have to hack this in yourself.~~

As Jan de Poorter rightfully noted: The functionality is available; just poorly documented. My lesson here is to check the Rails source more often.

Easy Authentication with OmniAuth

chiel@chielwester.nl (Chiel Wester) — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 09:32:50 +0100

If you ever want to implement OAuth or OpenID to authenticate and connect users with different accounts, you should check out the OmniAuth gem! This piece of Rack middleware takes care of all the difficult stuff like having to implement and understand all the different API’s. It makes it very easy and clean to implement authentication with (for example) Twitter, OpenID and Facebook.

There are two excellent railscasts available on how to implement the oauth gem:

More information about this gem can be found at the GitHub Page

Tip: If you need nice twitter and facebook buttons on your authentication page, you can find them here

RubyGems

daniel.willemse@holder.nl (Daniel Willemse) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 20:34:16 +0200

Nick Quaranto recently wrote a great blog post about RubyGems, and creating gems.

It’s especially helpful for people new to ruby and rubygems, or people who want to create their own gem.

ControlTower

jeroenbulters@gmail.com (Jeroen Bulters) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 08:27:54 +0200

Although this blog is called HollandOnRails, and this post is about something that currently does not work with Rails I thought it would still be interesting, mainly because – possibly in the future – Rails might be supported.

Yesterday, MacRuby released ControlTower 1.0.

ControlTower is a ‘simple’ web/application server built entirely on MacRuby and thus playing extremely nice with your Mac (sorry non-Macheads). It is built to run all Rack applications which are ‘supported by’ MacRuby; which means Rails is out of the picture for the moment.

What does a MacRuby webserver mean? Well, basically, you can compare ControlTower with a MacOS X version of Unicorn; but instead of using native Un*x calls (i.e. forks and selects), it uses Apple’s GrandCentralDispatch (GVD) as a socketmanager. By default you will not notice any difference with – say – Thin; as GCD uses a serial connection queue by default. But if you mac allows it, and of course you configure it correctly, it will allow you 75 concurrent incoming requests on a 8-core Mac Pro.

Scalability out of the box.

Charts

daniel.willemse@holder.nl (Daniel Willemse) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 08:01:17 +0200

If you want to have some charts in your application there are numerous ways to achieve this.

In the following railscast (june 19th)

Ryan Bates shows you a couple of these ways and goes indepth on a js library called Highcharts. This library is 100% js so no extra dependencies are needed, and the api is pretty straightforward aswell.

I found the examples pretty easy to follow and i’ll definitely be using them the next time i need a chart.

Quicktip: hashes in find conditions

roy.van.der.meij@holder.nl (Roy van der Meij) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 13:26:43 +0200

Have you ever made a find condition with a lot of questionmarks in it where you wanted the same input for those questionmarks?

Like this:
named_scope :search, lambda {|x| { :conditions => ["title like ? or lead like ? or content like ?", x, x, x] }}

You can actually use hashes in stead of questionmarks. So the above code could be refactored into this:

named_scope :search, lambda {|x| { :conditions => ["title like :search or lead like :search or content like :search", { :search => x}] }}

Quicktip: localghost

wijnand@nedbsd.eu (Wijnand Wiersma) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:09:10 +0200

I just wanted to share a quick tip I just found on the interwebz.

I happen to add hostnames to /etc/hosts regulary in order to have different hostnames for all apps I am working on. With localghost you can easily add, remove, enable and disable hostnames pointing to localhost with just a few mouse clicks.

For people who are not using passenger and the prefpane for development this might be very handy.

Website: http://scotchi.net/localghost/
Github: http://github.com/scotchi/Localghost

to_s FTDRY

wijnand@nedbsd.eu (Wijnand Wiersma) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:22:24 +0200

Here is just a quick tip: define more to_s methods on your models to DRY up you views. It’s a very Ruby thing to do and if you keep this method fairly on top of your classes it won’t be very confusing for other developers.

For one project I have 3 models: include, exclude and split. When I want to display them I only want to show the only defined property they have: path

I display them regularly in views and it gets used in background processes where it is concatenated into a bigger string.

So instead of writing include.path everytime I went for this approach:

def to_s path end

From now on I can do something like this in my views:
<li><%= include %></li>

And where it gets concatenated:
"#{first_include} something here #{second_include}"

or a array gets joined:

includes.join(" ")

Another nice example might be a person class where you display the persons name regularly in views. If you keep the parts of the name in multiple properties you are getting a bigger win:

def name [first_name, last_name_prefix, last_name].reject{|x|x.blank?}.join ' ' end

So if you display an object as a string a lot defining a to_s method and just put in your plain object in your view will certainly a nice way to get more DRY.

It's Rails 3 time!

chiel@chielwester.nl (Chiel Wester) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:29:09 +0200

After years of development by the Rails Community the 3rd version of Rails is finally ready! The number of new features and improvements is enormous!

Are you ready to upgrade your application to this new version of Rails? Just use the Rails 3 upgrade handbook

Rails 3.0: Release candidate 2

stephan.kaag@holder.nl (Stephan Kaag) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:55:02 +0200

According to DHH the release candidate process is progressing as planned. This second candidate has very few changes over the first, which means that unless any blockers are discovered with this release, we’re targeting the final release of Rails 3.0 for this week(!!!).