UKI Simple UI Kit for complex web apps

Roy van der Meij zo 18 jul 10

I just found out about UKI, a javascript framework.

Basically: you stop writing html code,
and start writing interfaces.

Now I’m not sure if I’m going to use this in production.
But it has been fun playing around with it.

Check it out and tell me what you think about it.

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Upgrading to rails 3.0

Daniel Willemse vr 16 jul 10

Seeing as upgrading your <3.0 rails app isn’t just changing the rails version in your env.rb I started looking for an easier way.
Scouring through the internet, I stumbled across this little gem + guide: rails-upgrade-automating-a-portion-of-the-rails-3

by Jeremy McAnally. I haven’t found time to play with it much, but I’ll definitely look into it more this weekend.

He also wrote a book railsupgradehandbook that gives you the basic tips / tricks to upgrade your app to a rails 3.0 app.

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Random Scraps

Wilco van Duinkerken do 15 jul 10

I didn’t check my RSS reader for a while, which resulted in a long list of unread posts. This is a summary collection of interesting tidbits.

bullet 2.0.0.beta.3 gem released

At @holderhq Bullet alongside New Relic saved us loads of time speeding up some database intensive apps. Especially when ActiveRecord magic and ActiveRecord extensions make your development log look like a wizards spell book describing how to fetch green goblins with red hats from middle earth.

Ruby Medicant University Game Mechanics

Gregory Brown’s Ruby Mendicant University idea is taking off. I think the idea is great and I’m closely following the progess.

Javascript Console with TextMate

I didn’t have the time to check it out yet. But it looks like this’ll certainly help javascript development.

Corporate Dictionary Part 7

Plainly funny.

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Bundler 1.0 without system gems

Wijnand Wiersma do 15 jul 10

The last time I talked about bundler I showed how to use the 0.9 series and everything will be in it’s own bundler bubble.
However, starting from bundler 1.0 systems gems will be prefered with sudo installs and this might be not what you want.

Some perfectly valid reasons might be:

• You are deploying to webservers as an unprivileged user and don’t want to sudo
• You don’t want the existing apps to break because incompatible gems are being installed

I was looking at the bundler source code for a solution and found out it was actually quite easy to solve.
Just add a path after “bundle install” !

So when installing an application on a production server you can let capistrano (or whatever you use for deployments)
run the following command: bundle install ~/.bundle

Inside the application a config file will be created and respected.
This configuration file consists of the following content:

--- 
BUNDLE_DISABLE_SHARED_GEMS: "1"
BUNDLE_PATH: /Users/wijnandwiersma/.bundle

As long as this configuration exists the system gems will not be touched.

Until recently I wasn’t a big fan of bundler but because of this presentation I fully understand all decisions that made bundler the way it is. I think you should watch it too. I think I will convert some rails 2.3 apps in the near future.

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EuRuKo 2010 speakers showcase

Dax Huiberts do 15 jul 10

EuRuKo is a European Ruby Conference which was held on the 29th and 30th of May this year. Some time ago, Sandro Paganotti created a speakers showcase to honor this conference, the speakers and their talks. For each of the speakers you will find a short summary and some resources (video, slides, etc).

If you just want all the videos you can find them all directly on Vimeo and if you would rather read a write up you can read the transcripts of EuRuKo day 1 and day 2 written by Markus Prinz.

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rescue Resque

Chiel Wester wo 14 jul 10

A couple of months ago, i posted an article on this blog about implementing resque for performing background jobs.

There have been several updates to the resque core since then, one of them is the possibility to write plugins for resque without having to change the main functionality of resque.

One of these plugins that was created is resque-retry. When you include this plugin in your Job class, any failed job will be retried several times when it raises an error. This becomes very useful when your job uses some external service that can give the pain of timeouts.

The plugin also has the possibility to only retry on specific exceptions (e.g. Timeout, NetworkError). At the moment the job is simply deleted when the retry limit is exceeded. Of course you could overwrite this functionality to notify you in some way that a job failed too many times:

    def on_failure_retry(exception, *args)
      if retry_criteria_valid?(exception, *args)
        try_again(*args)
      else
        # Notify me about this error!
        Resque.redis.del(redis_retry_key(*args))
      end
    end

Check for examples and documentation the github project page

This plugin depends on the resque-scheduler plugin that gives you the possibility to schedule jobs in a cron-like way or to schedule a job at some time in the future.

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Humanizer: web_user.verify()

Paul Engel ma 12 jul 10

As a web developer, you are often forced to participate in the struggle against bots submitting bogus data to your web application. The most common implementation are Captcha images which contain distorted digits and letters you will have to fill in for verification.

Kisko Labs has provided us a Rails 3 gem to use instead and it’s called Humanizer. This gem implements the question and answer method for verifying you being human. Its installation and implementation is child’s play (both 2-liners).

Humanizer supports internationalization with i18n and is shipped with a set of questions and answers in English, German and Finnish. You can your own Q&A’s of course.

To see Humanizer in action, visit the ArcticStartup sign up page. All in all, it’s a very useful and simple gem!

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Private attachments with paperclip

Johan Vermeulen vr 09 jul 10

Aaron Sumner of Everyday Rails wrote a nice article about howto make attachments private.

Only I recommend to use the send_file method provided by the rails framework with the x_sendfile header. This prevents the ruby process from streaming the file to the client, instead let the webserver software handle it (X-SendFile is disabled by default).

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Ruby 1.9.2 RC1 is released

Stephan Kaag do 08 jul 10

A few days ago Ruby 1.9.2 RC has been released. This is a release candidate of Ruby 1.9.2.

Ruby 1.9.2 is mostly compatible with Ruby 1.9.1 except for some changes listed here.

Both Array and Enumerable are extended with new possibilities for handling them. The most interesting changes are summed up overhere.

The upcoming Rails 3 release is compatible with Ruby 1.9.2.

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Browser testing web apps

Jeroen Bulters wo 07 jul 10

We all know that full-stack integration tests for Rails applications can be quite cumbersome. Luckily, we have tools like watir and selenium. The major drawback to these tools is that it’s not easy to quickly whip up a test for something your “just trying out”. In other words: It takes the fun out of testing.

Most of the times we then result to manual – in browser – testing. But – being human and all – this leads to inconsistent – and therefore possibly -incorrect testing. Meet Fake, a web browser automation app (Mac only!).

Fake is built on the Fluid site specific browser application and supports native Applescript scripting which makes it easy to perform a wide variety of tasks (including uploading files, which can be a hassle with other tools).

Having played with Fake last night (after seeing the Dutch soccer team reach the WorldCup final) I can only say that this application will become a regular in my development toolchain.

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