Head On

I am seeing signs in the sky that Sun is making a comeback.

• Textdrive is switching from FreeBSD to Solaris
• Rumors that ZFS might be ported to Mac OS X
• Tim Brays presence and statements on the RoR podcast from Canada on Rails
• Sun makes smart moves like supporting PostgreSQL

And not one of them is related to Java.

I will be speaking on the Rails Recipes Meetup here in Stockholm tomorrow. My topic will be on recipe 28 in Chads excellent book, how you can use with_scope to DRY your code.

Whilst I have looked quite deeply into the subject - it is quite small actually - there is one thing I have yet to find out. Chad mentions that you can use wrap your actions with scoping using a before_filter.

The thing is that the author of the patch for nested scopes provides a plugin to enable just that, but he uses an around filter which utilizes funky metaprogramming to do just that. He has a whole blog entry about it.

I’ve asked twice in the IRC channel without any answer, and I’ve posted a question on the books forum.

Does anybody know if a before_filter can be used?

Really funny:

A list of facts about Chuck Norris

(Via Planet Ruby on Rails.)

Linda DeMichiel together with Mike Keith again walking us through the new EJB3 API. I must say that I like the idea of the one, true, unified O/R mapping framework. Also providing a decent set of default values id really smart - the table mapping is reminiscent of Rails. I wonder what all the app server vendors think of the fact that it can be run outside of EJB? This is another reason that you most probably can get by with Spring in most cases which really must upset the app server vendors and especially JBoss.

So I arrived yesterday to Antwerpen, and have just sat through the keynote. It was basically a shameless plug battle between Sun and BEA. The most interesting thing was Bill Roth talking about WebLogic “in the coming years” supporting “languages that might take off”. This is in line with what Jon wrote some time ago. Rails on WebLogic? Could be interesting, if not for no other reason but to gain a wider acceptance for Rails.

While at Lecando, I was quite proud of the library of computer books we assembled oveer the years.

These days as a consultant for Valtech, my employer does indeed have a library, but as I am almost never at the office it is not really accessible.

I have therefore started to buy the books that I find necessary for my daily digital life out of my own pocket so that I can have access to them whenever I want. These are the ones I have got so far:

• User Stories Applied
• The Pickaxe
• Agile Development With Ruby On Rails
• Domain Driven Design
• Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion
• Ship It!

While looking at the list I couldn’t help but noticing that I really like the Pragmatic books. I am equally surprised that I have so far not felt the urgent need for any of the O’Reilly titles

Lots of people have had problems with Ruby and MySQL. The ever so pragmatic Rails book links to a popular solution which involves installing the MySQL gem and specifying the path to the MySQL. This did not do the trick for me, and I’ve failed trying different alternatives after that. Today I came across PJ Hyett’s idea of installing Ruby-MySQL from source. It worked like a charm.

I feel I just have to try Ruby on Rails, I mean everybody else is doing it and I don’t want to feel left out.

So I started setting it up on my X40 which runs Ubuntu. There is still no deb available for it, you have to use the Ruby Gems system to set it up. I dont know if this is good or bad - it seems like a Ruby CPAN and my feelings towards Perls CPAN are mixed. I once ended up with two Perls on a Red Hat box when using it to set up Request Tracker. Let’s hope Gems works better.

To start out I had to apt-get rdoc and libzlib-ruby. After that it is installed. Whohoo. What now?

Ok rails ~/work/rortest … Bang. Some dependency is missing. Let’s search Synaptic to see what could possibly make it tick.

libwebrick maybe? Nope.
libmysql-ruby? Nope.
eruby? No.
libdbi-mysql. Noo.
libwhatever-ruby. Nothing works.

Maybe there’s some info on their site? Hmm … there are instructions on how to install it on Debian unstable which involves apt-getting the all ruby libraries known to man - but who cares - let’s try that.

Whohoo! It works. Let’s see some of the Ruby love in the browser then - it is indeed there.

Ok. Now for the database tweaking. Why three databases? I guess I’l find out.

Yaml is really, really nice.

Ok, according to the site, all I have left is to develop my Rails application, so I guess that is what I will do. Wish me luck.

Update: There are now instructions for how to set up Rails on Ubuntu.