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1. Rails Ruby Web Frameworks A Dive into Waves by Carlo Pecchia agi 1 TATA So lets generate a resource for items resources item rb module TodoManager module Resources class Item lt Default GET items on get items do items controller all view List items gt items end end end end and keep resources map rb smaller resources map rb module TodoManager module Resources class Map include Waves Resources Mixin redirect request do items on get redirect items delegate to item resource any path like items on true items to item delegate to item resource any path like items lt something here gt on true items true to item end end end Hitting the refresh button on our browser shows us that everything works as expected Now we can inject the full REST behaviour to our item resource Let s add the handling for GET items lt id gt in resources item rb GET items lt id gt on get items name do item controller find captured name view show item gt item end And see how it is rendered in our browser T i Dolio terma E hup localhost 3000 items TC ToDo manager finish Waves inttoduciory aricl view So it s easy to continue defining all the other REST meth ods exercise for the readers Don t
2. Let s explore functional tests with rake test functionals Started Finished in 0 259097 seconds 9 tests 10 assertions 2 failures errors You may wonder how it is possible that you already have a suite of 9 different passing functional tests without even writ ing a single one You should thank Ryan for this he is so good that nifty_ generators comes with functional tests not only for Test Unit but also for Shoulda and RSpec That simply means that our work for functional tests will be less than expected So open test functionals snippets_con troller_test rb with your editor and have a look at the first method 1 require test_helper 2 3 class SnippetsControllerTest lt ActionController TestCase 4 def test_index 5 get index 6 assert_template index 7 end As the name suggests the method is testing the index ac tion of the snippets controller On line 5 there is a call to an HTTP request in particular the get method the symbol index that actually stands for the index action of our snippets view is passed as an argument to the get request That request is expected to produce a response rendering the index template view for the snippet controller This is fine and it works we just would like to add the expectation that a list of snippets is rendered on the template To do that we modify the method in that way 4 def test_index 5 get index 6 assert_template index 7 Snippets ass
3. we don t have what you are looking for in place we cant approve a non work related projects run ning on this infrastructure it has to be approved by the committee if you are doing this then it means you have a way too much time on your hand I decided not to get into the corporate bureaucracy and to run the project on my own I was going to approach the corp tech again later when the project is off the ground and kicking Looking back I think the decision to opensource the proj ect was one of the best decisions of my life The next step was to figure out how to run the project and not to spend too much money out of my pocket We live in a weird time when you can get a lot for free And it is not like you get what you pay for any more free does not mean bad at all usually the opposite free reads the best And of course it is the best not because it is free but because it is opensource As far as technology Ruby on Rails was my first choice free elegant outstanding community support but I m preaching to the choir here Being a professional I could not afford not to put the code into a version control There are tons of options available here Git is getting a lot of buzz lately There are many sites that offer git repositories hosting But there is something to be said about http github com First of all it gives 100M for public repositories for free which really means repositories
4. withdraw operation ef withdraw amount do whatever you need balance amount if balance amount gt now here comes our logic issue that the account has changed changed notify the observers notify_observers self nd ye Rails Observer and Singleton design patterns in Ruby by Khaled al Habache Magazine account BankAccount new Jim Oslen 100 account withdraw 99 5 gt Sending email to Jim Oslen informing him with his ac count balance 0 5 gt Sending SMS to Jim Oslen informing him with his account balance 5 So to user ruby observer lib we have to implement four things 1 Require the observer lib and include it inside the subject observed class 2 Declare the object to be changed and then notify the observers when needed just like we did in withdraw method 3 Declare all needed observers objects that will observe the subject 4 Each observer must implement an update method that will be called by the subject Observers in Rails You can find observers in rails when using ActiveRecord it s a way to take out all ActiveRecord callbacks out of the model for example a one would do this class User lt ActiveRecord Base after_create send_email private def send_email send a welcome email end end a neater solution is to use Observers class UserObserver lt Ac
5. 19 def test_new 20 get new 21 assert_template new 22 assert_select select snippet_language 23 end The above expresses that a template should contain a select element with snippet_language id and a parameter cor responding to the language attribute in the snippet model Having no select box in our view rake test functionals fails as shown Started er Finished in 0 282672 seconds 1 Failure agi Fa ATA x test_new SnippetsControllerTest Expected at least 1 element matching select snippet_ language found lt false gt is not true 9 tests 16 assertions 1 failures errors We find that the relevant code to modify is placed inside _form html erb a view partial 1 lt form_for snippet do f gt 2 lt f error_messages gt 3 lt p gt 4 lt f label name gt lt br gt 5 lt f text_field name gt 6 lt p gt 7 lt p gt 8 lt f label language gt lt br gt 9 lt f text_field language gt 10 lt p gt 11 lt p gt 12 lt f label body gt lt br gt 13 lt f text_area body gt 14 lt p gt 15 lt p gt lt f submit Submit gt lt p gt 16 lt end gt We change creating a local variable holding an array of languages on line 8 and changing the text_field into a select box on line 11 as follows 8 lt form_for snippet lt span gt lt span class r gt do lt span gt f lt span class
6. A rus aa yi Tg Flew kriga ul aia Miliki fare Fhia Arijit Configure Dupa ken Sp Por beide mher pas epia lire appia siam m pe od Fr Lerepind lir appia dae iaa rier kaian Gwta Fides a 4 They tates orl pe errata ae pii idler iEn tao Dipa igar r 1 i a i E oad enin magara 3 D inet F BME Ea aleea n F war JAY i E gii aig Tod MLF Eim i a Pii 1 4 b 3 tia Lc ae oa gt a Tadi Wiii 7 PLACES ae Tota HELS Fi tress Big Taian back ee ie eb To i III i han Babr ip Tadap DEEG J riar apace Teia Lich Dc Se ret Ted Iit fh donee B ot Taduw DELS E ee ie b Problem C Prgresa F beerh nt B omai s a eae ll 1 Figure 3 Building a GUI for our application The Flex binaries have to be accessible over the web So well put them in the public directory of the Rails application This is easy we only need to select this directory for Output Ruby on Rails e Flex Building a new software generation by Arturo Fernandez Rails fagan nme Wings to the moon folder as shown in Figure 2 Once were finished with the GUI we can create the back end First we ll create a Rails application using the rails com mand Second we will need a model to store the product s data so we will execute this command script generate model Product name string description string price float Now we need to configure our database By default Rails 2 offers a simple configuration for an SQLite datab
7. HTTPService This method is simpler but less flexible than AMF In our example we will build a new DataGrid to link it with the HTTPService component This is the code lt mx DataGrid id dg0 dataProvider productHttpService lastResult products product x 203 y 262 width 361 gt lt mx columns gt lt mx DataGridColumn dataField id headerText ID gt lt mx DataGridColumn dataField name headerText Name gt lt mx columns gt lt mx DataGrid gt Note that we used a different value for the dataProvider property Now we need to declare the productHttpService com ponent in Flex lt mx HTTPService id productHttpService url http local host 3000 products load_all gt HTTPService requests consume normal XML If you take a look at the load_all controller method above you ll see where the XML comes from Finally we ll add a button which loads makes the HTTPSer vice request lt mx Button label Load using HTTPService click productHttpService send gt That s all folks We have all the code finished let s check it out Running Now we are ready to test our application Clicking in the play button of the Flex Builder generates a binary file in SWF format and a HTML page which invokes this binary directly in the public directory of our Rails application Flex Builder opens a web browser with the URL so we can see our applica tion as
8. Layer s Foundation e Application is built on Layers e Layers mix in features to help build your application eg MVC support e Foundation is a Layer that provides at least the mini mal features set required for an application In fact Waves authors speak in terms of Layers and Foun dation Of course there arent any magical approaches on that we can do almost the same with Rails or Merb Sinatra Ramaze etc but this change of mind is interesting and worth experimenting a little In this article we ll explore the surface of the framework that is still on version 0 8 x After installing it we ll write a simple application in order to illustrate how Waves works Installation Of course a gem is provided so we simply need to type sudo gem install waves and adding some dependencies if they aren t already pres ent in our system A simple application Let s create a simple application for managing personal ToDos list waves generate name todo manager orm sequel Waves can use whatever ORM we prefer in this case we choose to experiment with Sequel Previous command generates our application skeleton Rakefile Startup rb configurations Ruby Web Frameworks A Dive into Waves by Carlo Pecchia controllers helpers Lib tasks models public resources schema migrations templates tmp views As we can see the directory structure looks familiar to Rails one Par
9. cerberus continuous integration h puexian it s free and anyone can join Start your own convos invite all your friends to join your Working on a typical Open Source Rails project by Dmitry Amelchenko trol as well but as for me I find that the social coding aspects of Google Code are just not nearly as good and helpful as githubs The good thing is that thanks to the competition in the OS project hosting space where you can choose what works best for you Here is the example of how the users tracking list looks like for me http code google com p echowaves issues list The next big thing in organizing an OS Rails project is an infrastructure you will be running you site on There are few options available here I initially started hosting my site on a computer under my desk in a basement But quickly realized that outsourcing the infrastructure is the better way to go If you are serious about getting your project off the ground and want it to be noticed by other people you have to make sure its up and running 24 7 and the bandwidth must be good enough to make a good impression on visitors the web community has very high expectations these days This is the only thing you are expected to pay for not a whole of a lot but still out of your pocket so make your choice wisely There are number of hosting providers that support rails apps like http www engineyard com and http www slicehost com I personally choose the p
10. end end end end Ruby Web Frameworks A Dive into Waves by Carlo Pecchia Rails ylagarine Its clear that the first path declaration redirects to items that is handled by the second path when we invoke the ren der of templates item list mab templates item Llist mab layout default do ul do items each do 1i li do 1 content href gt items 1 id end 4 a view end end end A little explanation When defining the route we see that controllers are very tiny pieces in Waves they simply tie the request parameters to the appropriate ORM model Dont bother because we see controller logic placed in resources map rb after well put it in its own space The line view item list items gt items tells the controller to render the file List with appropri ate extension found under templates item coming from item passing it a parameter named items populated with some values retrieved by the controller Pointing our browser on http localhost 3000 items we can see Atte flecalhas 2000 linens 1 aif ct Wi A nop flerallhost 2000 mems 1 0j ToDo manager finish waves introductory article 28 12 2008 logo Keeping separate concerns resource delegation The only resource in our application is Map and that handles requests for items too Of course we should avoid that and delegate some route paths to appropriate resource
11. idl gt amp gt lt span gt lt span gt lt span class no gt 2 lt span gt lt span class il gt lt span class idl gt amp lt lt span gt f error_messages lt span class id1l gt amp gt lt span gt lt span gt lt span class no gt 3 lt span gt lt span class ta gt amp lt p amp gt lt span gt lt span class no gt 4 lt span gt lt span class il gt lt span class id1 gt amp lt lt span gt f label lt span class sy gt name lt span gt lt span class idl gt amp gt lt span gt lt span gt lt span class ta gt amp lt br lt span gt lt span class ta gt amp gt lt span gt lt span class no gt 5 lt span gt lt span class il gt lt span class idl gt amp lt lt span gt f text_field lt span class sy gt name lt span gt lt span class idl gt amp gt lt span gt lt span gt lt span class no gt 6 lt span gt lt span class ta gt amp lt p amp gt lt span gt lt span class no gt 7 lt span gt lt span class ta gt amp lt p amp gt lt span gt lt span class no gt 8 lt span gt lt span class il gt lt span class idl gt amp lt lt span gt lt span class iv gt languages Ruby JavaScript Java C gt 9 lt p gt 10 lt f label language gt Rails Create a simple code snippet a
12. notice the following 2 lines won t work the instance to a specific number of objects for example we can restrict the number of instances to five objects This is useful when exactly one object is needed to coordinate ac tions across the system dup won t work new method is private AppConfig new rescue puts The singleton design pattern is used to have one instance confl dup rescue puts of some class typically there are many places where you might want to do so just like having one database connec tion one LDAP connection one logger instance or even one gt Application configuration file was loaded from file configuration object for your application DOME e NT rc Ora In ruby you can use the singleton module to have the can job done for you let s take application configuration as an gt private method new called for AppConfig Class xample and check h n r he job l example and check how we can use ruby to do the job gt can t dup instance of singleton AppConfig require singleton lib i So what does ruby do when you include the singleton require singleton method inside your class 1 It makes the new method private and so you can t use it 2 It adds a class method called instance that instantiates mixin the singleton module only one instance of the class class AppConfig A R LEN So to use ruby singleton module you need two things 1 Require the lib singleton
13. ra to develop their web presences and improve their business processes Though officially tech agnostic a 190 meters up he s usually happiest building web applications with te Rails or Merb Outside of work he s enjoying the new experience of fatherhood and dabbles in concert promotion a ye a a a In either case you could get round it with careful use of layouts partials and other tricks from the Rails toolkit but that can quickly become cumbersome and isn t going to scale s if you need to change different elements for different clients pia o Thats where theme_support plugin comes in EE oe oe Originally released by Matt McCray based on code used in i the Typo blogging engine by Tobias Luetke theme_support pro 4 eH vides support for any number of themes which can override a any view whether a full view or a partial from your main ap k 5 plication and have their own set of assets So once you ve got your main site set up all you need to do is add an appropriate folder add some declarations to your ApplicationController to identify the right theme and override where necessary The README file covers most of the particulars Before you rush out and start theming your application there s something else you ought to know The plugin keeps breaking Its not that the code is buggy but simply that goes fairly deeply into Rails and for a variety of very good reasons Rails api keep chang
14. an ideal environment for working with those patterns o Yard Lg production e ard dallablp ai Interview with Ryan Singer interviewed by Rupak Ganguly on May 5th 2009 Rupak Would you hazard a prediction on the future of Rails One year from now Five Ryan I can only hope that as time goes by people will appreciate the rare opportunities Rails gives them Rails makes it easier for developers and designers to collaborate so I hope we see more UI designers getting involved in software design Id like to see more discussion happening about the relation between modeling and UI and perhaps more con versation about view code conventions Most of us on the UI side are relying on patterns we inherited from the standards CSS movement which are a good basis but they re also not enough I m doing my best to share the patterns I ve found as the opportunities present themselves Rupak With Merb merging into Rails 3 what features from other platforms or frameworks would you like to be incorporated into Rails in future Ryan That s outside my knowledge probably Rupak Do you think Rails risks getting bloated with all this functionality Or that it will lose its ease of use and magic as the price to pay for the newly found flexibility Ryan That s outside my knowledge probably Rupak If you could give someone just starting out a tip what would that be Ryan Id advise anyone doing UI for Rails apps
15. as Fa cebook ad campaigns The traffic has slightly increased but the bounce rate also went through the roof The bounce rate represents the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who bounce away to a different site rather than continuing on to other pages within the same site Its incredibly difficult to come up with the right keywords combination and even if you do find it most of the times is does cost money If you set your daily budget too low like I did your keywords will never trigger and instead Google will show your ad based on the site content which might not be exactly what you want Here are some more effective techniques that tend to yield better results for promoting early stage OS project again things are different if you have cash on your hand then feel free to skip this part e Talk to all your friends tell them about your project and ask them to post a short note about it on their blogs Consider writing articles for magazines like http rails magazine com Make sure to post on http www opensourcerails com Post your projects status updates on Facebook Twitter or both This is the way to keep your friends informed about what s going on Eventually they will notice from your status updates that something is happening will start asking you questions and most likely will start sharing your story with their friends If you have good writing skills or really catchy idea feel free to post on
16. attention Ryan The key thing about Rails is it lets me work at the right level of abstraction The amount of implementation have to think about is small enough that I feel like Pm touch ing the model directly and the views are 90 HTML Also gt TS wo request A a gt hy em SS a 2 et gt Be iversary EWS OSS N Uy Ny wy Ue gt MY WNS by J Nay N Utoy using Moy Community Pulse Warm reception for Passenger for Nginx Wordle generated from blog comments on the announcement Anj Y 5 Interview with Ryan Singer interviewed by Rupak Ganguly on May 5th 2009 Ryan Singer is an interface designer and product manager at 37signals Ryan joined 37signals in 2003 Within a year the company transitioned from a design consultancy to a software company with the release of Basecamp Ryan s interface designs have since set a standard for web application usability and clarity He lives in Chicago with his wife and french bulldog the MVC pattern is a major support for our work at 37signals as a Ul focused company Designing UI in a stubbed Rails app is so much better than writing independent mock HTML screens because I can see how a design behaves with real data as I build it Working with partials and helpers also means that my templates do a lot without sacrificing readability m a huge fan of Eric Evans Domain Driven Design and I feel like Ruby and Rails are
17. attribute for our snippets Consider the following test method 25 def test_should_have_a_unique_name 26 snippet_one Snippet create name gt Hello language gt ruby World body gt puts Hello Rails ylagarine World 27 assert_nil snippet_one errors on name 28 Ssnippet_two Snippet create name gt snip pet_one name language gt ruby body gt def hello snippet_one body end 29 assert_not_nil snippet_two errors on name 3 end We instantiate two snippet objects we assert that the first one is created and saved without errors on name in line 27 while the second one on line 28 is expected to have an error on name having the same of the first Run the usual rake test units to see Started F Finished in 0 099406 seconds 1 Failure test_should_have_a_unique_name SnippetTest L test unit snippet_test rb 33 in test_should_have_a_ unique_name lt nil gt expected to not be nil 4 tests 8 assertions 1 failures errors As you may have guessed we need to change app models snippet rb like that class Snippet lt ActiveRecord Base validates_presence_of name language body validates_uniqueness_of name end Let s try our tests again Started Finished in 0 095361 seconds 4 tests 8 assertions failures errors All tests are passing now We have validation for our snip pets and the first task is complete
18. away Do not accept every line of code people contribute unless you have worked with that person before and developed a trust relationship Read more about that in the Getting Real book Its essential to communicate back to the community what is currently in progress and what features are planned to be implemented Initially I had a free ac count on http lighthouseapp com but it only support ed 2 users per project for more I had to pay and I am so cheap when it comes to OS development Then I looked at Google Code as an alternative Surely it sup ports the whole OS development stack including Sub version as a version control but since I already started using github I was only interested in the issues tracking aspect of Google Code If you are more comfortable with svn feel free to use Google Code for version con EchoWaves com is an opensource group chat social network SignUp convos follow other convos that look interesting to you Have fun start new convo If you like to chat or blog or post pictures or share updates with friends or just socialize you will enjoy EchoWaves f you have any ideas or suggestions feel free to talk about it in EcHoWaVeS CoM convo Take it for a spin post messages to our TEST convo Recent convos Popular convos Recently joined was O t ALn 5 the Ameichenko s private convo ZUR eee e We Th eile a D E aN y KO mat Ne Sn Russian Animation kheill conve
19. companies bossing you around with their advertising campaigns arent making money off advertising They re selling things that people want It quickly became clear to me that the Microsofts and Sonys had much stronger business models than the CNETs and Sourceforges So free is out this thing needs to pay for itself And ads are out they suck What s left The revolutionary concept of charging people money If you want a private project on GitHub you have to pay If you want a public project go nuts it s free Dont ever make people pay to participate in open source That s as bad as looking at porn in shop class Rails ylagarine So with the business model in place we continued work ing on the site in our free time We didn t want to put a lot of our own money into it but we definitely wanted to keep it self funded It was a side project not a startup At a local tech meetup we showed off the site to some friends who immediately wanted access Shortly thereafter we launched the beta and invited them to sign up After that beta began we began noticing what we ve dubbed the YouTube effect People were blogging about the cool things they were doing on GitHub not about GitHub itself Wed get huge traffic spikes from people writing blog posts announcing their project or idea with a single casual link to the project on GitHub Even better wed get tiny traffic spikes in great numbers from less notable projects
20. containing opensource projects But even that is not the most important thing What makes github stand out from the crowd is the social networking aspect It s crucial that your OS project is reachable The project I started is hosted at http github com dmitryame echowaves and at the moment of writing it had 18 followers not that many but more then I could have possibly hoped for for a few month old project And the cool thing is that you are not only limited to developers in your company or country It s Rails ylagarine truly world wide One of the best contributors and the techni cal lead on the project is located in Spain believe it or not he found the project on github and liked it enough to join Through github I got introduced to a guy from Britain who was also inspired by the 37Signals and started few other great projects railscollab and rucksack he has made a lot of very useful suggestions and had influenced the project in a big way I can not stress enough the excitement I get from work ing on the project with all different people I ve never even met in person before located all over the world Social network ing lately has drawn a lot of scepticism but in my experience if there is a benefit from the Internet and Social Networking then that s it web applications development for financial area Throughout his career he worked on a number of highly visible mission critical Dmitry A
21. dont have 100 code coverage or practice TDD then you are a bad developer This is an unhelpful view Strategies like 100 code coverage may be useful in meet ing your goals But if they arent helping you meet your goals dont waste valuable time implementing them just because someone else makes you feel bad for not doing so So let us get specific on goals What considerations should affect your testing goals Eric Anderson does independent contract work out of Atlanta GA He has been developing Rails applications professionally for several years You can find out more about his work at http pixelwareinc com Desired Reliability Level Are you writing software for a bank website a community website a personal website or an internal utility Depending on your project you will have different reliability needs Let us not kid ourselves Testing isn t free You can argue that in the long run testing will save time and money and I would be inclined to agree with you but there are a few things to consider e Some projects never make it to deployment Testing can increase the cost of failure e Some projects have priorities other than 100 reli ability e Occasionally long run costs are less important as short run costs On the other hand your company s entire business may depend on your application working correctly Your com pany s reputation and your user s privacy may be at stake So when you start that next p
22. is gaining developers and users due to their beautiful look and feel and the great possibilities that they offer Were talking about RIA Rich Internet Applications a new type of software that combines the best of web and desktop applications There are often times when we could benefit from com bining the usability of the desktop with the features of a web application Consider a program that organizes your MP3 collection Obviously it would need to access the file system But wouldnt it also be nice if it could pull certain informa tion from the internet such as the artist s bio and track notes Sounds good don t you think Rich internet applications are more complex than normal web applications Because of this they re usually developed with the aid of a framework These days we have many options to choose from both open source and proprietary For Java developers Open Laszlo and to JavaFX are work a look If you prefer Microsoft technologies there s Silverlight But over the past two years one framework in particular has grown very quickly Adobe Flex Flex is an open source RIA framework developed by Adobe It allows you to build RIA applications using a n ActionScript like programming language and a markup lan guage called MXML for the interface Its was initially released in 2004 and the last version is 3 which was released in March 2009 Flex has two components an SDK Software Develop ment Kit and a runtime on
23. now to get syntax highlighting using the same ex ample as the user manual gt gt CodeRay scan puts Hello world ruby html gt puts lt span class s gt lt span class d1 gt amp quot lt span gt lt span class k gt Hello world lt span gt lt span class d1 gt amp quot lt span gt lt span gt We see a bunch of span tags with their own css class but we would need a div mentioning a CodeRay css class Let s try again calling the div method on it gt gt CodeRay scan puts Hello world ruby html div gt lt div class CodeRay gt n lt div class code gt lt pre gt puts lt span class s gt lt span class d1 gt amp quot lt span gt lt span class k gt Hello world lt span gt lt span class dl gt amp quot lt span gt lt span gt lt pre gt lt div gt n lt div gt n It looks much better now It has a div with a CodeRay class and the code is inside a pre tag so that multiline code will be shown on separate lines We now have enough ingredients for the following test def test_should_render_highlighted_html plain_body Q puts Hello world hightlighted_body Q lt div class CodeRay gt n lt div class code gt lt pre gt puts lt span class s gt lt span class d1 gt amp quot lt span gt lt span class k gt Hello world lt span gt lt
24. pictures share updates with friends or just socialize try out EchoWaves Running the OS project you have to be a little bit of every thing yourself no one else will do it for you if you won t Keep an eye on the stats and try to understand the metrics that are available to you Simple number of hits per day is important but not nearly enough to understand what s going on Sub scribe to some free uptime monitoring service as well I use http pingability com It s also as crucial to follow some basic design guidelines to get higher ratings on search engines Things like correct page titles meta descriptions etc Google webmaster tools https www google com webmasters tools is of a great help in identifying some problems If your ratings are not that high initially do not expect it to go up very quickly it takes a lot of patience and daily attention it could take months Still make sure to analyze the suggestions Google Webmaster tool makes and try to address the issues pointed out as soon as possible There are probably a lot more other things you can do to make your OS Rails project a hit The basics are still going to be the same for everyone it is all about common sense as outlined in Getting Real by the 37Signals book Your job as a project Master is to find the best possible combination that works for you Just remember when you are running an OS project the most difficult thing is to make others care
25. prediction on the future of Rails One year from now Five Ilya Sunny I m continuously amazed at the new features being integrated into every release of Rails Our community still attracts much of the thought leadership in testing deploy ment and library support and perhaps even more importantly we are open minded about better or alternative solutions The merge of Merb and Rails is a great example of this As a framework Rails is definitely maturing and it s exciting to see all the companies EngineYard Heroku New Relic etc being created around the tooling deployment and manage ment of the infrastructure Trend for the next year I think were going to see a lot more enterprise deployments of Rails which in turn opens up an en tirely new ecosystem support consultants tooling and so on Rupak With Merb merging into Rails 3 what features from other platforms or frameworks would you like to be incorporated into Rails in future Ilya Django s debug bar already underway as a Rack middleware and administration panel available as a merb plugin is something I would love to see in the core of Rails at some point More broadly I m looking forward to having a more modular framework as a whole On one hand I m a big fan of the principle of convention on which Rails was founded on the other the modularity of Merb is a must have for many developers Merging these two concepts will go a long way towards meeting t
26. seen in Figure 4 Figure 4 Running our Flex application Feel free to click every button to see how the application transfers data from the front end to the back end Rails pagarin iua munie 2 This is ce poodud aero 2 16 99 Pedia mimar J This is ta pocia eee eT J 99 Pending racer d Wines is ma pogua member EEE Figure 5 Showing data of a selected product ua number ii New cesciption il UG fumer z The ip e produc 20 99 3 Ths is me procuc 30 99 Encontrar Q Siguiente Anterior Resaltar todo C Coincidencia de mayisculas mindsculas Figure 6 Loading data using HTTPService Congratulations Your first RIA application with Flex and Rails is up and running Conclusions Flex is a growing technology and Rails can play a great role by providing a solid robust and stable back end Weve only scratched the surface of what you can do with Rails and Flex Check out our references to learn more Are you ready Let s start coding DISCUSS http railsmagazine com 3 10 Resources Flex site http www adobe com products flex Information about ActionScript programming language http www adobe com devnet actionscript Main features of Flex Builder http www adobe com products flex features flex_builder Complete information about MXML http learn adobe com wiki display Flex MX ML Blog about Flex and Rails http
27. several top level graphs of the current system resource usage Memory CPU etc The Memory Threads Classes and VM Summary tabs all provide more information about each respective topic The MBeans tab is special as it shows you the raw output received from New Connection Mame sun tools jconsole JConsole 6648 O Remote Process Usage lt hostname lt port gt OR sernice jmx lt protocol gt lt sap gt Username Password Cancel Connect the JMX connection In addition if you want to change any of the Java settings use this tab It depends on the version of JConsole that comes with JDK If you are using JConsole from versions earlier than 6 then you will need to set this variable in Java Dcom sun management jmxremote java Dcom sun management jmxremote java Monitoring amp Management Console Connection Window Help Ceeriew Memory Threads classed WH Summary Mibears Time Aarupe All i Heap Memory Usage Threads To Mb di 60 Mb 50 Mb i 40 Mb ih a0 Mb iil 20 Mb 16 Mb 0 0 Mb all F yin MERT Wy UP YT ihe Th TATIN mj od aama Iaa MMMM DEAS 8 50 08 55 10 00 10 05 10 10 10 15 PS 0850 O85 10 00 1005 Lod 1015 Mied 23 3 Mb Committed 68 5Mb Max 906 Mb Le 33 Peak 33 Total 2670 CPU sage j 4a ie uP bel lh Maar eda wel 4 able Alby aah a B a b a i b a i E G85 O50 AGAS 1000 15 5 10 10 1935 15 665 06 55 2 55 1900 1005 10 15 10 15
28. span class dl gt amp quot lt span gt lt span gt lt pre gt lt div gt n lt div gt n snippet Snippet new name gt Hello language gt ruby body gt plain_body assert_equal hightlighted_body snippet highlight end First we instantiate a Ruby snippet with the content of puts Hello world as body and with the requirement that it should be rendered by the same markup that we last saw in the console We run our unit test suite as usual and we get Started sa E Finished in 0 098842 seconds 1 Error test_should_render_highlighted_html SnippetTest NoMethodError undefined method highlight for lt Snippet x211b460 gt test unit snippet_test rb 44 in test_should_ren der_highlighted_html 5 tests 8 assertions failures 1 errors It complains since we do not still have any highlight method So we add it to app models snippet rb def highlight end Michelangelo Altamore is an Italian Ruby on Rails evangelist with a passion for expressive beautiful code He holds a B S in Computer Science from Catania University Italy Michelangelo has more than 3 years of experience in software development and offers his services from Convergent it http convergent it Rerun the test to find that now we ve got a different prob lem Started eer Finished in 0 102812 seconds 1 Failure test_should_render_highlighted_html SnippetTest L test
29. the plugin syntax itself makes it really In the example above I declared a Proc which calls an straightforward to understand instance method of move_file after the object has entered the processed state and its attributes have been updated The instance method delete_tmp_files removes all temporary video DISCUSS http railsmagazine com 3 7 files after processing and will be called once the object leaves the block One can create very complex states and behaviours by delegating callbacks to relevant actions within a single state exit gt delete_tmp_files Resources http elitists textdriven com svn plugins acts_as_state_machine trunk rails aizatto com 2007 05 24 ruby on rails finite state machine plugin acts_as_state_machine justbarebones blogspot com 2007 1 1 actsasstatemachine enhancements html http github com ryan allen workflow tree master http 29steps co uk n Rails ylagarine Ruby Web Frameworks A Dive into Waves by Carlo Pecchia Ruby Web Frameworks A Dive into Waves by Carlo Pecchia In this article we introduce the Waves framework mainly based on the concept of resources to provide web applica tions No prior knowledge is needed in order to understand everything though some experience with Ruby and Ruby On Rails could help Introduction WAVES Being a ruby programmer implies more or less to being also curios to love experimentations so we like to explore emergi
30. then include it inside the de sired class do the actual app configuration 2 Use the instance method to get the instance you need def load_config file do your work here Resources puts Application configuration file was loaded Ruby observer rb POM tase anes http www ruby doc org stdlib libdoc observer rdoc index html end Singleton Module http www ruby doc org stdlib libdoc singleton rdoc index html ii Rails guides http guides rubyonrails org activerecord_validations_callbacks html conf1 AppConfig instance Discuss http railsmagazine com 3 5 Rails JRuby Tip Monitoring with JMX by Joshua Moore agi Fa ATA m JRuby Tip Monitoring with JMX by Joshua Moore What is JMX JMX Java Management Extensions is a Java tool used to monitor and control a Java process Since JRuby is a Java process it can also be monitored using JMX The great thing about JMX is that it is not just one way communication You can also use JMX to change settings within the JRuby Java process and within your own application This article will only cover the briefest of introductions about JMX The goal is to help you get started using it JConsole JConsole is the default JMX client provided with the JDK Java Development Kit Unfortunately it is not part of the JRE Java Runtime Environment so if you do not have it you will need to download and install the JDK JConsole is a simpl
31. to start using right away was Campfire a group chat Waves ES E convos users logout a i actually removed the date not only for space saving reasons i really thought it s EchoWa redundant i like philipp s idea about floating date contro that updates automatically based ikea on where you scroll to guess we can have the date on every message until we figure out a better way dont like the idea of have a date control floating on my Screen think is a better idea to Recently visited Messages hide the date until you need to Know the exact date of a message we can add itto a popup RMag all on the time link khelll with files h Rails Rumble 2009 with images for the oth h the dat tor already clessbiaimn yy forthe other cases we have the date separator alread ceo a gt a Se ae olimpiu Recent followers Sane dmitry robert 123 luscious Rails Magazine Meeting Room philipp russianbear 2009 05 01 hoblmarens crossblaim raquel kwOlf yerhot ebot zhangleipro stokp Tis Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elii sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt view all WHE ytlabore et dolore magna aliqua Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit sed do eiusmod tampor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua New Messages K Stes Loren May OL 2009 08 46AM ctotur adipisicing elit sed do elusmod tempor incididun Tagged with EHTS ul labore et dobar magna algue Lorem ipsum dotor sit amet consectetur
32. to take responsibility for the view directories Share the source code own those directories and dont lean on programmers to implement your designs From there it s a small step to find out where those instance variables are coming from what a model is or how helpers can help you out UI designers don t have to become programmers but we should know what MVC is and where we belong in it Rupak What would be one thing you wish would be there in Rails today Ryan I m quite happy with it I may not be technical enough to answer this question Rupak How was MeshU for you Ryan MeshU was great Everyone had their lights on and seemed excited to be there I met a lot of interesting folks between sessions and generally found it very inspiring Discuss http railsmagazine com 3 15 Rails Magazine Team Olimpiu Metiu Editor in chief http railsmagazine com authors 1 John Yerhot Editor http railsmagazine com authors 2 Khaled al Habache Editor http railsmagazine com authors 4 Rupak Ganguly Editor http railsmagazine com authors 13 Mark Coates Editor http railsmagazine com authors 14 Starr Horne Editor http railsmagazine com authors 15 Bob Martens Editor http railsmagazine com authors 16 Rails lagar ATE Call for Papers Top 10 Reasons to Publish in Rails Magazine 1 Gain recognition differentiate and establish yourself as a Rails expert and published author 2
33. trust their peers and personal experience to find a hosting provider not random Google ads Same for the blog ads Its nice to sponsor someone s qual ity unpaid time but when youre a self funded startup the dollars spent are not effective enough As for the regional conferences spending money to be just another logo in a pamphlet or on a poster is not something we can afford to do Instead we ve started doing more guerilla style marketing last weekend I flew to a conference in Chi cago and spent the money we would have spent sponsoring it on hanging out with developers Saturday night for instance I took a group out for pizza and beers I got to drink with GitHub users talk about version control with people whod never used the site and give our website a human face We ve done this a few times now and are finding it to be extremely effective Who knew actually meeting your customers is good for business The last promotion technique I mentioned was giving away t shirts Yeah that s awesome Do that Everyone loves t shirts So we got an idea figured out a business model launched a beta got users and made t shirts But what about the site itself In our efforts to improve and expand the site we found Building a Business with Open Source by Chris Wanstrath at meshU open source software to be an extremely cost effective way to develop many core pieces of our infrastructure GitHub is built on a variant
34. try to modify our show action to properly display a snip pet We add line 16 in snippets_controller_test rb 13 def test_show 14 get show id gt Snippet first 15 assert_template show 16 assert_select div CodeRay count gt 1 17 end Here we expect a div CodeRay element on our page The test fails since our generated show view action does not know anything about syntax highlighting as you can see Started gulag Finished in 0 306102 seconds 1 Failure test_show SnippetsControllerTest Expected at most 1 element matching div CodeRay found Q lt false gt is not true 9 tests 14 assertions 1 failures errors Now we produce the following template for show html erb lt title snippet lt span gt name lt span class idl gt lt span gt lt span gt lt span class k gt lt span gt lt span class il gt lt span class idl gt lt span gt lt span class iv gt snippet language gt lt small gt lt link_to Edit edit_snippet_path snippet lt span gt lt span class idl gt amp gt lt span gt lt span gt lt span class il gt lt span class idl gt 8 amp lt lt span gt link to lt span class s gt lt span class dl gt amp quot lt span gt lt span class k gt Destroy lt span gt lt span class d1 gt amp quot lt span gt lt span gt lt span class iv gt snippet conf
35. which applications are viewed The SDK is open source released under the Mozilla Public License while the runtime is the famous Adobe Flash Player which has a proprietary license Because the runtime is flash based Flex applications are cross platform by default And they work not only on desk tops but also on many mobile devices like phones and PDAs Moreover the Flex SDK allows you to build software using different operating systems like GNU Linux MS Windows and Mac OS X since the binaries generated are cross platform too While you can develop Flex applications without buy ing anything Adobe does offer an additional development tool called Flex Builder It s a modern visual IDE Integrated Development Environment built on top of Eclipse Though it costs money the Flex Builder is very useful when developing the user interface for your application Why do we need RIA applications A classic desktop application usually runs on a PC or Mac and it doesn t need a network connection A good example is a word processor like Apple Pages Microsoft Word or Ope nOfhice Writer On the other hand a web application runs on a server and many clients simultaneously access it using web browsers Both types of application have their own benefits and drawbacks Obviously they are different from a technical point of view Desktop applications can leverage various tool kits to create rich GUIs They re faster And you don t have the rend
36. write some of the most mind blowing GitHub features Good thing we open sourced Grit As the site grew and more businesses started using it people began requesting integration with various third party services They wanted IRC notifications ticket tracker aware ness stuff like that Integration with established sites is a great thing to have It s sexy and lets people use tools they re familiar with we wanted to add as many as we could Doing so however would be prohibitively time consuming Wed have to sign up with the third party service learn their API write the integra tion test it to make sure it worked then address any bugs or complaints our customers had with it Over and over and over again So we open sourced that part of the site too People immediately started adding their own pet services Building a Business with Open Source by Chris Wanstrath at meshU and fixing bugs in existing ones We ve even seen third party sites write their own service in order to advertise GitHub Integration as a perk Everyone wins Needless to say this idea became very attractive to us open sourcing core parts of the site so motivated individuals can fix change or add whatever they see fit So we did it again with our gem builder We host Ruby packages for development versions of code The utility that creates the packages is now open source We ve had various bug fixes and security patches submitted which feels g
37. you sure method gt delete gt lt small gt lt snippet highlight gt lt hr gt lt end gt lt div gt Check our functional tests Started Finished in 22947 seconds 9 tests 13 assertions failures errors And they pass In fact you can now see div snippets and div CodeRay by looking at the source code of the index page Create a simple code snippet app with Rails by Michelangelo Altamore Aa href snippets new sCreate a new code snippet lt a gt lt he gt Snippety c i 2iew available code snippets lt h2 gt lt div ide snippets gt hr gt ait Hello world ruby f arma b gt href snippets 9 showen a href s snippets Sedit sEdit m a hrefe enippets 3 onclicke if confirm re you sure none this porenthode appendihild f methed POST faction m sekattribute type hidden m setattribute name _method m Gocument wcreate lement input j s asetAttribubed type hidden j 5 3 e eetattributed value St4odSs45r loTiebecdebT4chlaooh Sie Spbe f aama l l gt View availabl Hello world rut Show Edit Destroy puts Hello world i ali closs Codemay gt lt diy closs oo0de s lt presouts lt span clots s s lt span closs d i shquot lt clagee d siquot g spona spon preg div gt Le ir PPS By the way we ve just finished our 3 requirement Now let s
38. Create a code snippet app by Michelangelo Altamore Open Source Rails project by Dmitry Amelchenko Theme Support by James Stewart Observer and Singleton design patterns in Ruby by Khaled al Habache JRuby monitoring with JMX by Joshua Moore Ruby Web Frameworks A Dive into Waves by Carlo Pecchia How to Implement Automated Testing by Eric Anderson Ruby on Rails amp Flex by Arturo Fernandez Workflow solutions with AASM by Chee Yeo MeshU Exclusive Coverage How to build a business with Open Source by Chris Wanstrath Carl Mercier Ilya Grigorik Ryan Singer interviews by Rupak Ganguly Rails Magazine fine articles on Ruby Rails ISSN 1916 8004 E Don t listen to us Ce listen to them RPM gives your developers transparency into the performance details of our applications saving significant time in isolating bottlenecks lan McFarland Pivotal Labs New Relic s RPM has dramatically improved the way we monitor the health and performance of our applications Mark Imbriaco 37signals If you are running a Rails app of any reasonable size YOU have to use New Relic There is no way around it New Relic RPM lets you see and Tobias Liietke Shopify understand performance metrics in real time so you can fix problems With RPM we had more fast It s intuitive It s granular And time to add new its a 10 second Rails plug in install features and fix issues rathe
39. Loaded 3 438 Unloaded 22 Total 3460 CPU Lage 4 5 rer 6648 sun kools jconsaleJConsale or for JRuby use jruby J Dcom sun management jmxremote Monitoring local processes is not all that exciting Much more interesting and useful is monitoring processes on re mote servers Because of security reasons if you want to use JMX to monitor a remote JRuby process you will need to pass in some variables to the Java process when it starts To be simplistic simply start the Java process like this you can choose any port number you want java Dcom sun management jmxremote port 9999 Dcom sun management jmxremote authenticate false Dcom sun management jmxremote ssl false These options are used with JavaTM or a JavaTM applica tion server like Glassfish Tomcat Jetty etc In order to moni tor a process started with JRuby you will need to prepend the variables with J J Dcom sun management jmxremote port 9999 J Dcom sun management jmxremote authenticate false J Dcom sun management jmxremote ssl false Once the process is started with these variables you are ready to go You should be aware that when starting a Java process with these options you will be opening a huge security hole in your server Unfortunately I do not have time to cover the secure setup Please see the resource section for an article on this topic Once the process is up and running in the JConsole con nection box click the Re
40. Showcase your skills Find new clients Drive traffic to your blog or business 3 Gain karma points for sharing your knowl edge with the Ruby on Rails community 4 Get your message out Find contributors for your projects 5 Get the Rails Magazine Author badge on your site 6 You recognize a good opportunity when you see it Joining a magazine s editorial staff is easier in the early stages of the publication 7 Reach a large pool of influencers and Rails savvy developers for recruiting educating product promotion etc 8 See your work beautifully laid out in a professional magazine 9 You like the idea of a free Rails magazine and would like us to succeed 10 Have fun and amaze your friends by living a secret life as a magazine columnist Sponsor and Advertise Connect with your audience and promote your brand Rails Magazine advertising serves a higher purpose beyond just raising revenue We want to help Ruby on Rails related businesses succeed by connecting them with custom ers We also want members of the Rails community to be informed of relevant services Visit Us http RailsMagazine com Subscribe to get Rails Magazine delivered to your mailbox e Free e Immediate delivery e Environment friendly Take our Survey Shape Rails Magazine Please take a moment to complete our survey http survey railsmagazine com The survey is anonymous takes about 5 minutes to com plete and your participation
41. about it as much as you do if you accomplish this goal success will follow Be passionate and honest even if you are not the most experienced Rails developer in the world but love what you are doing that is a sure road to success Discuss http railsmagazine com 3 3 Rails Theme Support by James Stewart jagi 1 TA TE Theme Support by James Stewart Its the ideal scenario really You ve spent many many fairly modest needs Since then a couple more forks have hours into your project crafted the business logic so it s just sprung up and were working on resolving them I also man right and tuned it all to perfection And then you realize that aged to make a test suit that can help checking the state of the with just slightly tweaked views and a change of stylesheets plugin with your installed rails version that same app could serve a different audience Or perhaps that s rather rare but you re busy designing an app that from the outset will need to serve multiple clients Resources each of whom will need a bit more customization than a Project page simple choice of logo and colour scheme provide http github com jystewart theme_support tree master Test Application http github com jystewart theme_support_test_app James Stewart is a freelance web developer and consultant based in London and primarily Discuss http railsmagazine com 3 4 _ working with arts organizations and non profits
42. adipisicing Blit dmit sed do eiusmod tempor Incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua fT this should be sufficient Tey i found a little bug this page of a friend httpvwww echowaves com users 23 oddlyzen which u can find itin search for users functionality search for Mark Coates and u get the previous link which in turn gives We re sorry but something went wrong Working on a typical Open Source Rails project by Dmitry Amelchenko web application But as soon I was ready to start promoting Campfire in the office I realized that its not going to work for my company I work for one of those firms that are very concerned about sending potentially sensitive information across the wire outside of a corporate firewall But I was stub born and felt that the group chat software was exactly what my company needs to improve openness and collaboration So I decided to start hacking my own group chat web applica tion At first I just wanted to write something very similar to Campfire It is later based on users feedback when I real ized that group chat powered by social networking aspects is even more powerful and useful Also my intention was to get as many developers from my work place interested as pos sible So opensourcing the project was not really a require ment initially But in order to make my life easier and avoid any questions from the management like what do you need this server for
43. alhost 3000 we see the 404 error http flecalhost 3000 Lap Le Of course we havent yet defined any request path pro ell A rite localhost 3000 Q Google Rails Ruby Web Frameworks A Dive into Waves by Carlo Pecchia cessing Let s do it in main entry point that s the resources map rb file resources map rb module TodoManager module Resources class Map include Waves Resources Mixin on true Hi I manage your To Dos end end end Basically here we are saying that all request are served by a string as content Let s see if and how it works in practice Let s add one line on true Hi I manage your ToDos on get Hi I manage your ToDos again Refreshing the browser we can see the second string rendered This is how basically routes work in Waves At the end of this article we ll show how we can use this nice DSL domain specific language here to express routes Introducing RESTful behaviour Ok now we have to define routes for items like that e GET items displays the items list of things to do e GET items id displays the item identified by id e POST items creates a fresh new item e PUT items id modifies item identified by id e DELETE items id deletes item identified by 1d But first we need to define Item model models item rb module TodoManager module Models class Item lt Default before save do
44. apable of remembering which state it is in at any point in time and the transitions it is allowed to go through between those states and the actions that are to be triggered when a specific state is reached oe w Workflow solutions using AASM by Chee Yeo Rails N Magazine Ss A slice above Setting It Up To utilise the plugin in a Rails application simply install it ruby script plugin install http elitists textdriven com svn plugins acts_as_state_machine trunk acts_as_state_machine You would also require a state string column in the model table this is where Aaso stores the state of the object An Example For illustration purposes say we have an application which allows the user to upload video files for processing and there is a Video model Within the Video rb model add the following code to in stantiate the plugin inside Video rb Class Video lt AR Base acts_as_state_machine initial gt original state original state processing state processed enter gt set_processed_attributes state error enter gt inform_user event convert do transitions from gt original to gt processing end event converted do transitions from gt processing to gt processed end event failure do def inform_user transitions from gt processing to gt error pass message to user to inform of error with error code end etc end def set_proce
45. arty code don t add it to your application And if you feel that you do need to test certain interactions with a 3 party library it s best to separate it from your own tests Now for a less obvious example Consider the following code class User lt ActiveRecord Base has_many projects belongs_to manager class_name gt User end Do you need any automated testing for the above code More than likely you do not I have seen where over enthu siastic testers will setup fixtures and ensure that the right projects are returned and the right manager is returned for a given record But at that point are you really testing your app Or are you testing the has_many DSL provided by Rails 3 _ Rais How to Implement Automated Testing by Eric Anderson aga ee Declarative Code Another abuse of testing I often see related to the 3rd party code issue is testing declarative code The previous code example was very declarative but let me give you a more subtle example class Notifier lt ActiveMailer Base def refer_a_friend to sender url recipients to from sender subject A referal from a friend body url gt url end end Does the above code need automated testing Probably not However if we added some logic to our method or email template then the code becomes less declarative and more procedural As the code does this it starts to become a good idea to add some automated tests to ensure your pr
46. ase so we will use that The next step is to run the migration rake db migrate Now we need a controller to manage the client s requests script generate controller products Our backend is finished for now The next step is to con figure connection between it and the front end RubyAMF Constructor x In this example we ve created two datagrids Figure 3 public function Product One will use AMF to communicate with the server The other will use HT TPService We ll cover AMF First Fortunately for Rails developers we have the Ruby AMF rails plugin which will do a lot of the heavy lifting Installa tion is easy Just type the following script plugin install http rubyamf googlecode com Notice that the public attributes of this class match those svn tags current rubyamf in our Rails model We also declare that RemoteClass is Product When installation is finished we will be ready to write a our Rails model class little code for our Rails application In the config folder we can Now go back to rubyamf_config rb and add these lines of find a file called rubyamf_config rb that includes the mapping between our ActiveRecord class and our ActionScript class code ClassMappings register But we don t have an ActionScript class Lets write one It actionscript gt Product will map to the product model that we just created in rails In ruby gt Product the Flex project create a n
47. been working primar ily with PHP after migrating from Perl but given all the press around RoR at the time I decided to give it a try Havent looked back since As with many Ruby RoR developers I joined the com munity because of RoR but stayed because of Ruby At the time I was also doing some work in Python but the elegance of Ruby really appealed to me and before I knew it I was converting all of my Perl PHP code into Ruby just for the sake of getting hands on practice with Ruby Interview with Ilya Grigorik interviewed by Rupak Ganguly on May 8th 2009 Rupak What drives you to work with Rails What had drawn you towards this platform when you started and still catches your attention Ilya There are a lot of things that Rails got right right out of the gate Convention over configuration creates a bit of confusion when you re getting started but ultimately it is a liberating experience especially when the project grows larger and you have multiple people working on it Likewise database migrations in ActiveRecord To this day most other frame works are still playing catch up In fact we can go on for hours clean MVC model the fact that testing is easy and part of the regular workflow an exten sible plugin platform etc And perhaps most importantly the community around it Technology is what gave Rails the initial push the commu nity around it is what made it such a success Rupak Would you hazard a
48. chitecture of an amazing collaboration platform A long time Rails enthusiast he founded Rails Magazine as a way to give back to this amazing community Follow on Twitter http twitter com olimpiu Connect on LinkedIn http www linkedin com in ometiu Our RailsConf 2009 edition intended originally as a 2 page event report took a life of its own and ended up with 12 pages of exclusive event coverage Rails 3 information and interviews with prominent rubyists Of course these are exciting times for the entire Rails community Passenger for Nginx MacRuby HotCocoa Ruby 1 9 gem compatibility and Rails 3 rumours are just a few things keeping everyone busy Also the Matt gate incident led to self reflection and positive action including the creation of Railsbridge org an inclusive community we hope will add value to the community and complement Rails Activism efforts Without further ado Rails Magazine Issue 3 Discuss http railsmagazine com 3 1 A Word from the Editor by Olimpiu Metiu Rails Contents Editoria kA Pee ee ee ee eee rere ae eee 3 by Olimpiu Metiu Create a simple code snippet app with Rails 4 by Michelangelo Altamore Working on a typical Open Source Rails project 12 by Dmitry Amelchenko PREME SUPPO Meyer ror ete ctr etree ee rare 16 by James Stewart Observer and Singleton design patterns in Ruby 17 by Khaled al Habache JRuby Tip Monitoring with JMX seese
49. d you get involved in Ruby Rails Carl When I saw the Rails video I thought its simplicity was astonishing so I immediately became very interested in it It was definitely a huge shift from C and Visual Studio which I was using at the time I tried RoR on many small projects and was constantly frustrated by the lack of an IDE debugging tools and cryptic error messages So basically I became frustrated gave up and came back many times The more I read about RoR the more it started to make sense to me and I eventually completely stopped doing any Microsoft development to work with Ruby and Rails exclusively But not without hickups http blog carlmercier com 2007 01 30 why i moved from ruby on rails to pythondjango and back Since my return to Rails life has been great RoR is a lot ma ture now and it s easy to find help if you re stuck I wouldnt want to work with anything else now Rupak What drives you to work with Rails What had drawn you towards this platform when you started and still catches your attention Carl I love simplicity in general so Rails is a great fit You can get so much more done in so much less time with Rails especially once you understand what happens under the hood ie behind the magic Rails is really hard to beat for most applications In our case Defensio we decided to use Merb for our API and Rails for our website I think Merb is perfect for APIs since it has a pluggable architect
50. doing the same More and more people were blogging about their cool project on Github Showing off You didnt need a beta to use GitHub Only to make an account and share People with accounts could share with anyone This was pretty key everyone could see what was going on they just couldnt participate without an invite After the YouTube like blogging came the Facebook effect Once a project was hosted on GitHub it made a lot of sense to invite the other people involved The more the mer rier Like the YouTube effect this was not something we had planned for or anticipated Something we did anticipate however was our invite sys tem During a consulting gig I was introduced to the concept of artificial scarcity When you control the means of produc tion you can limit production to make a product seem more valuable Just look at the Wii Or more appropriately gold in World of Warcraft So during the beta our invite system was modeled after Gmail s once you received an invite and signed up you could then invite five others This meant people would be asking for GitHub invites on Twitter mailing lists and message boards Thered be entire threads devoted to people asking for GitHub invites It wasnt hard to get an invite you just had to ask We could have given invites to everyone who asked but this gave us free publicity and made the invites more desir able Hey these invites are rare and I got one why n
51. e application that connects to a Java process and then displays the collected information to the user It can also be used to set variables within the Java process To get started with JConsole simply execute one of these commands de pending on your OS type e Windows c path to java bin jconsole exe e Linux jconsole it should be added to the path with the Java command or path to java bin jconsole e Mac Sorry I cannot afford a Mac right now but I guess it would be similar to Linux currently the Josh Moore Mac fund is accepting donations One bug with JMX on Linux is that JMX uses the IP address found in the etc hosts file to connect to the Java process So if you execute hostname i on the machine running the JRuby process you want to monitor and the output is not your IP address then you will need to modify the etc hosts file and then restart your network process or restart your computer You should be aware that the information gathered by JConsole is session based so when the connection is closed all the gathered information will be lost Setup the Jruby JavaTM process Now that JConsole is running you will need to connect to a process so that you can monitor it With JMX you can connect to any local process without any change to it Simply click on the process and click connect see image Once con nected you will be shown information that is being collected in real time The overview tab gives
52. ec tree master http ph7spot com articles getting_started_with_autotest http thoughtbot com http rubyconf2007 confreaks com d3t1p2_rspec html http blog daveastels com http blog davidchelimsky net http www pragprog com titles achbd the rspec book Discuss http railsmagazine com 3 2 Looking Up from Below Rails A jagazine Working on a typical Open Source Rails project by Dmitry Amelchenko Working on a typical Open Source Rails project by Dmitry Amelchenko There is a lot to say about open source OS development model A typical OS Rails project has its own specifics large enough that sets it apart from the rest of other OS software projects A typical OS project usually has a build output which can be downloaded and installed a tar or a jar ora zip archive a lib file or an installable exe file while Rails out put is a Web Site A complexity of a web application deploy ment perhaps is one of the reasons why OS web application development has not became a mainstream yet Rails on the ing tools and services for free in exchange for making your code open source In this article I will be talking about some such services And the last but not the least reason is avail ability of talent if you are working on really cool OS project and utilize all the powers of the Web to promote it the chanc es are that best of the best hackers will be open to work with you What ever the reasons for p
53. ed returns true or false Events Events move or transition the object from one state to the next These are declared in the example above using the event action event convert do transitions from gt original to gt processing end This automatically adds an instance method of lt event gt to the Video class as an instance method To call an event simply call your object instance with the event name followed by an exclamation mark In our example above suppose we have a method which picks a video out of a queue for processing def some_method begin video convert calls convert event moves video from original state to processing state video has been successfully converted video converted calls converted event moves video from processing state to processed state rescue video failure calls the failure event end end It is possible to have multiple transitions statement in one event block the first one which matches the current state of the object will be called Sometimes it might be necessary to do some validation in an event loop before moving that object to the next state These are known as guards and can be used in an event block like so event convert do transitions from gt original to gt processing guard gt Proc new video video accepted_format end The example above ensures that the uploaded file is of a specific forma
54. ensive its gotta pay for itself His last project Gravatar got pretty damn popular and pretty damn expensive He ended up spending a lot of time and money scaling it Time he could have used for mountain biking and money he could have spent on scotch Unfortunately self sustaining websites are not easy It s literally the million dollar question How do we make money with this thing Well how was our competition making money Sourceforge a popular code hosting site is free for open source projects but has ads Lots of ads I hate ads I used to work at CNET on a handful of sites that were ad supported In that model it s all about volume Get as many eyeballs on your site as possible and hope a fraction of them click on the ads Deal with sales people and advertising agencies You really need to become popular before making money That works for some but not for me And it gets worse The people paying your salary arent your customers They re the advertisers Your business lives and dies by people who care about how much and what kind of traffic you drive not how good your product is They care about your demo that s short for demographic and cpms I dont even know what that s short for anymore For example each year Vista was delayed CNET had to change its budget because there would be no massive Mi crosoft advertising campaign Same story with Sony and the delayed Playstation 3 The funny thing is these
55. eople to do OS Rails projects might be you can find a list of those in two primary sources http wiki rubyonrails com rails pages OpenSourceProjects other hand opens an opportunity to develop web applica tions which can be easily installed on as many environments or on as many hosts as desired Some might ask when we are developing a web application dont we usually want to run it on a single well recognizable and unique host One of the reasons for developing OS web applications would be the fact that some industries are still heavily regulated and will not allow potentially sensitive information to be sent across a wire to some web 2 0 service but if the source code for such a service is freely available and can be installed inside corporate firewall everyone would be happy Another reason people choose to do OS web applications is availability of outstand and http www opensourcerails com For me it all started with reading Getting real book by the 37Signals it s available online at https gettingreal 37signals com To simply put it the 37Signals are the best of their kind They are by far ahead of the crowd and setting the industry standards after all they are the Rails inventors The book mostly talks about common sense when it comes to software development I was also very excited to find out about some of the web 2 0 products the 37Signals of fers One of the simplest but yet useful projects that I wanted
56. ering inconsistencies that you do with browser based applications Web applications however are easy to deploy and work on any platform Arturo Fernandez is an entrepreneur software engineer technical writer and free open software enthusiast His professional experience includes services as software engineer consultant sysadmin and project manager working on technologies like J2EE PHP and Rails He currently lives in Andalucia Spain where he founded BSNUX Software Factory http www bsnux com a company specialized in RIA and mobile applications He can be reached at arturo bsnux com S3 woe i A DAR AA Technologies like AJAX bring the web a little closer to desktop like performance at a cost of increased complex ity Developers are forced to work in multiple languages JavaScript for the front end and another language like Ruby for the back end But with Flex the you can develop an ap plication from top to bottom in one language Developing a RIA application we can join the best of desktop and web applications resulting in a cross platform application with a good and flexible look amp feel that can ex change data with other applications using standard protocols and technologies through the Internet Now let s take a look at how we can use Adobe Flex and Rails to develop great software in less time Front End and Back End A rich internet application will typically have two major components a front end whic
57. es and conditions we provide at the beginning to progress a process forward The workflow is in control of the process A state machine workflow is the reverse It is driven by external events to its completion We define the states and required transitions between those states The workflow sits and waits for an external event to occur before transitioning to one of the defined states The decision making process hap pens externally outside of the workflow there is a structure to be followed still like a sequential workflow but control is passed to its external environment What is a state machine The diagram below is a simple example of a state machine It has three main properties states events and transitions Event Button Click Power On Button Click State Transition Event A state represents a particular situation The state machine above has two main states Power On and Power Off The machine will be in one of these two states at any point in time Power Off There is only one main event in the state machine above a button click An event describes an external stimulus or input into the system In this instance a button click will either power or the state machine or power it off and both states shown above respond to the same event A transition moves the state machine from one state to the next In the diagram above following a button click if the machine is in a power on state it will
58. ew subfolder of src called valueob ject and new ActionScript class called Product This is the code type gt active_record sattributes gt id name description price for the new Product as file created_at updated_at package valueobj Now that we ve mapped the Flex Product class to the Rails Product class we can load the data into our grid You ll need to set the dataProvider property of the datagrid component lt mx DataGrid id dg dataProvider products x 10 y 100 RemoteClass alias Product public class Product width 457 gt public var id int lt mx columns gt public var name String lt mx DataGridColumn dataField id headerText ID gt public var description String lt mx DataGridColumn dataField name headerText Name gt public var price Number lt mx DataGridColumn dataField description public var createdAt Date headerText Description gt public var updatedAt Date lt mx DataGridColumn dataField price headerText Price gt lt mx columns gt w Rails Magazine lt mx DataGrid gt products will be an array of products so we will need an ActionScript variable to store data received from database Bindable private var products Array new Array Note that were using the Bindable modifier to indicate that this variable is needed by the datagrid I
59. ext line we assert that our snippet has no default name that is snippet name should evaluate to nil Then we run the active record validation on line 7 by sending the valid message on the snippet object We have fulfilled our preconditions so on line 8 we assert that we should have an error for the snippet object on the name symbol That is sufficient to express that a snippet validation should fail when it has no name Run rake test units on your console to see the following failure 1 Failure test_should_have_a_name SnippetTest test unit snippet_test rb 8 in test_should_have_a_ name lt nil gt expected to not be nil 1 tests 2 assertions 1 failures errors The next step is to make the test pass by implementing the simplest thing that could possibly work Lets modify app mod els snippet rb so that it looks like that class Snippet lt ActiveRecord Base validates_presence_of name end and run rake test units again Started Finished in 0 076376 seconds 1 tests 2 assertions failures errors The test passes We are done with that iteration Now it s your turn using the above code as a guide try to write a test that fails when the language attribute is not set on a snippet object Then implement the simplest thing that makes your test pass Do the same for the body attribute and finally con front your snippet unit test suite with mine To accomplish task 1 we still need a unique name
60. flexonrails net Wikipedia definition of AMF http en wikipedia org wiki Action_Message_Format RubyAME site http code google com p rubyamf OpenLaslo site http www openlaszlo org meshU Rails Magazine Exclusive Coverage meshU is a one day event of focused workshops on design development and team management given by those who have earned their stripes in the startup game people who can talk knowledgeably about everything from interface design to using Amazons S3 distrib uted server network meshU 2009 speakers included Chris Wanstrath Ilya Grigorik Carl Mercier and Ryan Singer to name just the few that we interviewed meshU was held on April 6th 2009 at the MaRS Collaboration Centre in downtown Toronto The official site http www meshu ca Speakers and sessions http www meshu ca speakers 2009 Pete Forde Unspace Is that an iPhone in your pocket or are you just to see me the E Rails ylagarine Brydon Gilliss Brainpark Building software the Obama way Ilya Grigorik AideRSS Event Driven Architectures Chris Wanstrath GitHub Building a Business with Open Source 2 Rails agi Fa ATA m Building a Business with Open Source by Chris Wanstrath at meshU Building a Business with Open Source by Chris Wanstrath at meshU Hi everyone I m Chris Wanstrath When I think of workshops I think of 8th grade shop class Where you fashion
61. forget that the PUT and DELETE methods are not currently supported by the browsers so one of the best way is to mimic them with PosT and some hidden parameters that is the way it is done in Rails for instance Basically here we can see how routing works A path is defined as an array of chunks items past 1234 items past name gt d items some slug here and something else items past name Conclusion As promised before wed like to shortly show how the DSL for defining routes work Well it s based on the concept of Functor fib Functor new do given 0 1 given 1 1 given Integer do n self call n 1 self call n 2 end end So we can easily create a request functor that is a functor defined on a resource class to match a given request pattern So for example class Item include Waves Resources Mixin on get name default item here end Ruby Web Frameworks A Dive into Waves by Carlo Pecchia With that it is easy to define routes based on parameters matching an expressive technique used for example in lan guages like Erlang Waves is a work in progress so we can t rely too much on it for daily activities but maybe someone will do Anyways we found it really interesting particularly on the concepts of layers we can use MVC pattern if needed but we are not forced to mold our solu
62. from open source Just dont count on it driving signups to your Nascar based social network Use open source to im prove the quality of your product not as a marketing tool And while were talking about things open source wont do for you I might as well address the big question that always comes up Why isn t GitHub open source After all WordPress is open source and still makes money hosting blogs Lots of money Why not GitHub So I actually love this question because the answer fits so well with everything I ve been talking about In fact I already gave the answer The reason GitHub isn t open source is the same reason we started GitHub open source takes a lot of time And as we all know time is money Especially so in a small company Managing bug trackers reviewing and merging patches discussions on mailing lists writing documentation these are all things wed have to do in addition to working on the site and running the business So in addition to my current job Id basically need to do a second job And my current job already takes up a lot of my time With that said it s not out of the question for the future It would just be too expensive right now I believe that by worrying about every dollar spent and every dollar earned were a much stronger company We didn t have an office at first because we couldnt afford one but now that we can we still don t We ve realized that for us it s an unnecessary e
63. ge The used CSS styles can be printed with coderay_stylesheet Create a simple code snippet app with Rails by Michelangelo Altamore The documentation tells us that 1 we can obtain coderay s stylesheet with the command coderay_stylesheet 2 we can highlight a string calling scan method on the CodeRay class In order to integrate coderay stylesheet we run the follow ing inside root folder of Snippety coderay_stylesheet gt public stylesheets coderay css You should obtain the stylesheet file To get it loaded we must modify application layout as you can see on line 6 in app views layouts application html erb file 4 lt head gt 5 lt title gt lt h yield title Untitled gt lt title gt 6 lt stylesheet_link_tag coderay application gt 7 lt yield head gt 8 lt head gt The stylesheet should be loaded now you can look at the source to be sure Atm l head tit l ezsnippets lt tit les lt Link href sty lesheets coderay css 1233468447 medig screen Y lt Link href sty lesheets app lication ces 1les342204h mediag screen Y lt head gt handy Now it s time to explore CodeRay from the Rails console script console Loading development environment Rails 2 2 2 Create a simple code snippet app with Rails by Michelangelo Altamore gt gt CodeRay gt CodeRay The gem has been correctly loaded if you can see that Let s try
64. h is the client and a back end which contains the business logic and data Rails agi 1 TAMA When you write an application in Adobe Flex you ll end up with an executable that runs on the Adobe Flash Player either inside a web browser or on another device The back end is a web application built using any technol ogy like J2EE Java Enterprise Edition PHP or Rails We ll use Rails because it s our favorite framework and because it is a good complement for Flex The next step is to learn how the front end communicates with the back end Let s get to the to code How Flex Communicates With Rails There are two ways to establish communication between Flex and Rails The first is AMF Action Message Format a protocol to exchange data through traditional RPC Remote Procedure Call The second is HT TPService a mechanism that allows Flex to make a call to the backend using the HTTP protocol AMF is good for mapping objects on the server with objects in the client Using AMF we can map an ActionScript object with a Ruby object like a model instance It s also pos sible to call a controller method directly from ActionScript sending an object as a parameter Let see how to use AMF and HT TPService with Flex in practice As an example we ll create an application with CRUD Create Read Update Delete operations over a database table of products First we ll create a front end in Flex then a back end in Rai
65. he needs of a Interview with Ilya Grigorik interviewed by Rupak Ganguly on May 8th 2009 wider audience and growing out of the MySQL LAMP stack assumption Rupak Do you think Rails risks getting bloated with all this functionality Or that it will lose its ease of use and magic as the price to pay for the newly found flexibility Ilya I think the Rails core team has a good philosophy around this One of the motivations behind merging Merb and Rails is to cherry pick the best concepts from each and one of the things Merb got right was the concept of a modu lar framework Moving forward Rails will see more of that which means you will be able to pull in libraries or entire functional components into the framework and customize it to your needs without bloating the framework itself Of course Rails will still come preconfigured with sensible defaults right out of the gate and I m guessing the vast major ity will stick with the defaults but if you really need a differ ent database adapter you ll be able to make it so Rupak If you could give someone just starting out a tip what would that be Ilya Watch the build a blog in 5 minutes video and fol low it along Hands on experience is the best way to learn and it will also let you experiment and discover the beauty of both Rails and Ruby firsthand Beyond that a good book always helps so visit your local bookstore and then do a Google search for a local Ruby Rail
66. her consideration in determining your test goals is the environment culture and business processes in your development shop Are you likely to hand your code off to someone else to maintain and never see it again Do other developers constantly pop in and out of code they are not familiar with to make changes Or is the responsibility of a piece of code more focused around a small number of devel opers maybe just you If many hands are going to be touching the codebase as in an open source project then you may need more tests Developers in this environment want to make their change run some test and feel reasonably confident they didn t mess anything up On the other hand if someone or a small group of people is going to take responsibility for the code then they will become more familiar with the application So their tests may be a bit lighter What Do You Test When you get down to the actual code how do you know the best way to test Since automated testing is so dependent on your goals general rules are hard to define The following represents a few common situations in which I ve found it useful to implement automated testing Breaking Down A Problem Automated testing can help you break down a problem the little methods that are easily testable For example suppose that you want to display a list of items in a four column table Your template code may look something like lt table gt lt for group in ob
67. igns snippets 8 assert_select div snippets do 9 assert_select div CodeRay count gt snippets size 10 end Create a simple code snippet app with Rails by Michelangelo Altamore On line 7 we are assigning to snippets the fixtures set contained in snippets ym1 that you can see under the test fixtures directory and we expect that our template contains a snippets id div tag and inside it a number of div with Cod eRay class matching the number of the snippets Running our functional tests we see Started ee Finished in 0 227583 seconds 1 Failure test_index SnippetsControllerTest Expected at least 1 element matching div snippets found lt false gt is not true 9 tests 11 assertions 1 failures errors Our test is failing Indeed we have no div snippets for our view We can implement that and produce the div CodeRay listing with the following index html erb lt title Snippety gt lt h2 gt lt link_to Create a new code snippet new_snip pet_path gt lt h2 gt lt hr gt lt h2 gt View available code snippets lt h2 gt lt div id snippets gt lt for snippet in snippets gt lt h3 gt lt h snippet name gt lt h3 gt lt small gt lt h snippet language gt lt link_to Show snippet gt lt link_to Edit edit_snippet_path snippet gt lt link_to Destroy snippet confirm gt Are
68. ing It s the sort of problem that we can all hope will disappear once we have Rails 3 and the defined public ar but for the time being some workarounds are necessary to get it working for subsequent Rails releases So in that great open source tradition a few of us have begun experimenting with the plugin over on github It began when I created a fork and found a workaround to serve my 16 Seseeeee pemamnn ii goneane perce 7 4 Uy ii al Paa U Ua 2A pasg woo Observer and Singleton design patterns in Ruby by Khaled al Habache Rails A Jagarine Observer and Singleton design patterns in Ruby by Khaled al Habache Observer and singleton are two common design patterns that a programmer should be familiar with however what made me write about them is that both are there out of the box for you to use in ruby So let s have a look at both and see how ruby help you use them directly Observer Design Pattern According to Wikipedia The observer pattern sometimes known as publish sub scribe is a software design pattern in which an object called the subject maintains a list of its dependents called observ ers and notifies them automatically of any state changes usually by calling one of their methods It is mainly used to implement distributed event handling systems So how does ruby help you implementing this design pattern Well the a
69. ipt generate nifty_layout A code snippet will have the following attributes e name e language e body Lets scaffold a basic model script generate nifty_scaffold snippet name string language string body text Migrate the database with rake db migrate start your web server with script server and point your browser to local host 3000 snippets to see a functional snippet view eoo New Snippet http Mocalhost 3000 snippets new A O New Snippet Name Language Body Soon after playing with the web interface we realize that our fresh Snippety is lacking a few things 1 language is in a free text field instead of a selectable list of available languages 2 snippet name language and body are not required nei ther on create nor on update 3 snippet body is not highlighted according to the snippet language 4 two different snippets can have the same name 5 the list of snippet show a tabular list instead of a list of snippets These functionalities represent Snippety s business value We can start by constraining a snippet to have a unique name a language and a body after that we will try to get syntax highlighting In general you should not care too much about the order of activities when the sequence is not critical and this is the case since we cant ship a unit of work missing either syntax highlighting or with a potentially inconsistent snippet collec tion Before start I rearrange o
70. irm gt Are you sure method gt delete gt lt link_to View All snippets_path gt lt small gt lt snippet highlight gt Rails ETRA nme Finally our tests are now happily passing Started Finished in 0 271848 seconds 9 tests 15 assertions failures errors We can take a break now and have a look at our applica tion s front end After the creation of a couple of code snip pets Snippety now looks like this afl Spe Cy amp ee F Rite localhost 2000 snippets A p Snippety reate a nei View available code snippets test should hawe a unique name ruby show Edi Destroy ef tant should have a unlon pare soippet one Soippet create iname gt Hello World ilanguage gt ruby tbody gt puts Hello Woridi aasert nil enippet_ ona errors oni inama Bnippet_two Snippet create iname gt anippet_one name language m gt ruby body gt def hello H snipp t_ o a bady end assert pot nil snippet two errors on name end Hello world ruby show Edit Destroy p ta Hello world While editing or creating a code snippet we have no selectable list of available languages Its time to address the issue We start by adding the requirement that a language should be presented inside a select box by placing that assertion on line 22 of snippets_controller_test rb
71. ise Rails 3 will become more flexible but less than Merb and a lot more complex Interview with Carl Mercier interviewed by Rupak Ganguly on May 5th 2009 One thing I learned in my life is that you can t be every thing to everyone and I feel that Rails is trying to become exactly that We ll see Please prove me wrong Rupak If you could give someone just starting out a tip what would that be Carl Do Don t just read books build small applications and put your newly acquired knowledge to work Facing real life problems and solving them is the best way to learn and become a better Ruby developer I m talking to you Remy Ruby Reddit is a great place to learn new Ruby and Rails tricks too Rupak What would be one thing you wish would be there in Rails today Carl While not directly related to Rails I wish more gems were 1 9 1 compatible The threading and speed of MRI is a bit pathetic We sure can t wait to switch to 1 9 1 Rupak How was MeshU for you Carl Had a blast I m particularly happy that my talk received such a great response I m surprised at the amount of email I m getting about it Definitely gives me a boost for my next talk SRC http peepcode com Carl Mercier is a serial technology entrepreneur and developer from Montreal Canada His latest venture Defensio has attracted significant interest from worldwide blogger and developer communities and has exhibited superio
72. ite an ActionScript function and set it as a callback for the Refresh button private function load void var token AsyncToken AsyncToken productService load_ all Sending an object with data from Flex to Rails is possible too To store data in the database this ActionScript function is needed private function save void var prod Product new Product prod id dg selectedItem id From Burn to Blue Ruby on Rails e Flex Building a new software generation by Arturo Fernandez prod name Name text prod description Description text prod price parseFloat Price text var token AsyncToken AsyncToken productService update prod Back in our Rails controller we need to add some CRUD methods For example def load_all products Product find all respond_to do format format amf render amf gt Product find all format xml render xml gt products to_xml end end def update product Product find params Q id product name params Q name product description params description product price params Q price respond_to do format if product save format amf render amf gt product else format amf render amf gt FaultObject new Error updating product end end end We used render amf to indicate that we re using the AMF protocol Before testing our work let s see how Flex can com municate with Rails using HTTPService
73. js in_groups_of 4 false gt lt tr gt lt for obj in group gt lt td gt lt obj gt lt td gt lt end gt lt tr gt lt end gt lt table gt Lets say you were developing this code prior to the addi tion of Array in_groups_of method to ActiveSupport before Rails 1 2 So you need to develop your own implementation of Array in_groups_of Now if you develop both this template code and the Array in_groups_of method at the same time and try to test it all at once you are really debugging two things at once This will slow you down The alternative is to develop Array in_groups_of first and write a series of tests for it Once you have the Array in_groups_of working you can be gin writing the actual template code You dont have to worry if the newly created method is going to cause you problems while implementing the template code because it s is done and tested So you should write a test when it will help you break a problem down into smaller bites It will be easier to debug than trying to debug the entire pie Dealing with Edge Cases Another good time to write test code is when you deal with edge cases such as an off by one situation Even when you think you wrote the code correctly it is very easy to miscalculate an edge case So to be confident implement a quick automated test to see if you are catching that edge case correctly M Rails Magazine How to Implement Automated Testing b
74. k on the application use it to collaborate on project related issues Some people including myself have started photo blogs there We get some very useful feedback from the community through it and also using it we communicate the news and updates back Rails agi 1 TAMA to the community Thanks to the nature of the project we could eat our own dog food so feel free to checkout echowaves and run it on your own domain or even feel free to create a conversation convo on http echowaves com Another very important thing is to make the links between your project and the github obvious I placed a link to the github location on the default landing page and made it very explicit And the very first link in my README file points back to the http echowaves com site Sites like github are crucial in helping to get attention to your project The reason you are putting it on github is probably because you want to find contributors Be open to any type of help content writers developers spelling errors catchers designers the most difficult to find suggestion makers But remember you are in charge If you really want for your project to success you need to have a vision Make sure you communi cate this vision whenever you get a chance put it in on your home page make it the first thing in your README file talk about it in your blog Do not start working on every little feature suggested right
75. k p ki i j Aj L a GG i i New Snippet F tte localhost J 000 srmppets 2 errori prohibited thhe snippet from baing tawid There were problems with the following felda e Hame con t Ge Gank a Body can t be Blank a Language cant be Blank Name agazine pe Time to move on the next one Task 2 Snippet Highlighting For this task we will use the library CodeRay by Kornelius Kalnbach Check if it is already installed on your system with gem list coderay If it is not listed you can install by running sudo gem install coderay Our aim is to let Snippety being able to use the coderay gem to render an highlighted version of a snippet body ac cording to its language syntax So we configure that dependency in config environment rb by adding the line config gem coderay We still don t know how to interact with that library How ever that knowledge is not that far away by running ri CodeRay you can see its usage I report here what is relevant for us Highlight Ruby code in a string as html require coderay print CodeRay scan puts Hello world ruby html prints something like this puts lt span class s gt amp quot Hello world amp quot lt span gt Highlight C code from a file in a html div require coderay print CodeRay scan File read ruby h c div print CodeRay scan_file ruby h html div You can include this div in your pa
76. little letters out of wood and get to play with really big saws for 50 minutes each day You remem ber right My shop class was taught by Mr let s say Allen Mr Tim Allen It s a fake name but this is a true story Mr Allen s shop had a mini computer lab in it which was very cool Stocked with state of the art IBM PCs run ning Netscape Navigator we could use Lycos Yahoo or my personal favorite Metacrawler to find and print out designs or wood patterns The computer lab was in its own room near the back of the shop I never understood why there was a second room but looking back I m pretty sure it had something to do with the combination of teenagers electric saws and expensive computer equipment In science class wed call that potential energy So the computer lab being in its own room had a door and a window or two The windows had blinds that you could close to prevent glare On days where we were independently working on an Chris Wanstrath is a co founder of GitHub http github com and an Isaac Asimov fan He lives in San Francisco never has enough time to work on his own open source projects and tweets at http twitter com defunkt in progress project Mr Allen would enter the computer lab shut the door then close the blinds Occasionally hed peak his beady little eyes out to make sure we were all still alive then quickly retreat back to his work We always joked that he was looking at por
77. loo Canada where were building a collection of services for both the consumers and publish ers of RSS content More specifically PostRank which is our core technology is an algorithm we ve developed to rank any online content based on the overall audience engagement how many people have bookmarked a story dugg it shared it on twitter etc We gather all the social engagement data in real time and make it available in a form of a filter give me only the best stories from this feed or as real time data feed for publishers Ilya Grigorik is the founder of AideRSS a real time social media engagement monitoring and analytics platform He has been wrangling with Ruby and cloud computing for over four years trying to make sense of it all In the process he has contributed to numerous open source projects blogged about his discoveries blog www igvita com twitter igrigorik and as of late has been an active speaker in the Ruby Social Media and Cloud Computing communities Previous to AideRSS I was running my own web hosting company doing some freelance work on the side and running a couple of hobby sites while I was attending University of Waterloo One thing led to another the idea for AideRSS was born we managed to find a financial partner and here we are Rupak How and when did you get involved in Ruby Rails Ilya I got into Rails around mid 2005 while working on a personal project Up to that point I ve
78. lopment rb module TodoManager mod C base gt 4 css public e end end ule Configurations lass Development lt Default database adapter gt sqlite data todomanager reloadable TodoManager log level gt debug host 127 0 0 1 port 3000 dependencies application do use Rack ShowExceptions use Rack Static urls gt javascript favicon ico root gt run Waves Dispatchers Default new end server Waves Servers Mongrel nd Ml NN jagazine And in fact after running the migration a new file con taining the Sqlite development database is generated todoman ager Now it s time to put in some HTML and CSS code We do it using Markaby the default system assumed by Waves but of course we can switch to another templating system Its an interesting way of generate HTML code by only writing Ruby snippets templates lLayouts defauLlt mab doctype html4 strict html do head do title title Link href gt css site css rel gt stylesheet type gt text css end body do hl a ToDo manager href gt items div main do Layout content end end end public css style css it s up to you to put some content here af Ok it s finally time to start Waves server to ensuring us everything is set up properly waves server And pointing out browser on http loc
79. ls First we need to create a new Flex s project The easiest way to do that is to use Flex Builder Select File gt New gt Flex Project Name the project and the main MXML file rails_ magazine Be sure to check Web Application Runs on Flash Player as shown in Figure 1 This wizard will create all of the files needed by the application The most important directory for us is src This is where our code files will reside Using Flex Builder we can build our GUI quickly via drag amp drop Widgets are on the left pane and workspace is the main area A Datagrid is a great widget offered by Flex It s used to display data loaded from the database and allow typical operations like sorting and filtering Ruby on Rails amp Flex Building a new software generation by Arturo Fernandez Create a Flex project Choegue 4 name and location for pour project and configure the tervi bechnglegy pour project will be uting Projeti mame Project locarion FEl Use default location Foder Weer Jarre ocymeng ifie ider J frailties magarine Brownia Appicati n type Qj Web application truns in Flash Playeri O I Desktop application runs in Adobe All Server ethnology Appiktatgs brett type Other J icc aod bree ve Une eeror atj LiveCycle Data Services _ Coid Fusion Farh Remoting Figure 1 Creating a new Flex project Mex Builder m ioh dom dk1G Amua Q Fian Developman Adai Fea Beide J
80. melchenko specializes in companies in New York City and Boston web sites as a software engineer mentor and architect Experienced in C Java and Ruby languages Witnessed first hand the evolution of web applications development from CGI to J2EE to Ruby on Rails Currently works on number of open source projects hosted on github at http github com dmitryame As great as it sounds it does not come for free there are few simple things to keep in mind Here is what I had to do make things moving Make sure to write reasonable README in you rails project It will appear on the repos home page for your project on github and most often people will judge your project based on the first impression they get from that README file So make sure it has an executive summary of your project as well as simple installation instruc tions In my opinion this is all there is to README file If you start putting more things into it and it became long it will distract attention and will turn people away Next make sure you have a demo installation of your project that people can play with before they make a decision to install your project on their local machines Preferably this should be a dedicated host with a catchy name that hopefully matches the name of your proj ect on github My reference installation for instance is http echowaves com By now it s actually more then just a reference installation The developers that wor
81. mote Process radio box and then enter in the host name or IP address followed by the port number i e localhost 8004 Once the connection is estab lished you can use JConsole in the same manner that you would for a local process Resources MX home page JRuby Tip Monitoring with JMX by Joshua Moore Joshua Moore grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania USA On the farm he learned that hard work is not easy and that he did not like to get dirty So he started down the path of computer programming less dirt but still hard work He liked Java and worked mostly with desktop application development until about a year ago when he decided he could not ignore web development any longer he ignored it before because he did not want to fight different browsers to get his applications to work right But different browser rendering or not here he is using Ruby on Rails mostly JRuby on Rails and loving it He chose Rails because it was simple powerful and no configuration needed Check out his blog http www codingforrent com Twitter kaiping email josh codingforrent com Josh is a columnist with Rails Magazine where he publishes regularly on JRuby Conclusion This is a quick introduction to JMX This article has barely scratched the surface of what JMX can really do The real power of JMX can be leveraged in many different ways Some of these ways include writing your own MBeans to collect or set custom informatio
82. n but in real ity he was probably looking at houses reading the news or hopefully trying to find a new job No He was looking at porn The police got involved and he was fired the next semester I didnt learn much in shop class but I did learn one thing the Internet can be used for good or evil And just to be clear I m not saying Mr Allen s behavior was necessarily evil But at school around children Creepy 8th grade as it happens was also when I discovered open source I went to a Linux install fest at the University of Cin cinnati with some of my older friends and put Red Hat Linux on my family s Compaq Presario Sorry Mom and Dad It didn t have a window system only console mode and was the first time in my life I felt like a badass Like a hacker in the movies Awesome Over the next few years I worked at a Linux based ISP worked in a Windows based IT department wrote ASP wrote PHP loved the GPL hated the GPL then eventually ended up here Today I work at GitHub a company I co founded last year In this workshop I m going to talk about the ways we ve used the web and open source to stay cheap and help grow our business from a bootstrapped startup to a profitable company And no porn I promise Git is a version control system similar to Subversion or CVS It was written for the Linux Kernel and is used by proj ects such as Ruby on Rails Scriptaculous YUI Perl Android and the open sou
83. n and writing your own JMX client to log the performance of you application For further informa tion on these advanced topics checkout the resource section http java sun com javase technologies core mntr mgmt javamanagement More Information and JMX Authentication http java sun com j2se 1 5 0 docs guide management agent html jmx4r a gem to create a JMX client in JRuby http github com jmesnil jmx4r tree master jmx a gem to create a JMX client and custom MBeans http ruby dzone com news jmx gem released How to write custom MBeans http docs sun com app docs doc 816 4178 6madjde4b a view Using JConsole also explains what all the different Java TM memories mean http java sun com javase 6 docs technotes guides management jconsole html Discuss http railsmagazine com 3 6 Rails agar ATE a Rails ani 1 TATA Workflow solutions using AASM by Chee Yeo Workflow solutions using AASM by Chee Yeo Workflow Definition A workflow is an abstract representation of real work undertaken by a single or complex group of individuals or mechanisms It describes a system of activities enabled through a collection of resources and information flows Workflows are primarily used to achieve some form of pro cessing intentions such as data processing There are two main forms of workflows sequential and state machine Sequential workflows are predictable They utilize the rul
84. ng web framework particularly the ones based on Ruby Now its time for Waves It s defined by its developers as a Resource Oriented Architecture ROA framework But what does that mean Starting from the following facts they derive that the mvc way is only one of the possibilities to build and code web ap plications e The Web itself is based on resources and the spreading of REST over other protocols is a clear symptom of that e Reasoning in terms of resources give you the possibility to use all the huge existing infrastructures of the web caching URI MIME types RSS and so on e When properly structured a ROA application can be less costly to maintain and to integrate with other ap plications e After all HTTP has demonstrated to be a good choice for that a protocol that calls methods on resources e Methods GET PUT POST DELETE e Resource things identified and accessed by an URI So the most interesting things about this framework can be summarized here e Embrace of resources approach the key of Waves are resource and the routing features heavily work with that e The application behaves like a proxy of resources we can have multiple request paths invoking the same set of resources e It s based like Rails at least with 2 3 version and Merb on Rack e It runs on JRuby In Waves we can see an application basically as a com posed stack of functionalities Application
85. non EOS 5D Mark II David is practicing photography at home and in his travels David is best known as the creator of Ruby on Rails Photo gallery http www flickr com photos 46457493 N00 Twitter http twitter com dhh Blog http www loudthinking com Wikipedia http en wikipedia org wiki David_Heinemeier_Hansson Front cover Munching strawberry by David Heinemeier Hansson Back cover Howling in the Park by Huw Morgan Discuss http railsmagazine com 3 14 n Rails agazine Interview with Ryan Singer interviewed by Rupak Ganguly on May 2009 Rupak Can you please tell us about your background briefly for the benefit of the readers How and when did you get involved in Ruby Rails Ryan I started with web design when I was a teenager and freelanced until I joined 37signals in 2003 At that time we were a UI design consultancy mainly doing redesigns of existing websites Shortly after I came on board we started de signing Basecamp and connected with DHH After Basecamp launched in 2004 and Rails was extracted we found ourselves focused on writing applications instead of consulting for cli ents Parallel to the company s transition I also found myself becoming more interested in software and found my role as UI designer going beyond web design to software design Rupak What drives you to work with Rails What had drawn you towards this platform when you started and still catches your
86. nswer is by mixing the observable module into your subject observed object Let s take an example let s suppose we have a banking mechanism that notifies the user by several ways upon with drawal operations that leaves the account with balance less or equal to 0 5 If we look deeply at this problem we can qualify it as a good candidate for observer design pattern where the bank account is our subject and the notification system as the observer Here is a code snippet for this problem and it s solution require the observer lib file require observer class Notifier end class EmailNotifier lt Notifier def update bank_account if bank_account balance lt 10 puts Sending email to bank_account owner in forming him with his account balance bank_account balance send the email mechanism end end cla d end ss SMSNotifier lt Notifier ef update bank_account if bank_account balance lt 0 5 puts Sending SMS to bank_account owner informing him with his account balance bank_account balance e end cla i a d it d end send sms mechanism end nd ss BankAccount include the observable module nclude Observable ttr_reader owner balance ef initialize owner amount owner balance owner amount adding list of observes to the account add_observer EmailNotifier new add_observer SMSNotifier new nd
87. o mention that you are looking for contributors Next investigate your local ruby and rails community present at one of the local Ruby or Rails groups meetings as well if not able to present at least send an email to the local Ruby group and introduce yourself explain what you are doing and why mention that you are open to sugges tions and looking for volunteers One comment about com Working on a typical Open Source Rails project by Dmitry Amelchenko munity support I have to make if you run into a technical issues on the project then the local community mailing list is the great resource so do not hesitate to use it For example when I was looking for a library that supports chats in the browser before spending much time on research I asked the question on a Boston Ruby group mailing list I ve received a suggestion to use Orbited and that ended up being one of the best architectural decision I had made on the project Or bited is easy to install and configure and is rock solid I actu ally sometimes forget that I use it at all it works like a well oiled machine and you never have to worry about restarting it maybe once every few months when a new release comes out and I want to upgrade Depending on your project and budget you might con sider to start paid ad campaigns I feel the majority of the OS Rails projects might not benefit from it especially at the early stages I tried to run Google AdWords as well
88. ocedural code is behaving correctly Markup Testing Often developers will over test an applications output This can make it very high maintenance to update without J MO G OF OULOo providing much benefit in return A perfect example of this is the markup in your templates Testing for certain key bits of markup in your generated templates can be useful to automatically determine if your templates are being generated correctly But it s a mistake to start testing too much markup as it is very likely to change as the design of the application evolves Your automated testing will never be able to see if the page looks right So by over testing markup all you re doing is increasing maintenance costs when someone does want to make markup changes Testing For Error Messages Another area where developers over test is error mes sages It s a mistake to test for specific error messages Error messages are very likely to get reworded so testing for the exact text will make your tests fragile Instead try to find a way to test that an error occurred and maybe what type of error without doing character by charac ter comparison of the error messages Perhaps you can check a error code or verify the exception thrown was a certain type of exception For example in a functional test of a controller you may want to make sure the flash warning was set and not flash notice when testing to ensure an error is processed c
89. of the highly successful LAMP stack It stands for Linux Apache MySQL and PHP or Perl or Python Our own version looks more like Linux Nginx MySQL Ruby Git Bash Python C Monit God Xen HAProxy and memcached But none of those start with a vowel and LAMP is very pronounceable Basically going with a LAMP based stack is pretty much a no brainer unless youre a Java or Microsoft shop in which case youre probably not a bootstrapped startup on a budget But we were so we went with it Running an open source stack with a background working with open source libraries mean youre constantly looking for code to extract and release from your own projects The first thing we open sourced very early on was the Git interface library called Grit There was nothing like it avail able at the time and it remains a very core piece of our site It would have been easy for us to think Grit was some magical secret sauce a competitive advantage but we now know how wrong that would have been In fact Id say one of the most competitively advantageous things we did was open source Grit A few weeks after its release a man by the name of Scott Chacon published a competing library His had some amaz ing stuff in it but lacked certain features Grit excelled at Tom and I chatted with Scott and eventually convinced him to merge his code into Grit creating one library to rule them all A few months later we hired Scott He went on to
90. ood Fixes and patches that perhaps would have otherwise been overlooked had we kept the source closed Open sourcing this component also means people can run the builder on their local machine before submitting a pack age to GitHub and have some idea of whether or not they re doing things correctly Cool With the final successful project I want to talk about we went the opposite direction Tom created a static site genera tor in his free time called Jekyll When we launched static site hosting integrating Jekyll was obvious Since then we ve had dozens of bug fixes submitted and features contributed by people who want to use GitHub for their static site but needed just a little bit more out of Jekyll Now they have it And sure our site does cater to developers But open source has its own community that any business can take advantage of and contribute back to At my last startup we open sourced a JavaScript plugin wed developed I thought that people would see the plugin and get interested in the startup maybe sign up for a trial ac count Peek around Dip their toe in Didnt happen Should ve known But That did not stop people from using and contributing to the plugin Even though the users of my site werent adding features they wanted other people were My customers were still benefiting from open source probably without even knowing the concept existed Your site doesn t need to be developer centric to benefit
91. ook at autotest Conclusion Initial requirements for snippety have been fulfilled If it this exercise were real it would be now released to the users and we would await feedback from them Maybe they would like more languages the addition of line numbers etc What is important is that now you should be more famil iar with TDD As you have seen the concept is easy to grasp and you can use it effectively on your own projects Indeed Test Unit is great but some people are happier when they can minimize Ruby s syntactic sugar impact on tests still using it to express their tests in a readable language that is meaningful for the application Shoulda by Thoughtbot addresses this issue You can learn by their nice tutorial I cant close without mentioning RSpec the original Be haviour Driven Development framework for Ruby If you feel Create a simple code snippet app with Rails by Michelangelo Altamore PENE Magazine curious you could have a look at a great talk by Dave Astels and David Chelimsky where it is explained what BDD is and where it comes from By the way if you are interested The RSpec Book beta has been recently published I hope you ve find it useful and thank you for your time Resources http github com ryanb nifty generators tree master http github com ryanb http coderay rubychan de http railscasts com http github com thoughtbot shoulda tree master http github com dchelimsky rsp
92. orrectly The actual text of the flash message is less impor tant What is more important is that the correct type of flash message was Set Final Words It s important not to be lured into thinking that because your tests pass your application is bug free Absence of fail ure is not proof of perfection Automated testing should be considered a first step Make sure to use your application in a real browser and use it often Setup your application to report errors to you Tools like the exception_notifier plugin are extremely valuable because your automated testing is only going to test for the things you can guess might go wrong But that is really just a small fraction of what can go wrong In conclusion automated testing is an excellent tool to speed up development and integration avoid regression and gain confidence in your application s correctness But dont fall in to the trap of blindly implementing thousands of tests just because someone says you are a bad developer if you dont Often 100 coverage is overkill and it can sometimes even be a detriment to your application Instead always con sider your end goals when developing a test suite Discuss http railsmagazine com 3 9 Ruby on Rails e Flex Building a new software generation by Arturo Fernandez Rails NN Jagazine Ruby on Rails amp Flex Building a new software generation by Arturo Fernandez Introduction A new generation of applications
93. ot give this GitHub thing a try Unable to afford any advertising or traditional marketing the Gmail style beta system worked better than we could have hoped Combined with the YouTube and Facebook effect we were starting to see real traction without spending any money on ads n Rails i Fe ub y TATA Looking back there is another more traditional term for what was happening Word of mouth If you re building a website you have a huge advantage over more traditional businesses all of your potential cus tomers have access to the Internet You don t need to buy bill boards get written up in newspapers or buy commercials on TV in the hopes of getting your name out there The Internet provides better faster and cheaper means of advertising Best of all its more trustworthy and authoritative Friends recommend quality products to friends Its not some baseball player on a TV ad but a person you trust Somehow this is still a secret Companies still believe that what works offline will work online The longer they believe that the better it is for all of us who know better However we did get curious We started dabbling with Google AdWords and advertising on small blogs We spon sored regional conferences We gave away t shirts Who knows maybe wed find a hit The Adword conversion rates were abysmal I m glad that we gave it a shot but for our business it just doesn t work We ve found people
94. ower and flexibility of Amazons web services Read more about it here http aws amazon com EC2 is easy to setup and use They constantly add new features They offer a FREE static IP address a must for a serious web site hosting They finally support persistent file system storage in addition to their S3 web service The scaling is easy the bandwidth is outstanding the billing is a pay as you go model so no costly contracts no capacity planning ahead of time and no hidden costs just use what you can afford to pay for at the moment and pay only for the things you need at the moment In the future when the site grows above first million users and the investors start banging on your door offering loads of cash you will be able to scale with your eyes closed But that s a story for another article After you are done setting up the project and developers start contributing their talent to the project your reference installation is up and running and you actually have some thing to show then it s time to start promoting your project For me the most natural place to start was at work After all the project was initially started as a collaboration tool for the office I installed the app on my personal sandbox and held a lunch presentation for developers Doing a presentation you will be able to get an instant feedback you will know right away if your idea is worth anything to people During the presentation do not forget t
95. pp with Rails by Michelangelo Altamore 1i lt f select language languages gt 12 lt p gt 13 lt p gt 14 lt f label body gt lt br gt 15 lt f text_area body gt 16 lt p gt 17 lt p gt lt f submit Submit gt lt p gt 18 lt end gt rake test functionals says that Started Finished in 0 3083 seconds New Code Snippet Name Language v Ruby java C 9 tests 16 assertions failures errors We have no failures It means that we have a working select list We have caused some eyebrow raising since a good can didate model property is placed inside a local variable of the view layer We should refactor it and refactor it without making the tests fail You can see how in snippet rb 1 class Snippet lt ActiveRecord Base 2 LANGUAGES w Ruby JavaScript Java C 4 end And in _form html erb 7 lt p gt 8 lt f label language gt 9 lt f select language Snippet LANGUAGES gt 10 lt p gt Sure enough we see that the tests are still passing Started e Finished in 43375 seconds 9 tests 16 assertions 2 failures errors As a side effect the form partial change also provided a working implementation for the edit action without its own test As a simple exercise you can modify the test_edit meth ods on your functional test suite for covering that action If you are tired of using rake to launch your test suite you can take a l
96. r filtering performance Defensio was acquired by Websense Inc a publicly traded company in January 2009 Carl is now director of software development at Websense Carl also founded Montreal on Rails a developer community group that brings together local Ruby on Rails enthusiasts for monthly gatherings Prior to founding Defensio Carl started Adonis Technologies a company that built advanced management software for the tourism amp recreation industry It was acquired in 2006 Carl holds degrees in business management and sound engineering He also pretends to be able to beat just about anyone at poker He blogs at http blog carlmercier com and tweets at http twitter com cmercier DISCUSS http railsmagazine com 3 12 reencas ts PeepCode Screencasts are high quality tutorials that will get your team up to speed with Git source code control help you learn Introduce your designers to the take you in depth with teach you and not to mention and deployment and other topics you need to know about Only 149 for a full year or 9 for a single screencast Rails aga F ATE N 4 Rails agi 1 TAMA Interview with Ilya Grigorik interviewed by Rupak Ganguly on May 2009 Rupak Can you please tell us about your back ground briefly for the benefit of the readers Ilya I m the founder and chief Ruby wrangler at AideRSS a startup based in Water
97. r than scanning through piles of log files Rick Olson Lighthouse Take RPM Lite for a spin it s free NewRelic com We used the other tools out there and were NOT happy until we switched to New Relic was amazed how much we found in just a few hours of monitoring We got the real time picture be had vg o reaming apout O New Relic Yaroslav bath railsware Rails Performance Management A Word from the Editor by Olimpiu Metiu Welcome to the largest edition of Rails Magazine yet The past couple of months were hectic as usual with our team expanding to 7 people http railsmagazine com team not including our many authors and columnists hitp railsmagazine com authors Should you find an article particularly useful or enjoyable please take a moment to send a thank you note to the appropriate author or editor they worked hard on a volunteer basis to share their knowledge in a professional format To help the magazine continue on we are looking for additional help please contact us if interested in joining the editorial team Olimpiu Metiu is a Toronto based architect and web strategist He led the Emergent Technologies group at Bell Canada for the past couple of years and his work includes many of Canada s largest web sites and intranet portals Recently Olimpiu accepted a position with Research in Motion the maker of BlackBerry where he is responsible with the overall ar
98. rce code that powers Reddit GitHub is a site that lets you publish Git repositories either public or private Tom Preston Werner and I started working on it in 2007 while we both had other jobs He was at the natural language search startup Powerset while I was running a consulting business with PJ Hyett Both Tom and I were big fans of open source I had re leased dozens of projects and contributed to many and Tom was the same way We were both so active in open source that it was begin ning to take a toll Neither of us had created any huge proj ects but we had lots of little ones and the time was adding up Managing bug trackers reviewing and merging patches discussions on mailing lists writing documentation on and on GitHub was our solution a way to streamline the open source process A way to make contributing accepting and publishing code stupid simple In the same way that Django or Rails does the tedious stuff so you can focus on your ap plication we wanted GitHub to let you focus on your code At least that s the official sales pitch version In reality I just wanted GitHub to let me focus on my code I ve learned from experience that I m much better at building things for Building a Business with Open Source by Chris Wanstrath at meshU myself than I am at building things for other people Tom had learned from experience that if you re going to have a side project with the potential to be resource int
99. read patch code base The learning curve is a little steeper because everything is so configurable and flexible but sometimes that s what you want On the other hand Rails comes with great defaults and just works out of the box No dependency problems or deci sions about which ORM to use I love that about Rails When we decided to rewrite our API with Merb we wanted speed and flexibility We felt that Rails had too many unnecessary bells and whistle for a simple API For our web site I think it made a lot of sense to use Rails because of all the goodies that comes with it I find that Rails has been losing a lot of its simplicity lately and that s scaring me Learning Rails used to be extremely easy just watch the infamous Whoops video in which DHH creates a simple blog in 5 minutes Couldnt be easier than that Nowadays creating the same simple blog using Rails best practices is much more complex and confusing because it involves understanding REST principles nested resources migrations etc There s also many new terms floating around like Metal Templates Engines Rack etc that makes Rails more cryptic overall This probably sounds very straight forward to most readers but it is not to less experienced developers or Rails nOObs I find that the learning curve has become steeper overall Merb focuses on flexibility and Rails focuses on simplic ity I fear that the result of the merger will just be a compro m
100. roject consider what level of reli ability is important to the success of your project Current Project Iteration Even when developing the next flagship product for your company you dont necessarily need 100 code coverage It s crucial to consider the current state of development For example is this a exploratory project A minor or are you implementing version 8 0 of an established product In the early phases of a project you often don t know what to build Often you ll find that your early ideas about the project were incomplete and some major refactoring is in order And if you spent a lot of time making the first itera tion bulletproof you re out of luck Not only are you going to scrap or refactor large chunks of the application but you must also scrap or refactor all of the tests for that code When writing your tests consider how confident you are that the application you are developing will be the same ap plication after an iteration or two Personally if I am doing exploratory programming most of my tests are in my models since those are less prone to change My controller tests are few as application flow is quite likely to change I do very little testing of the template output as that is most likely to change And integration testing is non existent at this point On the other hand if I am develop ing iteration five of a well defined project then my tests are much more complete Development Process Anot
101. s user group or a meetup I guarantee it you ll be pleasantly surprised at how helpful other Rubyists will be as you begin your foray into the won derful world of Ruby Rupak What would be one thing you wish would be there in Rails today Ilya An easier deployment model and more ubiquitous Rails support amongst hosting providers Phusion Passenger is a great step forward as it eliminates an entire class of infra structure reverse proxies and distinct app servers but I m still hoping for more alternatives moving forward Heroku and other hosting providers are building their own one click deploy models which is great to see but I m also keeping my fingers crossed for JRuby Glassfish as an easy alternative it would mean one click deploys on any JVM stack Rupak How was MeshU for you Ilya It was a fantastic event I really enjoyed both Mesh and MeshU If youre in Toronto GTA area and havent at tended definitely check it out in 2010 What I enjoyed most was the relatively small size of the event which meant that you could easily chat with the speakers about their talks and go in depth on any given topic Looking forward to the next one already Discuss http railsmagazine com 3 13 Rails ylagarine Artist Profile Illustration for this issue was kindly provided by David Heinemeier Hansson David was born in Copenhagen Denmark and moved to Chicago US a few years ago Equipped with a Ca
102. sessssssesssesese 20 by Joshua Moore Workflow solutions using AASM sssssesssssssssesesesesees 22 by Chee Yeo Ruby Web Frameworks A Dive into Waves 26 by Carlo Pecchia How to Implement Automated Testing 0 0 0 32 by Eric Anderson Ruby on Rails amp Flex Building a new software generation 35 by Arturo Fernandez Building a Business with Open Source eee 42 by Chris Wanstrath Interview with Carl Mercier ae meee aa 46 Interview with Uya Grigorik saoe ea 48 Interview with Ryan Singer oisin 50 interviews by Rupak Ganguly ylagarine a Rails aiaga ATE Create a simple code snippet app with Rails by Michelangelo Altamore Create a simple code snippet app with Rails by Michelangelo Altamore In this article you will see how to create a basic source code snippet application I will use tests to drive development step by step and provide a practical example I assume that you are familiar with Ruby on Rails basic concepts You should have a working environment with a recent version of Ruby gt 1 8 7 RubyGems gt 1 3 0 and of course Rails gt 2 1 Initial Sketching We create a new rails application called Snippety rails snippety cd snippety and install nifty_generators by Ryan Bates as a plugin by running script plugin install git github com ryanb nifty generators git so that we can quickly generate a simple layout with the command scr
103. set with params updated on gt Time now end after save do set with params name gt self id end def date updated on strftime d m Y end end end end Due to implementation of find methods for the control ler maybe broken we have to define a name column in the model and be sure it acts like an id field Let s insert some data using the console waves console gt gt t TodoManager Models Item new gt lt TodoManager Models Item values gt gt gt t content finish waves introductory article gt finish waves introductory article gt gt t status todo gt todo gt gt t save gt lt TodoManager Models Item values content gt finish waves introductory article Status gt todo id gt 1 updated_ on gt Mon Dec 29 12 00 00 0100 2008 gt gt gt t gt lt TodoManager Models Item values content gt finish waves introductory article Status gt todo id gt 1 updated_ on gt Mon Dec 29 12 00 01 0100 2008 gt gt gt t id It s time to define the correct request mappings resources map rb module TodoManager module Resources class Map include Waves Resources Mixin redirect request do items on get redirect items GET items on get items do items controller item all view item list items gt items
104. sites like http reddit com or http slashdot com or http digg com just dont be discour aged if your post does not get high ratings or does not get published at all as in my case with By the time you start actively promoting your project it helps to start monitoring your site statistics I use Google Analytics which is free and offers a lot of different metrics Rails ylagarine Echo Waves Overview by Khaled Al Habache Echowaves is an ambitious project with many features of interest In a way you can use it as a free Campfire like group chatting tool We the RailsMagazine staff use it to hold our regular overseas meetings using our private Convo conversa tion However that s only one side of it Echowaves adds the social aspect to chat making it more into Conversation based site You can create new conversations and share your thoughts check popular conversations and follow them and also you can follow users and check what conversations are most of interest for them Echowaves can also be used as a Web 2 0 live forum where topics and replies can be seen instantly A nice thing is the ability to embed photos and videos and to attach files This makes the conversations more interactive also it makes it fit personal and gallery pages Echowaves acts as an OpenAuth provider and exports data in various formats to help developers make use of the public data If you like to chat blog post
105. ssed_attributes update name of file move file to permanent storage end end of Video model location etc The acts_as_state_machine directive includes the plugin with d es as an initial state of original When a new video file is uploaded a Rails agi 1 TAMA Workflow solutions using AASM by Chee Yeo and a new video object created this is the first state it will be in Note that although the plugin looks for a column called state in the database table this can be overridden in the directive like so acts_as_state_machine initial gt original column gt my_state_column The diagram below illustrates the current state machine of the video model The three main components which the AASM plugin needs to make it work are states events and callbacks Chee Yeo is a 30 year old open source enthusiast from the United Kingdom He is currently a Ruby on Rails developer and has produced and launched small to medium sized applications He enjoys blogging and writing articles about Rails and contributing to open source Chee is also the founder of 29 Steps a web agency specializing in Ruby Rails and web development See how they can help at http 29steps co uk States The possible states an object can be in are defined using the state keyword The name of the state is expressed as a symbol This generates an additional method of lt state gt to query the state of the object video process
106. t s very important to indicate in Flex code that we need AMF to invoke remote methods so we will write this code lt mx RemoteObject id productService destination rubyamf endpoint http localhost 3000 rubyamf_gateway source ProductsController showBusyCursor true result resultHandler event fault faultHandler event gt RemoteObject is a component offered by Flex to manage communication with the backend Properties like result and fault will invoke a different ActionScript functions The result callback indicates what to do when the request is complete In this case we store the result of each request in the products ActionScript array The fault callback is for error handling Add this code to rails_magazine mxml a m _ A n 38 Ruby on Rails e Flex Building a new software generation by Arturo Fernandez private function resultHandler event ResultEvent void products event result as Array Remember products is a bindable array which is associ ated to our datagrid The connection between components is automatic It is important however to keep in mind that communication with the backend is asynchronous CRUD operations are accessible through the GUIs but tons When clicked each button invokes a corresponding Rails action For example to list all products in the datagrid we need to call the load_all method of the controller class To do this we can wr
107. t via the accepted_format method and state tran sition will not be continued if it fails if it returns false Callbacks The enter action at the end of a state statement is used to define a callback Callbacks are defined to trigger code once the object is transitioning into that particular state These could be either methods or Proc objects If a callback is defined as a symbol like in the example above the instance method of the object with the same name will be called In the Video example when the object has reached the processed State it fires a method called set_processed_attri butes which updates the object accordingly There are two other actions which could be used in a state declaration after and exit The after callback gets triggered after the model has already transitioned into that state and exit gets called once the object leaves that state We could make our Video example more expressive by defining two additional callback methods to be triggered once the object has reached the processed state Ee Workflow solutions using AASM by Chee Yeo Rails ylagazine state processed Conclusion enter gt set_processed_attributes The AASM plugin is a great tool to have when you need after gt Proc new video video move_file to implement state based behaviours in your application Although the same could be achieved by rolling your own the expressiveness of
108. ticularly important is the startup rb file when a Waves application starts startup rb require foundations classic require layers orm providers sequel module TodoManager include Waves Foundations Classic include Waves Layers ORM Sequel end Now lets create a migration for our basic resource rake schema migration name create items that generates the file schema migrations 001_create_items rb we ll fill with schema migrations 001 create items rb class CreateItems lt Sequel Migration def up create table items do primary key 1id string name String content String status timestamp updated on end end def down drop table items end end As told before here we are using Sequel ORM but of course we can choose whatever fits our needs ActiveRecord Data Mapper etc Now we can launch the migration with rake schema migrate But wait Where is the database configuration All con figuration defau options live in configurations rb namely lt rb development rb produ Carlo Pecchia is an 1T engineer living in Italy ecosystems Ruby web application development code quality He can be reached through his blog ction rb Its main interests are related to Open Source or on Twitter http carlopecchia eu http twitter com carlopecchia Development and production modes inherit from default setups In CO development we find nfigurations deve
109. tion on it Moreover a strong separation of concerns can be done at resource levels clearly assuring for example that some filters are applied for a given set of resources Happy coding DISCUSS http railsmagazine com 3 8 Setting a Temporal Mark a m i A u 7 a ae s ar gt Y i F Resources Dan Yoder s talk at RubyConf2008 http rubyconf2008 confreaks com waves a resource oriented framework html Waves http rubywaves com Rack http rack rubyforge org Merb http merbivore com Sinatra http sinatra rubyforge org Ramaze http ramaze net Sequel http sequel rubyforge org Markaby http github com why markaby iat 31 ne Rails lagi 1 TA nme How to Implement Automated Testing by Eric Anderson agi 1 TAMA m How to Implement Automated Testing by Eric Anderson You will find no shortage of discussion on which tools you should use to implement your automated test suite What s often lacking is discussion of exactly how and what to test The goal of this article is to provide this information Determine Your Goals Testing isn t a cookie cutter process Each project has its own unique goals and those goals will determine what is important to test and what is not Moreover testing is neither good nor bad It s only a tool to help you reach specific goals Some people treat automated testing like a moral decision They insist that if you
110. tiveRecord Observer def after_create user send a welcome email end end You can generate the previous observer using the follow ing command ruby script generate observer User You still can have observers that map to models that don t match with the observer name using the observe class method you also can observe multiple models using the same method class NotificationObserver lt ActiveRecord Observer Hanging Low E Observer and Singleton design patterns in Ruby by Khaled al Habache Rails ylagarine observe user post Khaled al Habache is a software def after_create record engineer and a senior RoR engineer A fan of open source and big projects and research based work end Currently giving part of his time for Ruby community and other web related work on ene his blog http www khelll com Khaled is a Rails Magazine contributing editor and maintains our regular Ruby column send thanks email Finally dont forget to add the following line inside config environment rb to define observers config active_record observers user_observer confl load_config home khelll conf yml Singleton Design Pattern conf2 AppConfig instance According to Wikipedia puts confl conf2 In software engineering the singleton pattern is a design pattern that is used to restrict instantiation of a class to one object This concept is also sometimes generalized to restrict
111. transition to the power off state and vice versa Not all transitions move the state machine to a new state it is possible to loop back to the same state A state machine does not just store states and events alone It can also execute code when an event arrives In the example above the state machine can be designed to control electricity flow when it transitions to a new state following a button click event State Machine in Rails Sometimes you need to track the state of a model in an application and the transitions between a set of pre defined states which are triggered based on certain events Or you might need to express the business logic of your application using a workflow to illustrate the flow of state changes based on its events For example you might have an ap plication that allows the user to upload files for processing and you need to provide some form of mechanism to track the file while it is added to a queue for processing and to provide some form of feedback to inform the user of the status of the out come success or an error and the relevant action to take based on the outcome if an error occurred inform the user This can be modelled by adding a state or status column in your model table and updating it as you go along However it becomes tedious and error prone when multiple states are involved The acts_as_state_machine AASM plugin converts any model into a Finite State Machine c
112. unit snippet_test rb 44 in test_should_ren der_highlighted_html lt lt div class CodeRay gt n lt div class code gt lt pre gt puts lt span class s gt lt span class d1 gt amp quot lt span gt lt span class k gt Hello world lt span gt lt span class dl gt amp quot lt span gt lt span gt lt pre gt lt div gt n lt div gt n gt expected but was lt nil gt 5 tests 9 assertions 1 failures errors It fails since the highlight method actually returns nil We are ready to implement source highlighting by writing the implementation that we have already seen using the console and hopefully making the tests pass def highlight CodeRay scan self body self language html div end We try our tests again Started Finished in 111017 seconds 5 tests 9 assertions failures errors And they pass We can highlight source code snippets now and we have a test that confirms that However we can t show highlight source code for anyone until we modify the snippet views Your first instinct could be to look for snippet views Rails ylagarine a Rails agi 1 TATA m manually customize them and finish the work That would be great however you will end up without any tests for your controller or views and that is not good We instead maintain discipline and proceed with the next task Task 3 Action Views Customization
113. ur previous list according to their priority and express each as an expectation 1 each snippet should have a mandatory unique name language and body 2 each snippet body should be rendered highlighted ac cording to its language 3 index action should list snippets in a blog style way 4 snippet language should be chosen from a selectable list of languages instead of free text Now that we know where to head for we can start our first iteration Task 1 Snippet Validation The business logic of Snippet requires a mandatory unique name a stated programming language and a body We will implement this starting with tests Test Driven Development TDD basically means that for any new requirement we first add a new test asserting what should happen for a case and then we will implement code so that the new test and all of the old tests are satisfied Let s start by editing test unit snippet_test rb and imple menting a test method named test_should_have_a_name that fails when the snippets name is not present 1 require test_helper 2 3 class SnippetTest lt ActiveSupport TestCase Create a simple code snippet app with Rails by Michelangelo Altamore def test_should_have_a_name snippet Snippet new 4 5 6 assert_nil snippet name 7 snippet valid 8 assert_not_nil snippet errors on name 9 end 10 end Take a break to understand what this test is saying On line 5 we are instantiating a new snippet On the n
114. ure and less bloated overall Rupak Would you hazard a prediction on the future of Rails One year from now Five Carl I think enterprise adoption will start growing ex ponentially in the very near future A lot of bigger consulting firms still believe Rails and Merb are toys and not ready for serious work These firms are always at least 5 years behind and wrong so they ll likely catch up pretty soon Interview with Carl Mercier interviewed by Rupak Ganguly on May 5th 2009 Rupak With Merb merging into Rails 3 what features from other platforms or frameworks would you like to be incorporated into Rails in future Carl I think Merb has a much simpler code base Theres less meta programming and magic going on which I really like That s probably my main wish for Rails 3 I would hate losing that Another neat feature of Merb is the way depen dencies are managed with dependencies rb I prefer it to Rails dependency management and hope it makes the cut Rupak Do you think Rails risks getting bloated with all this functionality Or that it will lose its ease of use and magic as the price to pay for the newly found flexibility Carl I personally think merging Merb and Rails is a big mistake but I REALLY hope the team proves me wrong The reason I think that is very simple Merb and Rails attract different people for different reasons Merb is lean flexible pluggable fast and has an extremely easy to
115. will help the magazine in the long run and influence its direction Call for Artists Get Noticed Are you a designer illustrator or photographer Do you have an artist friend or colleague ie Would you like to see your art featured in Rails a Magazine Just send us a note with a link to your pro posed portfolio Between 10 and 20 images will be needed to illustrate a full issue Join Us on Facebook http www facebook com pages Rails Magazine 23044874683 Follow Rails Magazine on Facebook and gain access to exclusive content or magazine related news From exclusive videos to sneak previews of upcoming articles Help spread the word about Rails Magazine Contact Us Get Involved Contact form http railsmagazine com contact Email editor railsmagazine com Twitter http twitter com railsmagazine Spread the word http railsmagazine com share Rails M qa VANO
116. xpense We all enjoy working from home or at cafes Company meetings are held at restaurants over dinner and beers At the end of the month it s a lot cheaper than rent would be And a lot more fun than board rooms and white boards Starting small on a cheap VPS with no office and no money has made me realize the value of thinking through your decisions Don t forgo an office just because we don t have one Think about what s best for you your employees and your business Start simple incrementally improve measure twice and think about what youre doing Just like in shop class Thank you Resources Ruby Howdown 2008 Keynote http gist github com 6443 Startup Riot 2009 Keynote http gist github com 67060 Rails yaga TATE DISCUSS http railsmagazine com 3 11 Rails agi 1 TAMA Interview with Carl Mercier interviewed by Rupak Ganguly on May 2009 Rupak Can you please tell us about your background briefly for the benefit of the readers Carl I m a self taught programmer since the age of 7 I have a degree in Business Management and another one in Sound Engineering I discovered Ruby and Rails shortly af ter the Whoops Rails video came out http www youtube com watch v Gzj723LkRJY so sometime in 2005 Although I ve been programming pretty much forever I consider myself more of an entrepreneur than a developer Rupak How and when di
117. y Eric Anderson Designing an API Tests are also useful when youre designing an object interface The best way to determine an ideal interface it to think of it from the calling code s perspective If you were interacting with another object how would you like it to it to expose itself to you Tests are an ideal medium in which to develop these ideas You can write code that uses your hypothetical API before the API has been developed By thinking about it from the calling codes perspective you often are able to come up with a cleaner and more useful interface Furthermore once the API is actually implemented you will already have some of the tests needed to verify it s cor rectness Using automated testing as a way of designing software is what many people called test driven design development TDD It can be a very useful practice What You Should Be Weary of Testing We all know that testing is a good thing But there are times when testing may actually detract from your project 3rd Party Code A big place I often see people over test is in testing 3rd party code A 3rd party library is being used and developers implement automated testing to ensure that 3rd party library works as advertised For example I ve seen code that will test to make sure ActiveRecord save actually saves the record to the database they use raw SQL to make this determination This is the wrong approach If you lack confidence in the 3rd p

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