Musings about Technology, Software Design and Development
I was a guest recently on The Tablet Show with Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin, to talk about iOS development, client projects, API’s with Ruby on Rails and creating applications with interactive back ends.
I think it turned out pretty well but I really can’t stand listening to my own voice, so please give it a listen and decide for your self.
Thanks to Richard and Carl for having me on the show.
While working on Rails project I often find myself wanting a visual representation of my model classes. I usually grab a notebook and manually write them out. Depending on the project, it can take time.
I started searching for a diagramming tool that might be easier and faster than writing out by hand, there are a bunch of them out there. Most have a steep learning curve and are expensive.
A bit of searching around the web for a Ruby-specific tool lead me to a gem named rails-erd. Maybe you have heard of it, maybe I’m the last to know, but regardless it is a nice find.
The gem relies on GraphViz to do it’s drawing magic. There are a multitude of ways to install it, I used Homebrew:
brew install graphvizAdd the gem to your development group in your Gemfile:
group :development do
gem 'rails-erd'
endDon’t forget to run the bundle command.
When everything is install, from the root of your Rails project simple run:
rake erdWhen the rake task runs, watch the output from the tool. It tells you items you won’t find on the diagram either because it’s not used or a relationship isn’t right.
The result will be a PDF file in the root of your project that looks something like this:
As you can see, it gives a very nice model diagram with all the relations and properties. Just what I was looking for.
The tool is very customizable and the web site outlines everything that can be changed. I haven’t looked very much at this aspect since it produced everything I needed the first time.
I came across an interesting problem that was driving me crazy when using Ruby on Rails 3.2 Date types in an application I am working on for client.
I have a date property that is virtual and not backed by a column in a database. When trying to create a new object from a date select on a form, I was being greeted by the following error:
1 error(s) on assignment of multiparameter attributes
After some searching around the web for a solution, as any self-respecting developer does, and came up with many others facing the same problem. It was suggested this was a problem with Rails, a quick check on the Github Rails project revealed something similar reported, but no solid fix I could find. It may be out there and if someone is aware, please let me know. I am using Rails 3.2.8 so any fixes that exist, should be in there.
This works great when using the date select and storing to a database, Rails takes care of processing multiparameter attributes and pushing into the date field. We are talking about virtual attributes here, no database field to store the data.
Please don’t comment how bad this solution is..it’s a hack, I know, but it works. I’m never too proud to share a hack.
The goal here is to end up with and expiration date in a virtual attribute on my model. To accomplish this I construct a plain Ruby Date class from the components of the date from the date select form helper. Ruby Date expects parameters; Date.new(Year, Month, Day)
NOTE: if you try this look at the parameter values for each component of your date to make sure choose the right values. I have changed the default order of the date select on the form.
params[:user][:membership_attributes][:expiration_date]=Date.new(
params[:user][:membership_attributes][:"expiration_date(1i)"].to_i,
params[:user][:membership_attributes][:"expiration_date(2i)"].to_i,
params[:user][:membership_attributes][:"expiration_date(3i)"].to_i)
Now remove the individual date components from the parameter hash:
params[:user][:membership_attributes].delete(:"expiration_date(1i)")
params[:user][:membership_attributes].delete(:"expiration_date(2i)")
params[:user][:membership_attributes].delete(:"expiration_date(3i)")
In my case this is strictly for a Ruby Date type in Rails but the problem and solution is the same with a Ruby DateTime type. The date and time are broken down more, having 4i and 5i representing the time.
This little hack works great and hopefully helps those using a version of Rails 3 that is not patched..or heck, maybe it will never be.
I’d be happy to learn this was fixed or how I could have handled this better. Please add some details in the comments.
I was fortunate enough to be able to work out attending RailsConf 2012 in Austin, TX. This was the first time on many years that the conference was not organized by O’Reilly but rather Ruby Central, Inc.
I have to go on record and say I usually avoid cities but the city of Austin is a great place and would not hesitate to return. The people are friendly and there is so much diversity in the city that there is something new on each corner. I noticed an abundance of restaurants with so many different types of food. I can’t say I had a single bad meal during my journey. Everyone I spoke with about the trip said I had to try the BBQ, and they were right…it was fantastic.
Many of the sessions overfilled the room. This on in particular exemplifies what I’m talking about. I bet the fire marshal wasn’t aware of these. Overall the floors were pretty comfortable.
It was often difficult to decide which sessions to attend, with 3 full-tracks there always seemed to be two talks during the same time slot I wanted to take. I usually decide which sessions to attend by how applicable they are to current work.
One of my favorite sessions was by Obie Fernandez about using Redis with Rails. Although the examples of the talk were from his recent startup, they were excellent and showed integrating Redis into a Rails application not to remove ActiveRecord but to compliment it. Obie discussed a gem he released to help the integration called redis_props along with sample code used in the talk. The code is clean and concise…great stuff.
Another talk I found personal value in was the Semi Automatic Code Review by Richard Huang. Richard is the creator and maintainer of the Rails Best Practices gem. In the talk he discusses another related open source project called Railsbp.com which allows for your code to be reviewed when committing to Github. The results will be displayed on the Railsbp.com site where you can change the code right there and commit back to your repo. Very informative details produced from the site, GitHub allows hooks into the service and thoughtfully open sourced. I wasn’t aware of the site before but now I am using it regularly.
The other talk which I took a lot away from was Digging Deep with ActiveSupport::Notifications by Matt Sanders. This talk when into great detail with many examples of using notifications in your applications. It is similar to the event publishing and subscriber model from other platforms such as .NET. Having spent many years writing .NET applications this talk brought back many memories of this pattern. The techniques exemplified here I had never used in Rails but do need this functionality on a new project.
UPDATE (05/03/2012): One talk that was intended to be included here, is from Lori Olson. Her talk titled, Mobile Rage – What causes it & how to fix it (Confreaks), takes the view of web application use on a mobile device from the user’s perspective and how developers can implement very simple techniques to ease the pain. I recommend this one highly, good stuff and some tips I was not aware of. I admit I have some sites that can take advantage of this.
The final keynote of day one was from a non-Ruby developer, Rich Hickey, which seemed to be out of the ordinary. Maybe he was there to pull some Ruby developer to the Clojure world. It appears Rich is trying to convince these two Rubyist that LivingSocial would be better with Clojure. I wish I could have overheard the conversation.
There were three very large, two-sided, white boards used for companies to post jobs, and they were pretty full of opportunities. I noticed there were far too many companies attempting to make the next Facebook or Twitter and not enough companies creating really useful applications. There were exceptions from what I could see, but too few. I remember the same thing happening around 2000 and then the bubble burst. Apparently we are not better from this event in history because we have not learned from it.
I finally met face-to-face many friends I only knew from various social networks with lively hallway track discussions. I think this is the #1 reason to attend conferences. The materials from the talks are available everywhere and with Confreaks recording all the sessions, you can watch the show later. You can’t however, experience meeting new friends and seeing old ones without attending.
I recommend every Rails developer attend just one of these events, well worth the time and effort. The next on is in Portland, OR from April 29 to May 2, 2013.
I have been working diligently on a project for some time now and it’s finally available. My company, Still River Software, received approval from Apple last week for Palliateive Symptoms Survey to help doctors and caregivers provide better and faster care to their patients.
Palliative Symptoms Survey is an application based on the Edmonton Symptom Assessment Survey (ESAS-r) which was developed to assist in the assessment of nine symptoms that are common in palliative care patients: pain, tiredness, drowsiness, nausea, lack of appetite, depression, anxiety, shortness of breath, and wellbeing There is also a blank scale for patient-specific symptoms.
The application is a native iPad application written in Objective-C with a back-end using Ruby on Rails. Please read a little bit about the project on my company web site.
I have been a huge fan of Pow to serve my Rails applications for development on my Mac. I wrote my love for Pow a while back and have been using it ever since, but all has not been a perfect experience along the way. After upgrading to the 0.3.2 version I started to have my applications appear to lock up in the browser and finally timing out.
The only solution I could reliably make work was to open up Activity Monitor and kill the pow process manually. It worked..until the next time and I would have to do it again and again. It seemed like I was doing this many times a day.
It turned out this was a bug reported to the development team and is a confirmed issue. The cause of the problem is determined to be the dns resolver, ndns. A pre-release version, 0.4.0-pre is reported to resolve the issue. Install it with the command:
curl get.pow.cx | VERSION=0.4.0-pre sh
I did this and have not had to manually restart pow once. I’m not sure why the official release has not been updated to include the fix to this issue which seems to effect many users.
I’m sure everyone saw this already, right? In case you didn’t then it’s worth a look.
It amazes me (though it shouldn’t) how far a community of developers can take something vs. a software giant like Microsoft. It looks like open source wins against corporate. Sure, the results are not exactly scientific but interesting all the same.
My interview with Michael Hartl of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial series is now live on InfoQ. Michael is such an interesting guy and has a diverse background ranging from physics instructor at CalTech to Ruby on Rails teacher.
Please give Learning Ruby on Rails with Michael Hartl a read.
You can find out more information about the printed version of Michael’s book Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)
Today the great team led by Wayne Sequin (rvm fame) and Luis Lavena (RubyInstaller fame) and initiated by Dr. Nic Williams of Engine Yard released RailsInstaller.
RailsInstaller is really what Instant Rails brought to Windows developers wanting to write Ruby and Ruby on Rails code, but now evolved. RailsInstaller takes Ruby and Rails to their current versions and add some other niceties to give the Windows developer the ability to create real Rails applications today. Included is:
I would expect that we would see a Ruby 1.9.2 at some point but imagine there must be some technical hurdles to get beyond before it makes sense to release.
Installation is a breeze by just following the simple installation wizard all Windows users know all about. A nice video has been created to show how to install and get started:
The video is very clear and the installation wizard really simple, just follow the directions and keep the defaults for the best experience.
The installer explains clearly what is being installed in this particular version.
The default is to add to the PATH statement. I would recommend keeping this so your system knows where to find all the needed executables.
You should notice a nice shortcut to a Ruby and Rails prompt all setup to use.
The Ruby version as well as the Git version are cleanly shown. You are good to go.
I was lucky enough to have a prerelease build of the tool and even in a prerelease state, they guys did a great job. It was easy to create Rails apps and have them running in no time. Keep in mind that not all Ruby gems will yet be compatible with Windows. If you encounter issues you are best advised to contact the person in charge of the gem project you are trying to install.
I encourage everyone to who is interested in Rails on Windows in a clean package to download the installer now and give it a go.
Ruby on Rails 3 was released just a short time ago and is a fairly big changed to previous versions of the Rails framework. People are starting to put together some great content to help developers come up-to-speed on Rails 3.
I began looking around for some Rails 3 content for my own use, even though I use a variety of beta books for the purpose, I found these resources really useful. This brought me to the realization some readers may find value.
This is such a great resource; offering a range of content that includes a Ruby on Rails Tutorial book as well as a set of videos with material from the book. The book is available to read on-line, purchase as a PDF or the dead tree version available from Addison-Wesley.
The videos are a real sweet spot in my opinion, with 15 hrs of video training for $85. Try to get 2-days of training from anyone at that price.
Table of Contents
- Rails installation (OS X/Linux) (13m)
- Git .bashrc lines
- Rails installation (Windows) (8m)
- Lesson 1: From zero to deploy (46m)
- Lesson 2: A demo app (1h11m)
- OS X testing setup (8m)
- Lesson 3: Mostly static pages (57m)
- Lesson 4: Rails-flavored Ruby (1h45m)
- Lesson 5: Filling in the layout (1h10m)
- Lesson 6: Modeling and viewing users, part I (1h30m)
- Lesson 7: Modeling and viewing users, part II (1h40m)
- Lesson 8: Sign up (1h22m)
- Lesson 9: Sign in, sign out (1h36m)
- Lesson 10: Updating, showing, and deleting users (2h25m)
- Lesson 11: User microposts (2h03m)
- Lesson 12: Following users (2h19m)
I have gone through both the book, Rails 3 version, and the screencasts looking for nuggets of information I may not be aware of in Rails 3. The screen casts are presented in a such a well-thought-out manner that makes them easy to follow and will not put you to sleep.
Michael covers a lot of great basic topics but also includes specific coverage of such things as setting up and using Devise for authentication. He also covers Test-Driven Development (TDD) very well using RSpec. There are a lot of how-to tips with TDD alone to save you hours.
I always love the content put out by PeepCode and Geoffrey Grosenbach and his recent Meet Rails 3 Part 01 was no exception.
This screen cast covers the beginning aspects of getting into Rails development both on Mac and Windows. I was pleasantly surprised to see my blog post Running Rails 3 on Windows was used as a reference for users to setup and use Rails 3 on Windows.
PeepCode has been providing screencasts for a long time and is likely to the first to offer those covering Ruby on Rails.
The Dive into Rails 3 screencasts put out by Gregg Pollack were probably the first series focused on Rails 3 right around the time Rails 3 was released.
Gregg covers many of the hot topics emerging in Rails 3 today:
These are screencasts talk about what is new in Rails 3, so some knowledge of Rails 2.x would be helpful to get the most out of these.
Ryan Bates has been making the weekly release of a RailsCast what seems like forever now. Currently there are 240 episodes up on the site, and by my precise calculations..that’s around 4 1/2 years of great content. Most episodes range between 10 and 15 minutes of focused content on a particular topic.
At last count Ryan had 25 screen casts covering different aspects of Rails 3 from the basics to new validations to implementing Devise. These episodes are laser focused to they are best used with some prior knowledge first, possibly go through the Tekpub or RailsTutorial first.
The Rails 3 series from TekPub currently has 6 episodes running 5+ hours. The typical series from TekPub is one that starts off with a single episode with more added over a few weeks.
I have been a Tekpub subscriber since it first opened in October 2009 and love the format of their training.
This series is promoted as:
In this series Rob Conery shows you Rails 3 and the core concepts involved. The focus of this series is a bit more practical than theoretical – with the goal of showing you not only Rails, but many of the tools to help you get your site up and running quickly and effectively.
Rob has a been doing screencasts for a long time and has really honed his voice to be the soothing voice you hear on each episode. Each episode is on a different topic and covers it very well in the 1 hour dedicated. As I write this, Rob has 6 episodes:
Long-time Ruby and Rails community member Jeremy McAnally has written up this great handbook on how to take your pre-Rails 3 application into the Rails 3 world.
So many projects exist out in the wild that his handbook is invaluable.
Unlike the other resources I have listed, this is not a screencast but is available as an ebook. I felt is was just such a great resource for Rails 3 and it tied in so well with coming up-to-speed on Rails 3 and the likelihood you might be upgrading a Rails 2.x application to the latest.
The guide is a beauty, it really covers the pain points a developer will face when upgrading their application to Rails 3 and shows how to get around them. He includes use of his gem to help with the process as well as checklists for deprecations and the upgrade process itself.
Moving your application to Rails 3? You need this guide.
