Author: ceefour | Filed under: Reviews
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Assembla.com is an online software development version control and management tool. The site includes an SVN/Subversion/Git/Mercurial/CVS repository hosting, a complete ticketing system, a collaboration tool and a management tool.
Certain features of the site can be used for free, but to use the entire suite of tools requires a paid subscription to the site. The site uses 128-bit encryption for free and paid users, and all data is stored on secure Amazon servers. The ticketing system incorporates task tracking, issue tracking and bug tracking. The collaboration tool includes a wiki, a message board and shared files. The software repositories offered by the site require no setup and offer seamless integration with the ticketing, collaboration and management tools.
Tags: assembla, bug tracker, project management, subversion hosting
Author: ceefour | Filed under: Rails
What do you get when the power of Ruby on Rails is combined with flexibility of Merb web framework? Rails 3 of course!
We have a very happy news: Rails 3 Beta is ready for testing. The improvements are numerous: ActiveRecord, ActionController, ActionView, and ActionMailer, ActiveSupport have all been redesigned. ActiveRecord got pimped with ActiveRelation scoped queries.
Some components have been refactored into their own: ActionDispatch, ActiveModel. Even better, all components can be used alone and you don’t have to require the entire Rails framework.
Rails is now not only Rack compatible, but subcomponents of Rails, like routing, are Rack middlewares.
Author: ceefour | Filed under: Opinions

How do you feel during your daily Ruby programming workflow? Do you feel fun or productive? Either way, you’ve got to feel grateful!
After several years not doing any serious PHP programming, today I get curious.
Right now, PHP has evolved. PHP programmers are not “script kiddies” anymore, they’re professional programmers with quality MVC web frameworks.
Now it won’t be fair if I compared Ruby on Rails with PHP, as that’d be like comparing apples and oranges. So I have to pick some killer app written in PHP that competes directly with Rails, as long as it’s not WordPress or Drupal.
Tags: framework, php, Rails, Ruby, symfony, syntax
Author: ceefour | Filed under: Fluid Web
During my experience developing web applications, it’s challenging to find the “best” web development approach of them all.I like these principles:
- POJO approach. No inheritance, interfaces, minimal annotations. Configuration is all that’s necessary.
- Convention over Configuration. Even with POJO, some configuration is needed. Minimize configuration by using conventions. And document the conventions! Because conventions can sometimes be confusing.
- REST approach. This is not anti-SOAP or anti-WS-*. It means designed for the web, and embrace resource-oriented and stateless principles.
- Use JSON. For browser-server communication JSON is preferable. Atom+XML is more suited for documents and server-server communication.
Author: ceefour | Filed under: Rails
A Ruby on Rails web application I’ve been developing uses Dojo-based full AJAX frontend. I learned some new tricks during development, relearned old pitfalls, and found some mistakes that I’d like to share with you.
Tags: Ajax, API, Cloud standards, controller, Dojo, JavaScript programming language, JSON, Representational State Transfer, resource model REST conventions, Ruby on Rails, Software architecture, web application, Web application frameworks, web framework
Author: ceefour | Filed under: Rails
Sometimes when developing a Ruby on Rails web application, you want to use an ActionView helper method inside your controller. The following tip is from Gabriel Gironda .
This is incredibly straightforward and more of an occasional convenience, but I thought I’d throw it out there anyway.
One use case is to use pluralize() in a flash message and not have to do it by hand using the inflector. You could include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper in the controller, but that fills your namespace with crap.
Put this in the class ApplicationController instead:
Author: ceefour | Filed under: Tools
NetBeans IDE version 6.8 has been released, Sun Microsystems’ newest flagship programming environment. Primarily targeted at Java programmers, NetBeans also sports a very polished IDE for Ruby on Rails developers.
New NetBeans 6.8 features and improvements for Ruby on Rails include:
-
Upgraded bundled JRuby to 1.4
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Ruby 1.9 debugging support
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Run/Debug File with arguments
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Support for running/debugging files that are not part of a project
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Improved handling of inherited methods in rename refactoring
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Possibility to specify arguments for Rails servers
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Navigation support for ActiveRecord associations
Author: ceefour | Filed under: JRuby, Reviews, Ruby, Tutorials
Aquarium is a framework that implements Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) for Ruby. The premise of AOP is that some concerns in an application will cut across the natural object boundaries of the problem domain. Rather than scatter duplicated code in each object to handle the cross-cutting concern, AOP modularizes the specification of which execution points are affected (called join points) and the actions that should be invoked at those points.
New in V0.4.0: Preliminary support for advising Java classes in JRuby! See the discussion here.
See also the RubyForge project page.
Tags: Aquarium, java, JRuby, Programming, Ruby
Author: ceefour | Filed under: Complaints, News, Opinions
Just got a server hard drive crash
We should be back operational soon. In the mean time please bear with us. Thank you.
Author: ceefour | Filed under: Beginner, Complaints, Ruby, Tips, Tools, Tutorials

Upgrading to the latest RubyGems in Ubuntu Gutsy is a bit non-straightforward. I’d like to share a quick fix this time. It’s trivial when you know it, but if not, a friend of mine has almost hosed his system just because of this annoying “bug”.
Installing Ruby in Ubuntu is pretty simple:
sudo aptitude install ruby ri irb rdoc rubygems libruby-extras libmysql-ruby ruby1.8-dev
(add other packages as you see fit)
The problem occurs right after you upgrade RubyGems to the latest version:
sudo gem update --system
Then you get something like this:
Tags: error, fix, gem, gems, gutsy, installation, rubygems.ruby, troubleshooting, tutorial, ubuntu, update, upgrade