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You know what, I really wanna learn this whole JavaEE-related thingy……

For some reason it’s unavoidable……. it’s bound to be touched by me……

You see, the trend is going RIA. MVC is going away. AJAX ain’t gonna compete. At least not fully. And will lose in many ways in respect to something like Adobe’s Flex. (Unfortunately there’s not much competitor better than Flex, and fortunately it’d probably be “standard” in the near future). Esp. with Flex going open source. Flex will need a backend, since it’s not a server-side product. There is Flex LiveCycle Data Services ES (what a name!!) by Adobe. There’s also BlazeDS open source. There’s also the excellent WebORB, which is free and open source for Rails and PHP. Oh yeah, it’s free for Rails!

The latest entry in Addison-Wesley’s Professional Ruby Series is The Rails Way, by Obie Fernandez, is a long awaited book billing itself as the “expert guide to building Ruby on Rails applications.”

More precisely, the book dives into nearly every area of the Rails libraries and APIs and acts as a reference work for them. Coming in at about 850 pages, the book is physically very similar to The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton. There’s no denying that these two books look good next to each other on the bookshelf, and a lot of comparison can be made between the two.

We’ve been doing a lot of scraping and mashups lately. So we’d love to share on how to do this. Fortunately Schadenfreude has written a good tutorial about using Mechanize and Hpricot to scrape Gmail.

The tutorial uses mechanize and hpricot to login to gmail and return a list of Unread emails.

Installation of required tools

gem install mechanize --include-dependencies


This will install both mechanize and hpricot.

Usage

It’s not just Rails 2.0 but another added bump in the minor version

There are thousands (literally, considering the Subversion revision numbers of improvements, including:

• Action Pack: Resources
• Action Pack: Multiview
• Action Pack: Record identification
• Action Pack: HTTP Loving
• Action Pack: Security
• Action Pack: Exception handling
• Action Pack: Cookie store sessions
• Action Pack: New request profiler
• Action Pack: Miscellaneous
• Active Record: Performance
• Active Record: Sexy migrations
• Active Record: Foxy fixtures
• Active Record: XML in, JSON out
• Active Record: Shedding some weight

Robert Thau from Smartleaf proposes a cool idea for implementing DSL for use in Active Record permissions. It makes it easy for a lot of users to have access rights and very exciting at the same time…

This is the Tease….

class Order < ActiveRecord::Base

  access_control_keys ['id', 'owner_id', 'paid']

  require_privilege :place,
    :for_action => :create,
    :to_update_attribute => [:payment_authenticator, :paid]

  require_privilege :edit,      # LineItem also checks this for attr changes
    :to_associate_as  => ['LineItem#order'],
    :to_dissociate_as => ['LineItem#order'],
    :to_update_attribute => [ :shipping_address ]

  require_privilege :ship,       :to_update_attribute => :shipped

  ...

end

 

The implementation:

• Data model

Any Ruby on Rails programmer would have touched Active Record, probably in a very early phase. Active Record deals with everything that’s related to the database of your Ruby on Rails applications, and in many ways a bit more.

Apress recently launched Pro Active Record: Databases with Ruby on Rails, which I can honestly say, is the most exhaustive, if not the only, book about Active Record I’ve ever known to date.

microformats has been only two years old, yet it has brought significant changes in a relatively short time.

What is it, actually? According to microformats.org, “[microformats is] designed for humans first and machines second, [they] are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.”

Enough with the fluff, let’s see how it actually works, microformats in action:

Flickr picture source

The above picture is me browsing to the LinkedIn profile of one of Indonesia’s renowned Ruby on Rails experts, Arie Kusuma Atmaja. The overlay window that contains these semantic information is not a LinkedIn feature. Rather, it is the easily usable, cross-browser Microformats Bookmarklet by LeftLogic. Go on… try it if you haven’t!

NetBeans 6 Beta 1 is here!!

Let’s rock the boat

It’s the first significant NetBeans event in probably a year

NetBeans isn’t only for Java geeks anymore, it has tons of Ruby and Ruby on Rails support now!

What surprises me (and delights me!) about this release is that, not like previous NetBeans 6 milestones where NetBeans-Java is bundled with Ruby, they actually make a special Ruby-only version.

The Ruby-only download is mere 19 MB in size!

To Chris Maxwell, Geoffrey Grosenbach, Ken Barker, Jeremy McAnally, Priit Tamboom, Christoph Blank, Roland, Arie Kusuma Atmaja, Simone Dall’Angelo, Scott Persinger, Greg Lappen, and Adara, thank you so much for helping and giving me suggestions regarding my call for keyboard recommendations.

I’m now using a Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000 USB Keyboard (tech specs), and struggling to learn Colemak. Was bought for $21, somewhat expensive according to most Indonesians (most people here would buy sub-$5 keyboards), but somehow I wondered why I didn’t go for the scarier Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 :-O

Profligacy is a JRuby library that makes building Swing Graphical User Interface much easier than with Raw code. It’s not a builder as with many other projects, but instead a simple Ruby way to structure the UI for the 80% common cases you’ll encounter.

It’s actively used in the Utu iHate client. iHate started as a RubyCocoa project and then convert to JRuby and Swing.

The purpose of Profligacy is not to be a complete way of hiding Swing components from you. You’ll still be making JButtons and JLabels, you’ll just be putting them into a Ruby idiomatic code structure that doesn’t make your eyes hemorrhage diarrhea like when you try to code in Java.