Posts tagged rails 3
Inline Attachments for ActionMailer
Jun 14th
The changes to ActionMailer coming in Rails 3 are already a huge improvement, and I hadn’t expected to see much more development before version 3 lands, but it’s great to see this change making it far easier to support inline attachments.
has_many_polymorphs and Rails 3
May 11th
I’m gradually porting a number of my older Rails apps over to Rails 3. The main motivation is a chance to really put the new version through its paces, get a better sense of how it’s working, where plugins are at, etc; but it’s also rather nice to get some of the performance improvements and cleaner code along the way.
Catapult relies on Evan Weaver’s has_many_polymorphs plugin quite extensively so it was important to be have a Rails 3 compatible version. I couldn’t find any evidence that anyone else was working on it, so I’ve forked the github project and made a few alterations. I’ve set it up to work as a gem (so I can pull in the latest version using bundler) and adjusted to fit the new rails initialization process. It’s rather hacky, but it’s working for me so far.
Evan informs me that he has no plans to work on compatibility, so I’m going to see what time I can find to tidy it up a bit more, make sure the tests are passing, etc. If anyone else is so inclined, I’d love some help with that. You can find my fork on github.
Ninja Tune XX
May 10th
Its been twenty years since Coldcut formed Ninja Tune and they’ve got a lot planned to celebrate that anniversary. There’ll be events, a very special box set, and… a website featuring exclusive giveaways every week for the next twenty weeks. Ninja Tune XX launched at 4pm today.
This is the rush job I’ve referred to in recent weeknotes, and it feels great to have it launched. It’s already attracting quite a bit of traffic and seems to be holding up well sitting on a little dreamhost private server (we needed cheap access to a lot of bandwidth). Under the hood it’s a Rails 3 app talking to MongoDB via mongoid. We’re using devise for authentication, formtastic for forms and InheritedResources to keep controller code to a minimum.
One of the very pleasing things has been how little there is to say about that stack, with the exception of one issue around multiparameter attributes in mongoid it’s all just worked. How nice.
Weekend Links
Feb 7th
MockSMTP.app bills itself as “smart and simple e-mail testing for new apps and websites on Mac OS X” and works as a non-delivering SMTP server so you can trap and review any emails your application sends. The instructions describe how to set it up for a Rails app but it should be usable in many contexts.
As with so many of these things, I heard bits and pieces about the Amazon-Macmillan dust-up over the past couple of weeks, but I really appreciate posts like this that lay out a good chunk of the story
node.js has been really exciting to watch over the past few months and it’s exciting to see Plurk adopting it to serve up “Instant conversations using Comet.” Apparently they ported from JBoss Netty over to node.js and saw a 10 times memory saving! Also getting a lot of buzz is redis and Mathias Meyer has a nice piece on “When To Redis“. It sounds like Redis 2 is going to adopt a Virtual Memory approach, a detailed write-up of which can be found here.
I’ve been doing a lot of work with jQuery this week and found this source viewer invaluable as a way of navigating the library.
Matthew from Bytemark–who I host numerous sites with–has been getting cross with people claiming libel but failing to supply URLs for the supposed instances, so he engaged Carter Ruck to help him work out an appropriate position. His writeup is well worth reading if you bear any responsibility for online discussion fora.
The tremors following the Apple iPad announcement continue to be felt including the ongoing debate about flash. It’s good to see a number of voices (such as Jeffrey Zeldman and Dorian Ray) pointing out that Adobe are well positioned to build tools to help with HTML5 adoption. That would seem a good way forward for them, specially as video players like this one demonstrate the goodness awaiting us.
Handling recurring payments (for subscriptions and the like) tends to be a pain. Recurly looks an interesting entry into that space and I’m looking forward to trying it out.
And then of course there’s Rails 3, now in beta. The announcement is on the rails blog, the release notes are a good place to start. Having had some deployment/gem version issues lately I’m very glad to see bundler stabilising.
Friday (ish) links – January 15th 2010
Jan 16th
A few random selections from this week’s reading.
Discussions of online privacy continue to rumble on. ReadWriteWeb had a piece about (facebook’s) Mark Zuckerberg repeating the adage that “the age of privacy is over.” Zuckerberg’s comments would appear to continue the confusion around facebook and privacy. Facebook’s popularity is at least in part due to peoples’ perceptions that there is some privacy (or at least control) inherent in it, but they keep eroding that. I deleted my facebook account a few weeks ago, partly because I was tired of negotiating its plethora of options. Twitter’s “always public” or “private” are really so much easier to handle.
Jeremy Gould pointed out O2′s SIM only iPhone plan on twitter the other day. I really wish I could find an equivalent in the US. On our last trip I was carrying two iPhones and a Palm Pre, but ended up buying a $10 virgin mobile phone from Best Buy.
Perhaps the biggest news in web development this week was the release of jQuery 1.4. The full announcement is here. I’m particularly pleased about all events now supporting live(), the improved support for contexts for actions, and the performance speedups, but many of the API changes look very nice. It’s been great to see several meaty blog posts about how some of the new features/improvements were achieved, such as this one on how the live() support works and Ben Nadel’s piece on handling problems with mouseover/mouseout.
In a similar vein I continue to enjoy Yehuda Katz’ coverage of Rails 3, including this piece on ActiveModel. It’s great to finally have a simple way to use AR’s validations, callbacks, etc. outside of ActiveRecord without resorting to nasty tricks. Gabe de Silveira also deserves some credit, not only for his very useful looking validation_scopes gem, but also for a dissection of its writing.
I missed this month’s LRUG but have been reading up on Dragonfly, a ruby library to handle image uploads and produce resized versions on the fly based on directives in a view. Putting that logic in the view makes a lot of sense and I really like the rails integration being handled by inserting rack middleware. I’ll definitely be looking for a project to try it out on.
Ajaxian continues to be the best source for impressive efforts with javascript. This week I was especially taken by efforts to implement audio sampling in firefox.
Fresh from Silicon Roundabout’s appearance in the latest issue of Wired UK, Ben Terrett of RIG has been working on some merchandise. I guess this joke’s just going to keep going.
TinyMCE is now on github. Chances are it’ll remain a pain to use (as are all editors of its ilk) but at least it can be checked out more quickly now.
And of course it’s been impossible to miss the tragedy in Haiti. The past few years have seen really impressive efforts to harness open source tools and techniques for use in disasters. Andrew Turner’s blog is a good stopping off point to find out what the mapping community has been up to.