The Musings of the Kat

Posted by Kat Crichton Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:53:00 GMT

I use Ruby-on-Rails to develop my own sites. It also makes up the majority of the projects that I am involved in at work. I will happily sing its praises and there’s no other language I’d prefer to be writing code in at the moment.

Our other Web applications are written in Java, so our IDE of choice is Eclipse. It’s a fantasticly fully featured open source IDE that is also a development platform if you care to use it as such.

Until the end of 2007 we were using and watching the progress of a couple of Ruby and Rails plugins for Eclipse called Ruby Developent Tools and RadRails. These Ruby development some of the same tools that graced the Java developement environment in Eclipse.

Sadly though, another larger Eclipse plugin vendor called Aptana made the developers of each of the existing tools an offer they couldn’t refuse. RadRails and RDT were absorbed into the monolithic Aptana plugin.

Aptana is downloadable as either a standalone application or as an Eclipse plugin. It has various versions that include Jaxer (an AJAX server), tools for developing against the Apple iPhone and Adobe’s AIR platform.

I have nothing against large applications as long as they are well written – although I would state a preference for the small is beautiful philosophy.

Unfortunately, since installation of Aptana, our Eclipse based development machines run like dogs and crash all the time. Evenutally after having to kill the eclipse process time after time, some corruption creeps into one of the plugin files and Eclipse will no longer start up. We then start the process of removing, downloading and reinstalling 79MB of Aptana plugin that can only be installed using the automatic update site.

The ruby/rails plugins are the best that we’ve found, allowing us to visually debug rails applications, run tests and browse our applications intelligently, but at the moment they’re wasting so much of our time that we’re seriously considering going back to a plain text editor.

Posted by Kat Crichton Sat, 31 Mar 2007 09:24:00 GMT

I've not been terribly impressed with the speed or quality of service of my Rails sites running at ASmallOrange.com. I think they are using mod-ruby in Apache, which doesn't quite work as well as it should, giving Application Errors fairly regularly for no good reason.

TextDrive are the official Rails host, as they hosted the first Rails project - BaseCamp. They support Lighttpd as a Rails Web server, which is very quick and fully compatible. They have an offer on at the moment for $99 a year shared hosting, which is not much more than ASmallOrange, so I thought I'd take the plunge and switch over.

It's taken a little longer to get Rails set up on a sub-domain, but since Textdrive has been hosting Rails applications longer than anyone else, there are a lot of good tutorials and users who can give a helping hand.

Follow up..

The Application Errors that I used to have with ASmallOrange.com stopped happening some time ago. They've obviously updated their setup at some point and fixed the issues. I still run a site on their service and would recommend it.

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 28 Feb 2006 18:45:00 GMT

Phew! My ISP upgraded to Rails 1.0, which knocked the version of Typo I've been using for six. I probably ought to put the correct version of Rails into the vendor folder to stop it happening again.

I decided to start using the Subversion release. I normally wouldn't trust code that's non-release, but since Typo seems to be written test first, I have a lot more confidence in it's ability to stay unbroken by new code.

Anyway, after some struggle converting my old data into the new format - including trouble installing MySQL Server 4, I'm up and running again.

Posted by Kat Crichton Mon, 09 Jan 2006 15:01:00 GMT

Managed the upgrade to version 1 without any major hitches. Just two notable differences...

• The AJAX stuff is fixed (which stopped us from upgrading to the last release).
• ActiveRecord has slightly stricter constraints on creation of new objects with has_and_belongs_to_many relationships.

The ActiveRecord change means that you can't create a new object and it's join table based relationships without first saving the main object. If object has_and_belongs_to_many relations, then...

object = Object.new
object.relations << relation
object.save

object = Object.create 
object.relations << relation

It makes some sense, since the identity of object has not yet been created, but it's a bit of a shame that the ORM layer can't hide these issues from you.

Posted by Kat Crichton Wed, 30 Nov 2005 06:28:00 GMT

Just got back from XPday5 where my colleague Dafydd Rees and I presented a talk on Rails for Real. It seems to have gone down well and a lot of delegates were interested in learning more about our experiences using Ruby-on-Rails for a major project.

I very nearly didn't make it up to London at all having contracted a nasty stomach bug or flu at the weekend, which returned shortly after the talk. Thankfully adrenalin kicked in for the duration.

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 04 Oct 2005 06:17:00 GMT

I found the option in Typo to enable 43 Things and 43 Places to my blog. Nice idea as it ties two Web2.0 technologies together.

Should help to give a better idea of what I'm about, although I'm some way off the number 43 (or 86) just yet, clearly need to be more interesting and make some more plans ;)

Would be nice if there was an option to show 43 posts on your Typo blog.

Posted by Kat Crichton Mon, 03 Oct 2005 04:41:00 GMT

Much as I love MythTV, it's web interface for anything other than TV recordings leaves a little to be desired.

So, I'm considering writing an interface to MythMusic in Ruby-on-Rails.

It should be ajax enabled so that you can do iTunes style search constraining and it should have a decent artist/album/song type browser.

I think I'll add this to the end of the project list after Mad Margaret's e-commerce.

If anyone else thinks this is a good idea, reply to this post.

Posted by Kat Crichton Sun, 02 Oct 2005 07:27:00 GMT

Well, the start of October seems like the right time to start a proper blog. A bit late for the term-start, but it's been a fair few years since I had a decent length summer holiday anyway.

I've had a news/diary section on klaws.org for a while, but I just never quite got around to updating it. Hopefully being able to edit on line will help.

What's this all going to be about then? Current projects include...

• Ruby-on-rails (web framework behind this site)
• MythTV (Linux based PVR)
• Extreme Programming
• Sorting out home bandwidth contention with a Linux firewall
• Getting my loft converted
• Writing and recording some music

So, glad you could make the grand opening. Hang around for a while, and help yourself to a cocktail and some canapés.

God bless this blog and all who sail in her!