Adam Jordens@littlesquare:~/ » Ruby

Playing around with Rails again

ajordens — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 03:55:00 +0000

I’ve been knee deep in the Java world for a long time doing a combination of desktop, backend J2EE (spring/hibernate) and most recently Seam-based web application development.

It’s the Christmas break and I’ve taken a bit of time to create an Ubuntu VM with Rails 2.2 installed in it. Rails has come a long ways since I last was working (playing is probably a more appropriate descriptor) with it. I’ve got a couple ideas to perhaps flush out, but before that, I need to re-learn a few things and come back up to speed.

Installation was simple and straight forward enough, there are a number of decent guides for getting Ruby and Rails installed in Ubuntu. Since I’m working in Ubuntu and not on my work MacBook Pro, there will be no TextMate for me. Fortunately, the guys from JetBrains have released early access versions of their new Ruby IDE RubyMine. I’m a long time user of their Java IDE and if the Ruby equivalent is anywhere near as good, it’ll be a real winner.

RubyMine is nice in that it seems to largely delegate to the command-line Rails generators. No magic and if you spot an error (it’s still beta software), you can still execute the respective command-line tools and continue working.

Don’t have much else to say, I hope everyone is enjoying their respective holiday seasons.

Happy New Year!

2007 OSCON Presentations Available

ajordens — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 00:30:30 +0000

I was pretty keen on attending this years OSCON in Portland but it unfortunately didn’t fit into the conference budget.

It’s never really a replacement for attending but a good majority of the presentations this year are now available (as PDFs) here.

I haven’t looked at many yet but there appear to be some fairly interesting talks regarding Java. Not to mention general programming and open-source goodness (ie. Databases Don’t Matter or Nested Data Parallelism in Haskell).

Maybe next year!

Ruby/Odeum : Something to try out

ajordens — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 06:22:57 +0000

Well, I haven’t quite kicked my desire to play more with ruby so I’m planning a little side project using the Odeum bindings.

It’s too late to start tonight but I’ll try to crank something out tomorrow after work.

Ruby/Odeum is a binding to the fantastic QDBM Odeum inverted index library. Odeum is used in the Estraier search engine and is written by the same author. It lets you easily construct a very fast inverted index so you can search for documents by words really quickly. It is released under the same license as QDBM (LGPL). The source includes the minimum source from QDBM needed to use Odeum, so it will work right out of the box.

Quick post on RoR

ajordens — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 07:20:19 +0000

I played around with Ruby on Rails tonight for a couple of hours. I guess I’ve joined the masses now.

It’s pretty cool. Enuf said. Cool enough to push XUL onto the back burner for the next short whle.

A pretty slick little framework. Simplier than but similar to what I’m used to in Struts, without the need to maintain an ever changing configuration file. Quite amazing how simple it was to prototype something when the web framework handled the initial pass at form construction. I don’t have any particularily complicated database relationships (ie. avoiding many-to-many join tables) so scaffolding has worked well so far.

I admit that I’m just getting into it but I’ve thought up with a little project involving Flickr and RoR that should force me a little bit deeper into the framework’s functionality. I should also mention that I was impressed with Scott Raymond’s insanely easy to use Ruby wrapper around the Flickr API.

That’s enough excitement for tonight.