I’ve been playing around with the very complete examples over the last couple of days and am really impressed with how easy it is to build Cocoa apps in just a few lines of Ruby code and using the new InterfaceBuilder. You get full-fledged support of all OS X’s goodness without having to worry about Objective-C.

However, I hadn’t fully considered some of the implications of this until I was stumbled across the open-source OmniFocus-UI. It is a Rails app written as an iPhone interface to the Productivity application (GTD) OmniFocus. It essentially provides a very lightweight web interface to the application by way of the AppleScript interface. rb-appscript and RubyOSA are two Ruby AppleScript bridges that make AppleScript actually really nice to work with.

The fact that it’s a Rails app is almost silly. There is no database connection to speak of. All storage and primary functionality is handled by the app itself. OmniFocus-UI could probably be rewritten as a Camping or Merb application very easily with a much smaller footprint.

The way the Rails app works is that the controllers just route commands via rb-appscript. So when you want a list of contexts (organization of todos), the Rails app just needs to do the following in Ruby:

require 'appscript'
doc = Appscript.app("OmniFocus").default_document
doc.contexts.get.length

Or to see how many Inbox items you have:

doc.inbox_tasks.count

If instead you want to use RubyOSA, it’s really just the Class name that changes (and some more underlying bits):

require 'rbosa'
doc = OSA.app("OmniFocus").default_document

What this means is, it’s very easy to build web interfaces on top of any AppleScript-able Mac application. The one difficulty, however, is configuring your Mac to make it easily externally accessible from anywhere on the Web. If you’re handy on IT, you can always setup port-forwarding on your router.

However, if you just want setup & forget, you should check out Prism (http://goprism.com) – which creates secure, private web accessible connections to your home computer.

Tags: apple, macosx, leopard, rails, ruby, rubyosa, scripting, bridge, prism

The article does a full walk-through, from concept, through development, and to scalability, deliverability, and maintainability, of a Ruby on Rails site/service.

Discussions (arguments) between the various languages and their frameworks are common. It’s helpful to see such a readable and poignant presentation of the entire process to address the various issues other developers bring up about the platform.

I have definitely seen the same effects he talks about in the article. Development and updates occur much faster. I can be more productive creating my ideas and getting them to a working prototype. The code is easy to read and small, so its also easy to maintain the code to optimize or extend with new features.

I’m not saying that the other languages or frameworks fail at this, I know that for me, it feels like its the fastest development I can do short of natural language requirements into code (”Make me a Map” )

Tags: rubyonrails, casestudy, business, webdevelopment, infoq, changingthepresent

Ajaxian discusses Adobe’s new “Apollo”:

Apollo is client-based software that will run Flash applications separately from a browser, whether online or offline

The image shows an example travel application developed in Flash, and deployed to a desktop via Apollo. (via Digital Backcountry)

I also saw that Chris Messina is helping out on a project WebKit on Rails, whose goal is to make it easier to deploy Apple’s WebKit and also to “come up with new ideas and practices that leverage the WebKit platform”. WebKit is an excellent platform to develop desktop web apps, as it can be baked straight into a Cocoa application, but be accessing a “web application” that may be running locally on the users’ machine.

rails-app-installer allows you to bundle and install/uninstall a Rails application, including required gems.

$ gem install my_app
$ my_app install /some/path


Tags: web3.0, desktop, deployment, rails, webkit, chrismessina, mattwebb, tixe, adobe, apollo, railsappinstaller

Using Tesly Jr., its very easy to keep your development team up to date with the status of the project. Combine this with runing tests on deploy with Capistrano (via Jamis Buck) and you have a that much better integration of testing into your development and release cycle.

Tesly Jr. is free when using the hosted service, and available for just $24 if you want your own copy to run on your own systems.

Tags: rails, ruby, programming, rubyonrails, teslyjr, bencurtis, testing, capistrano, jamisbuck

The project is Mapufacture. You can subscribe to feeds, create maps as collections of feeds, and share maps with other users. It’s still in very active development (one could call it beta, but I won’t), but is usable. Guilhem Vellut is the person responsible for the very nice mapping via YM4R_Mapstraction library. If you’d like to give it a try and give feedback that would be great.

Here are some examples of useful maps created with Mapufacture:

• WiFi in Grand Rapids from James Stewart
• Finnish Rescue Services’ 100 Lates Events

Compare to the few of us that were Rails proponents. Currently, Rails is the only Ruby framework with any market share (are there even any others?). The question was, in the future will more Ruby frameworks show up, steal market/mind-share, and splinter the community. Diversity is good, new ideas help spur innovation. However, large fracturing confuses new developers and makes support and interoperability difficult.

One definite way to address this possible problem is by keeping the core framework simple and effective and having good support for extensions, plugins, and additions by other developers. Rails currently does this very well, and it looks like this will become even more solid in the future.

A Ruby on Rails Plugin Repository is being realized and should be fully supported soon. Luke Redpath has a good discussion on the current progress and future path. To date, the plugin repository has been wiki based, or required knowing the appropriate subversion repository for a plugin. This new effort will centralize plugins, promote proper documentation, annotation, and testing.

Perl has CPAN, an absolutely incredible repository of modules that has probably kept Perl alive and made it a very powerful language. Ruby Gems provide a very similar infrastructure for distributing great enhancements to the language. Hopefully, the Ruby on Rails Plugin Repository will keep the community united and working to support and build on a single framework while still allowing them to bring in their application specific features.

Tags: ruby, rails, rubyonrails, perl, java, barcamp, barcampgrandrapids, frameworks

Excel Export Plugin is a Rails plugin to do just that.

Install the plugin:
ruby script/plugin install http://svn.napcsweb.com/public/excel

Here is an example method:

def export_project_to_excel
  e = Excel::Workbook.new
  @project = Project.find(:all)
  e.addWorksheetFromActiveRecord "Project", "project", @project
  headers['Content-Type'] = "application/vnd.ms-excel"
  render_text(e.build)
end

Yesterday a great, succinct, and accurate article on Rails Test Driven Development showed up. The article even discusses using the Hpricot test helper.

I’ve been very remiss in adding testing to most of my rails projects. Now I really have no excuse.

Technorati Tags: rubyonrails, ruby, hpricot, when2where

Therefore, you can build up your set of Location based plugins, such as:

• YM4R Mapstraction
• Georuby
• Yahoo Geocoder and Search
• Metacarta Geoparser

Plugin Packs

about:
  name: Mapping Pack
  description: A set of mapping and geocoding plugins
  author: Andrew Turner
  email: rails@highearthorbit.com
  website: http://www.highearthorbit.com
plugins:
  ym4r_mapstraction:
    source: svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/ym4r/Plugins/Mapstraction/trunk/ym4r_mapstraction
  GeoRuby:
    source:
  metacarta-geoparser:
    source: http://opensource.agileevolved.com/svn/root/rails_plugins/unobtrusive_javascript/tags/rel-0.1
  yahoo-geocode:
    source: http://opensource.agileevolved.com/svn/root/rails_plugins/navigation_mappings/trunk

about:
  name: User site
  description: Plugins for a standard site with users for authentication and basic cms
  author: Andrew Turner
  email: rails@highearthorbit.com
  website: http://www.highearthorbit.com
plugins:
  acts_as_authenticated:
    source: http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/acts_as_authenticated
  comatose:
    source: http://mattmccray.com/svn/rails/plugins

In case you didn’t know, Mapstraction is a Javascript library that encapsulates the API’s for GoogleMaps, YahooMaps, and Microsoft Virtual Earth maps. You can write once, but switch between any of the map types.

And I’ve even done my part to contribute by submitting my GeoRSS Simple Parser.

Technorati Tags: ym4r, plugin, rubyonrails, rails, ruby

In the meantime, I settled myself to using the adequate Cartographer Plugin to easily create Google Maps. I even went so far as to extend Cartographer to switch to Yahoo! maps and MapQuest Maps.

I just came across another mapping gem, YM4R (yellow maps for Ruby) which handles GoogleMaps v2 (there is a patch for Cartographer to do the same), and Yahoo! maps, local, and traffic. Wow!

Not only that, it’s by the same developer of GeoRuby, The Pochi Superstar Mega Show!.

Check out the very good, and complete Ym4r + GeoRuby + Spatial Adapter tutorial

The instructions below are the quick, and bare-bones steps needed to get a rails app up for development on a Mac OS X machine.

Create your rails application

$ rails ~/Projects/myapp

Edit your apache config file

You need to setup your apache to know how to handle the /myapp URL request. Put the following at the bottom of your httpd.conf file.

/etc/httpd/httpd.conf

FastCgiServer /Users/username/Projects/myapp/public/dispatch.fcgi
    -idle-timeout 120 -initial-env RAILS_ENV=development -processes 1
Alias /myapp/ "/Users/username/Projects/myapp/public/"
Alias /myapp "/Users/username/Projects/myapp/public/"

<directory /Users/username/Projects/myapp/public/>
  Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride all
  Order allow, deny
  Allow from all
</directory>

Restart Apache

After you’ve edited the file, you need to restart apache:
$ sudo apachectl graceful

Set the rails base address

Now you need to let rails know what the base address is for the URL’s:
~/Projects/myapp/public/.htaccess

RewriteBase /myapp


Test that it works

Navigate your browser to http://localhost/myapp, and you should see the happy Welcome aboard

If you’re configuring ActionMailer and you try to run the console and get the following messages:

[host]$ script/console
Loading development environment.
./script/../config/../config/environment.rb:41:NameError:
  uninitialized constant ActionMailer
/home/highearth/.gems/gems/actionpack-1.12.1/lib/action_controller/integration.rb:15:
  NameError: uninitialized constant ActionController::Integration::Session::Test
./script/../config/../config/../app/controllers/application.rb:3:
  NameError: uninitialized constant ActionController::Base

Make sure your ActionMailer configuration in your config/environment.rb file is after your Rails::Initializer.run do |config| block.