ZenLinux Blog

For those of you updating your rails apps from v1.2.2 to v1.2.3 (released a couple of days ago), here’s all you need to change:

config/boot.rb, line 6:

unless RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /(:?mswin|mingw)/

config/environment.rb, line 8:

RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '1.2.3' unless defined? RAILS_GEM_VERSION

That’s it.

Attention local Rubyists! The third meeting of the NHRuby.org user group is coming up soon. This month we’ll have Brian DeLacey speaking about using crypto algorithms in your Ruby code. He’ll be demonstrating the Crypt library, which is written entirely in Ruby.

The objective of this meeting is two-fold: to address some interesting Ruby techniques and also walk through the basic structure and operations of a Rails application. We’ll have some Ruby and Rails books to raffle off at the end of the meeting – special thanks to O’Reilly Media.

Brian is an excellent speaker and has been making the rounds giving talks at many user groups in the Boston area. Mark your calendars, you won’t want to miss this presentation!

WHEN: Tuesday, March 20, 2007. 7-9 PM.
WHERE: Portsmouth Public Library, Hilton Garden Inn Meeting Room (2nd floor), Portsmouth, NH.

For more details, including a map of the meeting location, see our upcoming meetings page on the wiki.

The two Rails apps I’ve been working on were started when v1.1.6 was the latest stable version of Rails. I’ve wanted to fully transition them to the new 1.2.2 release, and have been kind of sitting around waiting for someone to write up exactly what all the differences are that need to be merged into your project to upgrade. Since this apparently hasn’t happened (I’ve done some intensive Googling for it), I finally broke down and migrated the projects myself.

I didn’t document every single change I made, but below I’ll list the files that you’ll want to diff and merge if you want to do this yourself:


README
app/controllers/application.rb
config/boot.rb
config/environment.rb
config/routes.rb
config/environments/production.rb
public/404.html
public/500.html
public/javascripts/controls.js
public/javascripts/dragdrop.js
public/javascripts/effects.js
public/javascripts/prototype.js
script/process/inspector


The files in app/ and config/ had to be merged by hand, but the rest I just copied over from a freshly created rails project. Now I’m rolling with the latest version of prototype and can sleep better knowing that my projects are running in a fully complaint Rails 1.2.2 environment.

Update: kain in #rubyonrails noted that you can do a “rake update:javascripts” to cleanly update your javascript assets.

While I happen to own a colocated server and do all of my own system administration, many Ruby on Rails developers would prefer to use an outsourced hosting solution, even if only to get started with. Geoffrey Grosenbach just posted a very handy review of a few companies that do Rails hosting and his experience with them. The reviews are particularly useful because Geoff knows what he’s doing, and any problems he encountered were not likely due to ignorance on his part.

Last night’s NHRuby.org meeting went very well, despite sub-optimal brightness from my LCD projector. You can view a meeting summary on our wiki.

When I first watched the PeepCode RJS screencast, I noticed that TextMate (an OS X programmer’s editor) has a really nifty file open dialog. It opens a pop-up window where you can simply start typing the name of a file in your project and you will be presented with a drop-down list of files that match. As you type more, the list narrows down, or you can select one of the filenames to open with your arrow keys.

I immediately started drooling over this and figured there had to be a way to do this in jedit, my preferred editor. The OpenIt plugin is the one you want to enable for this. As with everything in jedit, you can configure this plugin to your heart’s content, telling it to compile its list of available filenames from the current Project, or every file under a certain directory tree. You can also tell it to ignore certain filename patterns when it generates the list. I have OpenIt bound to the Ctrl-Alt-o keyboard shortcut.

Oh, and if you’re not using jedit with Java 1.6, I’d strongly recommend trying it out. There is a significant performance boost, and the font antialiasing is improved. There are a few guides and debian packages floating around for Java 1.6 that you can find for Ubuntu on the Ubuntu Forums.

I’ve been doing lots of fun stuff that I’ve wanted to blog about, including setting up a decent Rails deployment environment on CentOS. But I’ve been insanely busy lately, so it’s going to have to wait a bit longer.

Tomorrow is the second meeting of the NH Ruby/Rails User Group, and the meeting topic will be the use of RJS Templates in Rails. It’s a very practical presentation if you want to integrate all sorts of AJAX-y goodness into your web applications. I hope to see you there. There will be free giveaways for everyone who attends.

Information about the meeting location and time can be found on the NHRuby.org wiki.

I discovered via the awesome blog of Amy Hoy that there is a conference being planned in NYC by the New York City Ruby Brigade. The Gotham Ruby Conference is scheduled for April 21, 2007. I’m a bit disappointed that I won’t be making it to RailsConf this year, so I’m very certain I can make this one instead to get my conference-fix.

It’s been just over a week since the first meeting of the NH Ruby/Rails User Group. I finally found some time to set up a wiki and some e-mail lists for the group to get started with. Please spread the news and take part in our new Ruby community!