Don’t hire people who don’t hack. There: don’t tell me I never gave you nothing.

A while back I did a little experiment with building a ruby gem – the result was Regexhelper. You can check out the gem on Rubygems.org, or check out the source at Githu.com. Of course, you can install by by running ‘gem install regexhelper’ if you’re so inclined. As of now its been downloaded 45 times.

I used a the jeweler gem to help create regexhelper. Right now the gem is pretty empty, and probably very amateurish, but I plan on updating and cleaning it up as soon as possible.

While learning Rails, I’ve come across a fair number of really interesting subsets/addons to Rails. This is a list of the ones I plan to investigate in greater detail:

• Sinatra – Super simple and quick rails app setup – it doesn’t get much easier than this:
  

  require ‘sinatra’

  get ‘/’ do
  “Hello World!”
  end

  I love the way Sinatra does routing, and the erb :erbname syntax just makes sense right off the bat. Also is supposed to work well with heroku, though I haven’t goten that far yet.

• Refinery – Also super-quick and easy Gem, but builds out a bare-bones but extensible CMS/blogging engine. COWPU and Bend.rb are using it during the weekly hack night in Bend to build hot sexy pizza websites.

Coffeescript – Coffeescript is a kind of Ruby-ish language that compiles into javascript, and as of Rails 3.1 will come bundled with rails. I like coffeescript because I’m a dork who can’t type and I always mess up javascript, which is then just a PITA to debug.

Notes for myself on learning rails

I set up rails using:
http://rubyonrails.org/download
Everything below here deals with the Windows install – since Tomcat on linux is causing me problems, I’m using windows right now so I can switch between jsp/servlets/php/rails more easily.

After initial setup, I always received this error:

Could not find gem ‘sqlite3 (>= 0)’ in any of the gem sources listed in
your Gemfile.

Eventually Google gave me this solution, which is to specify WHICH sqlite3 gem to use:

gem ‘sqlite3-ruby’, ’1.3.2′, :require => ‘sqlite3′

After which, I ran bundle install and everything went fine.
This is in total contrast to trying to run rails using mysql – both version 1.8.7 and 1.9.2 seem to only want to use mysql2, even after specifying in the Gemfile and in config/database.yaml to use mysql. I would always get this:

Could not find gem ‘sqlite3 (>= 0)’ in any of the gem sources listed in
your Gemfile.

Eventually I worked around this by downloading an older version of the libmySQL.dll (when I find the link I’ll update this) and putting that directly into the Ruby/bin dir. Not a great workaround. An actual ‘fix’ for this seems to be described on this page:
http://rorguide.blogspot.com/2011/03/installing-mysql2-gem-on-ruby-192-and.html – however, this solution is only for a full install of the mysql server on your machine. I use WAMP for PHP dev, so I decided rather than remembering to stop and start WAMP mysql ten times a day, I would just use this workaround:

First, install the DevKit from here:
http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads – make sure to read the docs first.

Then, update the Gemfile in your rails app:
gem ‘mysql2′, ’2.8.1′

Run bundle install.

run rake db:migrate (after rails generate to generate the models. More on this later.)

Following this tutorial:
http://ruby.railstutorial.org/chapters/beginning#top

Notes:
While using the github client for windows, always use git bash. Half of the time, commands work from the windows cmd prompt, but the other half they don’t.
ex: c:\Ruby\rails\first_app>git push origin master
error: src refspec master does not match any.
error: failed to push some refs to ‘git@github.com:jgbarr/first_app.git’

While using git bash remember to cd to the correct directory! After 1st setup (on windows 7), you’ll be in your home directory, where the .ssh dir was created.
Using the git client for windows was pretty painless, so long as I remembered to do things correctly. I ended up with this (github profile: http://github.com/jgbarr/):
https://github.com/jgbarr/first_app

I’m experimenting with HTML5 – it’s given me faith that eventually I will be able to develop/design for the web without all the cross-browser nonsense that we all know so well. I doubt the day of full cross-browser compatibility will every arrive, but until then HTML5 is a really exciting advancement in what can be done with HTML and CSS. One day I hope to be able to develop web apps with nothing more than a solid, stable javascript library (jquery is probably the best candidate right now), HTML, and CSS. Until then, I’m putting up a portfolio of code that I’ve written for the web as an accessible resource/demo repository.

Visit my the web development portfolio of Jeff Barr here.