Software dev, tech, mind hacks and the occasional personal bit

Category: Ruby / Rails Page 2 of 7

Rails Refactor is now a Gem!

Rails Refactor, a small command line tool to make rails refactoring more fun, is now available as a gem. To use:
gem install rails_refactor

More info available on github.

VIM is Sydney Rails Devs’ Favourite Editor

Outstanding news! As part of the rails refactor talk at RORO (Sydney Rails Group) tonight (great evening by the way!), I asked for a show of hands on people’s favoured editors. I was amazed to discover the vim has edged out TextMate with just over half of the people at the group using it as their editor of choice! As an aside, Netbeans had one supporter, RubyMine and Emacs had zero. The groundswell of support for vim (and the cheering) was impressive!

PS – this is a very nerdy post, but as a long time vim fan, I had to report on it 🙂

Short Talk on rails_refactor at Rails group

I’ll be giving a short talk with Ryan Bigg on Rails Refactor at the next Sydney Rails Group (RORO) meet (Tuesday, Feb 8 from 7pm) . We’ll be talking about Rails Refactor’s birth at a hack night last year, what it can do for you right now, and its bright future as your refactoring tool of choice. Hope to see you there.

nRake Microsoft Case Study

nRake is now the subject of a Microsoft case study. Check it out here:

UPDATE: Now on the Microsoft Case Study site.

Rails Refactor & Hack Night

During the RORO hack night last Wednesday, Ryan Bigg (@ryanbigg) and I worked on a Rails Refactor, something I’ve been meaning to get going for a long time.

How often have you wasted time doing renames in rails? Sure it’s hard to automate everything without understanding the code, but there sure are a lot of mechanical steps that you can easily automate. Ryan and I took on controller renames and got a fair way in the few hours we spent on the night.

Code is on github

To rename a controller:
$ rails_refactor.rb rename OldController NewController

  • renames controller file & class name in file
  • renames controller spec file & class name in file
  • renames view directory
  • renames helper file & module name in file
  • updates routes

To rename a controller action:
$ rails_refactor.rb rename DummyController.old_action new_action

  • renames controller action in controller class file
  • renames view files for all formats

Looking to extend it with model renames, and then more complex refactoring.
If you like it, please fork and contribute 🙂

Odd Date and Time Comparisons in Rails & Hack night

While comparing Dates and Times in Rails (both 2.3 and 3), I came across an odd behaviour:

>> Time.parse("Mon, 26 Jul 2010 9:59") == Date.new(2010, 7, 26)
=> false
>> Time.parse("Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:00") == Date.new(2010, 7, 26)
=> true
>> Time.parse("Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:01") == Date.new(2010, 7, 26)
=> false

Also

>> Date.new(2010, 7, 26) == Time.parse("Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:00")
=> false (Rails 2.3)
=> nil (Rails 3)
>> Date.new(2010, 7, 26) == Time.parse("Mon, 26 Jul 2010 0:00")
=> false (Rails 2.3)
=> nil (Rails 3)

Tonight, we’ll be having the RORO hack night in the ThoughtWorks Sydney office, with a focus on open source projects (your own or contributing). A patch for this date/time behaviour might be an interesting area to pursue.

Ruby 1.8 Scoping and Blocks

Quick ruby quiz.. after these two lines execute, what is the value of number?

>> number = 5
>> (1..10).each {|number| print number}

Well, number will be 10, thanks to the block being run and re-assigning the value of number. This can cause you some pretty subtle bugs if you happen to have the same name for a local/function argument, and as a variable name in a block.

In C#, the compiler is kind enough to tell you that this would be a very bad idea and give you an error.

And thanks to Sudhinda for commenting – this has been fixed in Ruby 1.9. In 1.9, the variable used as the argument in the block does not affect the variable outside the block.

ACS Alm Talk: Presentation Wrap Up & Slides

Thanks everyone who came along last night. It was a fun session, with a lot of lively discussion, especially around project management and software design. As mentioned during the talk, you might want to check out nRake for .NET builds and psDeploy for Powershell deployments. Here are the slides from the talk. If you have any more questions or areas to discuss, please feel free to drop me a line.

nRake now on IronRuby

nRake, the premier project and build template for .NET projects using the Rake build system now has a branch for .NET4 using IronRuby. Projects are also updated to VS2010 format, and Albacore gems are now updated to 0.1.5.

Check out the IronRuby .NET 4 branch of nRake.

or the check out the IronRuby .NET 2 / 3.5 branch of nRake.

Master branch is still using MRI ruby 1.9. However, plans are to change over to IronRuby for master branch in the future. IronRuby is now performing well enough and sufficiently compatible to support .NET builds. IronRuby has advantages around size (smaller download) and more exciting interop possibilities with .NET code.

Podcast from ALM Conference

At the ALM Conference, Richard interviewed me for a podcast on the Ultimate ALM Environment circa 2010 as well as a little on build and deployment automation. Check out the podcast on Talking Shop!

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