Installing a Rails plugin from a github branch

Today I wanted to install a plugin from github into a rails project. So far so good, you would think. You only need to run script/plugin install and start coding right away.

Unfortunately, the branch of the plugin I need is not the master one, because this applications runs on rails 2.3.x and the master branch has been adapted to rails 3 already.

I could just download the tar file from github, or I could make a git clone and checkout the branch I wanted.. but it turns out I don’t need to do any of those, because old good script/plugin has an option to checkout a specific branch

script/plugin install http://github.com/rails/exception_notification.git -r 2-3-stable

And I can start coding right away.. and that’s exactly what I’m going to do after publishing this post.

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Happy 4th birthday ASPgems

Four years ago I thought I was at the top of my career. The company I had co-founded was starting to look much like a nine to five job and I decided to resign and accept a great position as a post-sales engineer in FatWire, where I would have the chance to improve their content server solution, which in my opinion was the best of the market by then. Things were looking sweet: new challenges, smart jobmates, important clients, interesting salary… and then I got an IM from Ana Isabel that changed it all (you gotta love it was not a phone call, mind you)

She told me about this brand new tiny company she was starting up together with Agustin Cuenca and some other folks I didn’t know by then, and who resulted to be brilliant. The idea was to be an Application Server Provider and offer products in the later so-called cloud to help small and medium size companies manage their businesses. They would also develop web applications for third parties. And they would do it all using this new toy called Rails, after a successful proof of concept for a real client by Xavier Noria. Regarding project management, they didn’t want to use a traditional approach, but going down the Agile road and use Scrum. The name of the company was ASPgems, where ASP stands for Application Server Provider and “gems” was something related to this Rails thing.

I was very reluctant to join them. Apart from having just landed into a great job position, I had a lot of doubts about the new company. They didn’t have any money, so I would have to cut down my salary and trust the company would eventually make it; they were working remotely, so I thought nothing would get really done; they didn’t have any big clients, and I came from the banking/public sector/corporate world; and to top it all they were using this Ruby on Rails framework and these requirementless agile methodologies.

My first experience with Ruby, some years before, was painful. I had to make some kind of automatic web crawler and I found libraries for doing it both with Ruby and Jython. I didn’t knew any of them so I tried them both. Right now I don’t remember why I didn’t choose the Jython library, but I know why I didn’t choose Ruby. After half a day trying, it was impossible to make the thing work on my windows machine, and all the documentation was in Japanese, so good luck with it. I finally coded my own crawling solution in good old Java and XML.

So you can imagine I was skeptical about Ruby. Then I started to read about Ruby and Rails and I panicked: no static type check, lack of hosting options, poor windows support, opinionated instead of configurable, with a certain disdain for the database layer… my Java instincts were alerting me with a lot of red signals. And then I made “the mistake” of having lunch with Ana and Agustin. They were really excited about the company, they saw a world full of possibilities, and the sense of adventure was just too strong for me to resist. Besides Agustin had been the guy who started Qarana, the best company I had worked for until then. It was just natural for me to join ASPgems.

By adopting Rails as her development framework, ASPgems was making a statement: We don’t care what other people are doing, we want to use the best tools available with or without the support of the rest of the industry. Living up to that statement takes a lot of work. First you have to be sure you are using the best tools available, so you have to be scanning the surroundings all the time to see when it’s time to move to the new best thing. Besides, you have to keep up to date on all the changes and on the new libraries available. And of course in many occasions you will have to be the one building those libraries, because getting there first means no one did the work for you yet. This living on the edge thing can be really time consuming, but things get much easier when you find a friendly community sharing your passion. And in Ruby/Rails we are really lucky on that issue.

Today is ASPgems’ fourth birthday and I’ve been a part of the company almost from the first month. If I have to judge in terms of personal development, I can say without any doubts this is the best company I’ve worked for, and I guess that’s why I’ve stayed here longer than in any other place before.

Below are some of the things I have done in the last four years. Had I stayed in my safe Java corporate world, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have done some of these things, but I’m sure ASPgems inspired me to do most of them.

I have..

..attended more conferences (and camps, and other events) in the last four years than in the previous 10+ since I started working on IT.
..organized and presented talks in both national and international conferences
..co-started a local ruby group
..curated an extensive online presence: blog, personal page, vimeo, slideshare, mailing lists, communities…
..greatly improved my google ranking, making my conventional CV irrelevant
..written a book

..learnt how to better manage web projects
..seen clients really happy to see their projects going live on time
..shared my knowledge with both clients and competition
..launched more web applications than I can remember

..taught ruby on rails
..introduced some friends to the Ruby on Rails/Agile world
..developed a taste for being an early adopter on new technologies
..adopted ruby on rails for my personal and freelance projects
..switched to linux
..bought several domains and rented my own VPS

..learnt about SEO and Analytics
..made websites scale, and learnt a lot during the process
..learnt a lot about IT (web servers, process monitoring, system set up and configuration…)
..improved vastly my skills on client-side web developent
..been wrong many times, and happy to learn from those mistakes

..helped to build one of the most solid development teams I have seen
..worked together with the commercial department, and not against it

..kept in contact with brilliant developers from all over the world
..started repositories in github and rubyforge
..collaborated in several open source projects

..realized money is just a secondary motivation

Happy birthday ASPgems, and thank you.

p.s. By the way, remember how skeptical I was about Ruby? I was wrong, and happy to be. Go try it by yourself!

Slides and video for my talk “La herramienta de desarrollo definitiva” in conferencia rails 2009

I just realized I still hadn’t published in my blog the slides and video of my talk “La herramienta de desarrollo definitiva” in conferencia rails 2009, back in november.

My talk was a reflection about web development and the relative importance of the development tools. I was defending the idea of the individual with good practices being much more important than the choice of a tool or another. I was also talking about why Ruby on Rails is very appealing for such an individual and why it’s still relatively hard to find companies using modern techniques in development.

I talked about which were the best practices I consider an “ultimate developer” should embrace, linking it to concepts found in geek literature such as The Mythical Man Month, The Cluetrain Manifesto, Microserfs o The Soul of a New Machine.

This material is published under a Creative Commons NonCommercial-Attribution-ShareAlike license 2.5

The video is divided in two parts:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

IE cache for Ajax requests

A few days ago I ran into an issue that is now obvious but took me a while to figure out. I was programming a chat client and everything was working fine in Firefox and Chrome, but when I tested it on IE (6 and 8) things were not looking so good.

This chat is following the polling pattern, issuing an Ajax call every three seconds to check for any updates and receiving a JSON array with the pending messages, if any. Using prototype.js the code to call the javascript function every three seconds is this

new PeriodicalExecuter(Aspchat.chatRemotePoll, 3);

On IE the chat was initialized properly, the first call to the remote server was working fine, but the periodical poller was not issuing any further calls. At first I thought the problem was on PeriodicalExecuter, but after a bit of debugging I could see “Aspchat.chatRemotePoll” was being called, but the Ajax call inside was apparently ignored.

To make things more interesting, I could see some other Ajax requests were working fine (for example, the one to send messages or to update the user list).

Comparing the requests that were successfully sent with the ones that were ignored, I could see the difference. In the working requests I was using POST (the default when using prototype) but in the ignored calls I was using GET.

Once I saw this, it was easy to diagnose what the problem was. IE was caching the GET requests, even when using AJAX. To be honest, this time I will not even blame IE, since I understand a GET request is subject to cache. In this case, I would even say I prefer the IE behaviour over that of Firefox and Chrome.

There are basically three things you can do to prevent this kind of behaviour:

• The easy way out would be to convert my GET request to a POST one. Alas, I didn’t want to do it because in this case I was being RESTful and I was using the same URL for two different actions. When calling “/aspchat/messages” via GET I’m asking for new messages, but when calling via POST I’m sending a new message to the channel.
• Set HTTP headers to control client cache
• Make the request unique by adding a timestamp (or similar) to the URL

The solution I like the best is the one with HTTP headers, so I just went to my poller action (which by the way is managed via a Rails metal middleware) and added the Cache-Control: no-cache header. Just to be really sure, I also added the timestamp for extra security.

The prototype for the Ajax call with the timestamp looks like this

new Ajax.Request('/aspchat/messages', {
           parameters: {timestamp:new Date().getTime()}, //we need this to avoid IE caching of the AJAX get
           method: 'get',
           onSuccess: function(transport){
               Aspchat.displayChatMessages(eval(transport.responseText));  //pass the JSON array to displayChatMessages
                         }
       });

As an extra ball, you can see how I’m using the onSuccess callback to interpret the JSON I’m receiving from the server.

Now you cannot say you didn’t know your AJAX requests could be cached. Let’s be careful out there.

Ruby on Rails on unofficial Chrome OS

update: I thought this Chrome OS distribution was THE google distro. I was wrong. It’s just someone who used SUSE Studio to make a customized version of Open SUSE around the Chromium theme. With the site being on a google site and the code on a google code repository, I thought this was it, but no.. this distro is totally unrelated to google.

Chrome OS is by now just a bit more than a curiosity. In the meanwhile, you can go and download a non-official distribution mimicking what it could be, but be warned, all you are going to get is an Open Suse distribution with Chromium installed and a blue theme with a cute logo. Hopefully the real ChromeOS will be much lighter and more user-friendly.

Starting the virtual appliance from VirtualBox is easy. You create a new virtual media with the virtual media manager and then a virtual machine using this new media. That should be it. If you leave the default options (64MB) you’ll end up with a really slow boot. I set the base memory to 512K and things are much better.

What will you find in this distribution apart from Chromium? Zip, Zero, Null.. or if you are into ruby, nil.

Truth is, this distribution is a bit too rough around the edges (when it comes to internationalization, even if it ask you for the keyboard settings, it will just ignore them), but being a SUSE, you can install whatever you want. The only thing you’ll need is the root password. Since I’m such a hacker it took me almost no time to realize the root password was “root” (my other options being “sergei”, “larry” and “640Koughttobeenough”.

Once you have root access, you can use Yast for installing anything you might need. Just for fun I installed ruby, rubygems and sqlite3 via Yast, and then rails using gem. I had to run a gem update –system so I could use rails 2.3.4 and I generated a scaffold to see if everything was fine. Well, it was :)

ruby on rails running on google chrome os

Well, even if it was utterly useless, at least I found a cool way of making customized SUSE distros in an easy way ;)

it’s not the framework, it’s you

I’m getting tired already of the hype about Ruby on Rails and how it is better than any other framework past, present or future.

Sure Rails is a cute piece of software, and Ruby is a gorgeous language (supposing you are into programming languages, that is), but if you take a critical look at Rails, you could just say it’s another MVC framework.. Big deal.. And with some coupling issues between the layers too, which are fortunately being targeted on Rails 3.

Moreover, if you take a look at some of its components they could frankly be better. ActiveRecord, for example, is a wrapper ORM, which is implicitly tying you to the physical database layer, with one class per table, as opposed to a mapper ORM such as DataMapper or Hibernate. And the principle of least surprise is kind of a joke when it comes to some of the ActionView helpers and the parameters you have to pass along.

Still, as we like to say around here “Ruby on Rails mola infinito”, and it’s right now my favourite framework for non trivial web applications.

So.. what makes this framework so special? Is it only the absence of configuration and the sensible defaults? Would we sell ourselves for a couple of parlor tricks like those? Surely not.. specially with so many frameworks providing already sensible defaults. Come on, even in Java you can kind of forget about writing so much XML code if you make proper use of annotations and the like. No, it has to be something else.

Ruby on Rails has something that transcends the framework itself. It has you. The Mighty Developer. The Early Adopter. The Status Quo Challenger. The so-called Community —whatever that means.

Bottom line is, when I get together with people working with Rails, they are always in search of the holy grail of web development —or the nearest tavern, whatever comes first.. you have to love that kind of pragmatism. We like to break our assumptions, to learn new things and forget about the ones we already know.

We embrace Rails *today* but we are willing to embrace any other tool as long as we like it better. Do you remember the months before the Merb-Rails love affair? Half the Rails developers I know were already making eyes at Merb without the slightest hint of shame.

And by challenging the system, we are obliged to keep learning… and to find new ways to build the web. And instead of trying to make a carbon copy of what we did before, we like to start anew, because that’s where the fun is.

Sure you can argue this attitude is not the exclusive property of the Rails community. And I would second you on that based on theory.. but in practice, I have seen other some other communities lack this need of challenging. Maybe it’s because they have maturity models and certifications and black belts and whatnot…. And maybe having so many constraints is killing creativity; but fact is in some environments trying to take a step forward is seen as something odd, not desirable.

Rails will pass —or not— but as long as we keep alive the spirit of embracing change, we are entitled to be on the fun side of web development.

So, if you ask me, that’s the secret ingredient of Rails. Sure the language and the framework are cool, but the real power of Ruby on Rails is you.. and me.

update: please read the comments, since I was a bit ambiguous in the post and some points needed further explanation :)

Cucumber, Selenium, Webrat, and Windows

I spent last Saturday hacking around with some really smart people in Madrid. It’s not widely known than in Spain there’s a thriving Ruby on Rails community -my guess would be a language thing- but if you take a look at some of the Rails patches, Hackfest winners or the official Rails documentation project, you would be surprised to see how many -and how good- contributions are coming from this side of the world.

Once in a while we like to get together and take code challenges, so we can learn from each other and eat pizza to match the stereotype ;)

Thing is I’m a Windows guy. I know I should be sorry, I know it’s for housewives (or househusbands for that matter), but that’s life. (disclaimer: I’m planning to switch to Ubuntu in the near future)

As you know, developing software in windows while entirely possible is a bit more difficult than in other systems, specially when it comes to compiling, forking and the like.

Last Saturday I was, as usual, the only windows at hand (the rest being a lot of Macs in different flavors and a lonely Ubuntu) and, as a part of the code challenge, I had to run some tests with Cucumber, Selenium and Webrat. Apart from libxml, that has been working flawlessly in my computer for months, no other binaries were involved, so you would think everything was working just fine.. well, think twice.

First problem was the test server couldn’t be started automatically. I didn’t investigate much about it (my guess being that a fork or a system call is being issued and Windows cannot cope with it) since it was easier just to start it manually before running the tests. Also it was faster, because it didn’t need to be started every time.

After this obstacle, when I was trying to run the tests, I was getting a cryptic Errno::EADDRNOTAVAIL message. At first I thought it was because of Selenium not being able to bind to the given port, but a quick test from the command line discarded that possibility.

I don’t know anything about webrat (yet) but as the song goes, with a little help from my friends I was able to locate the source of the problem. When connecting to remote control Selenium, Webrat is trying to bind to the address “0.0.0.0” and that’s something Windows doesn’t like.

All I had to do was opening the file “selecium_rc_server.rb” at the gem source and replacing “0.0.0.0” by “127.0.0.1”.

I was told I can do this much more clearly at the Webrat config, but I tried it out and I still had the same problem. Taking a look at the Webrat code I would say the config param is not honoured system-wide, but truth is I was in a hurry and I didn’t researched it thoroughly. I had a challenge to solve after all ;)

Once I did this, all was hunky dory. Selenium started, the form fields were filled in, the tests were passing (or not) and the result was displayed on my not-ansi console. Bummer.

Believe me, cucumber is not half the fun without the colors in the output. Fortunately enough, google can tell you where to find lots of ansi-aware console replacements. Unfortunately enough console2, my favourite, is not one of those.

So, there, it took a bit of extra work but now you can also run this neat stack in your good-old windows box.

Scotland on Rails 2009

De vuelta de la conferencia Scotland on Rails me vuelvo con unas cuantas cosas aprendidas/confirmadas

a) Lo de menos son las charlas (aunque sigue siendo importante que, si las hay, sean interesantes). Lo que importa es el ambiente que se genera alrededor . Creo que el futuro de los eventos de desarrollo va por menos charlas, o por charlas filosóficas.

b) Tener un nombre en la comunidad no garantiza que seas competente haciendo presentaciones. Lo que sí garantiza es que te aplaudirán digas lo que digas (o leas lo que leas, aunque lleve años publicado y no tenga ningún interés).

c) El feedback positivo en una conferencia será directamente proporcional a la gente que venga de otros países. Se ve que la cortesía hace que evalúes bien aunque cometas el suicidio de no tener wifi en un sitio lleno de geeks, haya pocos enchufes, y des un catering de todo a 100.

d) La comunidad Rails hispana es muy potente, técnica y personalmente. El día que nos dé por hablar en inglés la vamos a liar parda. Da gusto escuchar a cualquiera de los de la representación “española” formada por Sam, Rai, Blat, Xavier, Alfredo, Gaizka, Susana, Fernando G., Sergio, Christos, Luismi, Guillermo, Felipe, David, Raúl, Juanjo, Jaime (y yo mismo :p )

En cuanto a las charlas, las que me inspiraron algo fueron (en orden cronológico):

– Getting Git, por Scott Chacon. Muy didáctico y con un buen balance entre crash course y consejos para usuarios más avanzados. Me gustó tanto que en cuanto su libro se publique es muy posible que lo compre. EPIC WIN

– Building blocks of modularity, por Jim Weirich. A pesar de alguna diferencia de criterio que tengo en las categorías de “connascence”, me pareció una charla muy interesante. Lo mejor es que no tenía nada que ver con Ruby o Rails. Era una charla de ingeniería/arquitectura de software. Así sí. EPIC WIN

– Security – what Rails will and won’t do for you, por Rory McCune. Sin entrar en nada especialmente novedoso, hizo una muy buena exposición de seguridad, comprensible, con ritmo, y con algunos datos que me parecieron interesantes. Es posible que acabe cambiando el login en alguna aplicación después de escucharla. WIN

– Advanced deployment, por Jonathan Weiss. Estuve a punto de perderme esta charla porque el nombre es muy engañoso, pero afortunadamente una amiga me hizo leer la descripción de la charla y acabé viéndola. No va de cómo hacer deploy, sino de qué forma puedes lidiar con una instalación compleja que requiere rendimiento, en concreto muy enfocado a la capa de datos. Explicaba las diferentes opciones para que tu base de datos escale, bien con replicación master-slave, master-master, particionado vertical de base de datos, sharding.. o mucho más sencillamente aplicando los famosos KISS y less is more. Me gustó ver que varias de las soluciones que aportaba las tenemos en producción en algunos proyectos. Siempre reconforta ver que lo que has hecho confiando en tu instinto es algo que tiene sentido. WIN

– The Ruby Object Model, por Dave Thomas. Nada nuevo que no esté escrito hace años (de hecho en los libros de este señor), pero de todos modos muy bien explicado y con unas referencias muy bien puestas a Simula y Smalltalk, incluída alguna frase lapidaria de Alan Kay. Lástima que no dedicase unos minutos más (dos) para introducir la teoría de objetos y el concepto de mensaje. Es lo único que le faltó para que me pareciera brillante. EPIC WIN

Y las charlas a las que asistí y que me hicieron sentir decepcionado:

– Keynote por Marcel Molina. Me alegro de que sepas leer y de que conozcas la página archive.org. El resto de la sala también tenemos internet en casa y también sabemos leer. Quizás sea especialmente duro porque en todas las charlas que he visto de Marcel me ha parecido brillante y esperaba mucho de esta keynote. FAIL

– Merb and Rails 3.0, por Yehuda Katz. Quitando el momento “teletienda engine yard de los primeros minutos”, me pareció en algunos puntos demasiado agresivo, en otros demasiado técnico, en otros demasiado ambiguo, y en otros pelín soberbio. Puede que por eso me dijeran que me parezco a él :P No me gustó su charla, pero he de reconocerle que de no haber sido por él puede que nunca se hubiera inventado el famoso juego “muerte violenta en seis movimientos”. De nuevo puede que sea un pelín duro porque Merb me gusta mucho y esperaba una charla espectacular. FAIL

– Server to server communication using XMPP and Ruby, por George Palmer. Dar una charla de XMPP sin hablar de XMPP y sin estar seguro de las siglas tiene su mérito. Dar una charla de 45 minutos en 20 tiene su mérito. Jactarse de no haberse leído un manual de 108 páginas porque es demasiado grande y luego no saber contestar a ninguna pregunta diciendo “pues esto estaría bien que lo hiciera, pero no sé si lo lleva”, tiene su mérito. Y a pesar de todo el FAIL no es absoluto porque la puesta en escena y la presentación multimedia me gustaron. Salvado por las slides de ser un EPIC FAIL.

A pesar de que el nivel de las charlas no me pareció óptimo y de que varios detalles de organización me parecieron muy malos (como que se llame “scotland on rails” y luego se quejen de que está demasiado orientada a Rails), el balance general que me llevo de la conferencia es bueno.

La experiencia fue muy interesante, la compañía inmejorable, y nada como ir a una de éstas para estar al día en tendencias de camisetas, zapatillas, y portátiles y gadgets cool ;)

Las fotos de la conferencia se están subiendo a flickr

p.s. gracias a aspgems por el detalle de hacerse cargo de mi viaje.

Rails Hot Or Not. The Movie

Una vez pasada la resaca de la conferencia Rails, y a punto de entrar en la resaca navideña, ya están subidos los videos de la conferencia rails 2008

Aunque pierde mucho enlatada, os dejo por aquí el video de la sesión Rails Hot Or Not

Y para que no se diga, también dejo la presentación que utilicé, convenientemente editada para que se vea en cada uno de los casos cuál fue el ganador elegido por la audiencia


Este material tiene una licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-LicenciarIgual 2.5

Por supuesto, agradecer la participación y el buen rollo de los asistentes a la charla, que contribuyeron a que fuera un éxito.. aunque nunca llueva a gusto de todos ;)

searchwords: hot or not, conferencias, rails

Rails HOT or NOT

Este año en la Conferencia Rails voy a presentar la sesión “Rails Hot or Not”

La idea es sacar partido de que vamos a estar juntos más de 200 personas que trabajamos todos los días con Rails, para poder extraer algo de conocimiento colectivo de la comunidad. Lo que pretendo hacer con esta charla es obtener una lista actualizada de los plugins/gemas/librerías varias que a día de hoy preferimos los desarrolladores Rails a la hora de empezar un proyecto y porqué.

Por ejemplo, una de las comparativas podría ser: Attachment_fu vs. PaperClip

Para que la sesión sea lo más interesante posible, no quiero hacer yo la lista de librerías a evaluar, ni quiero sacarla de sitios algo desactualizados como la toolbox de working with rails, sino que prefiero que sea un reflejo de lo que realmente usamos a día de hoy para desarrollar.

Supongamos que os toca hacer una aplicación compleja con Rails (os pongo debajo una lista de funcionalidades como ejemplo). Me gustaría saber qué gemas,plugins o librerías (en el sentido más amplio, javascript/css también me valen) son los que usaríais para abordar este proyecto. Si vosotros me mandáis esa lista, lo que voy a hacer es categorizar los elementos que me mandéis para poder hacer la presentación con ellos y que así quede la comparativa interesante.

Lista de posibles funcionalidades: un buscador, generación de pdfs, caché, integración con APIs de terceros, generación/lectura de feeds, multi-idioma, carga significativa de Ajax, procesos de fondo de larga duración, volumen de envío de mails razonable, autenticación con roles, un backend, foros, chat, edición de texto con formato (al estilo redcloth o wysiwig), popups estilo lightbox, notificación de excepciones, captcha, control de spam, upload de ficheros, creación de thumbnails, creación de gráficas/informes, notificación de excepciones, mapas y geolocalización… además de la funcionalidad que se ve, está la que no se ve: tests, profiler para el código, framework css, framework js…

Para facilitar en lo posible la recopilación de librerías, enviadme vuestras listas a jramirez+hotornot@aspgems.com. No seáis vaguetes y enviadme algo… así la charla será más interesante… y, ya puestos, como la conferencia empieza el 13 de noviembre, intentad enviarme la lista antes de que acabe octubre para que me dé tiempo a prepararla.

Publicaré el resultado de las votaciones en este mismo blog unos días después de la conferencia. Así podemos sacar todos partido.

searchwords: conferenciarails, conferenciarails2008, hotornot