Posts tagged with "rails"

I am experimenting with Mongoid and embedded relations. I have a class A that can have three named 1..1 relations to class B, and I found it quite problematic to get the reverse relationship setup. After specifying class_name and inverse_of everything started working as expected.

class B

  include Mongoid::Document

  embedded_in :a, class_name: "A"

end

class A

  include Mongoid::Document

  embeds_one :something, class_name: "B", inverse_of: :a
  embeds_one :completely class_name: "B", inverse_of: :a
  embeds_one :different, class_name: "B", inverse_of: :a

end

A year ago I was frustrated over Rails’ close ties to Subversion. But as Rails is moving from SVN to Git, the future is looking bright. The only bastion left I can think of is RubyForge.

Robby Russell is a constant source of information on Ruby and Rails, I have used his instruction on how to set up Rails and PostgreSQL on Mac a number of times. It is therefore fun to see that I have actually used 3 out of the 5 things he wants to know more about::

RSpec User Stories

We were very early adopters of this one, we started using it the same day it hit trunk in a useable form. Everyone should start using it today - I cannot speak highly enough of it. The only thing I miss is a Fit-style table approach to rules, but I have my own thoughts about that one.

Yesterday I twittered that I was trying to find a version of Ruby that both cc.rb and Rails likes. Last night, Wordpress plugin Twittertools posted yesterdays twitters to this blog. And this morning, I have an answer from Alexey Verkhovsky what the good versions are. Gotta love the lazyweb.

I just read the following in a month old post on the RSpec list:

As someone who uses an IDE, I find dealing with multiple SCMs is a real pain, and one of the cool things about Ruby has been that (traditionally) nearly everything’s in Subversion

It might be that Rails will have hard time keeping up with new stuff, both technically and culturally, since it tied really close knots with everything that was cool 2005.

I was happy to note that Dion Almaer commented on my blog post on Merb. Dion is one of my favorite bloggers/podcasters and I value what he writes highly.

But I disagree with him on this one. The problem with using Java for web application development was never one of too much choice. In fact, it was because of that choice that Java became a player in the server side market at all. Sun alone never had the answer to what was needed for server side development, instead the open source world stepped in and made incremental corrections.

I have used Rails on a daily basis for almost a year now, and before that I was a night time hangaround. While I am definitely a happier programmer using Rails than anything built on Java, I still feel that it can get better.

First of all I want more things to be plugins. And really, they should not be plugins at all but gems instead.

Why plugins? We use RSpec instead of Test/Unit, HAML instead of erb and are seriously looking into JQuery instead of Prototype. And of course, we are using Mercurial instead of Subversion. All of this is of course possible to use in Rails, but a lot of things are sort of made for the default choice, such as generators generating tests, and plugins having the -x switch for Subversion. And I am pretty sure that this is the way DHH wants it.

DHH’s post about the Rails 2.0 is incredibly well written. It is almost as he is showing off a unknown past as a PR agent when he talks about Rails not supporting commercial databases out of the box:

But that doesn’t mean the commercial databases are left out in the cold. Rather, they’ve now been set free to have an independent release schedule from the main Rails distribution.

This sort of well formulated marketing has been known to render some sour remarks from the rest of the open source web framework world. My belief is though that when they ask themselves “Why are people so attracted to Rails, my framework of choice is just as good or even better”, sentences like the one above are probably a large part of the answer.

I have absolutely no clue as to why David Heinemeier Hanson would hold any suspicious thoughts toward Sun. To me, given the big boys in the playground, they are the good guys. But reading it made me realize that I have not heard of IBM in a very, very long time.

Big Blue was quite quick to join the Java bandwagon, remember VisualAge for Java? But in the new world of dynamic languages IBM, apart from a few developerWorks articles, is not to be heard from.

I just got a mail confirming that I will not speak at RailsConf Europe this fall. I had submitted a proposal named “Version Control in Rails using Mercurial” which was going to show the benefits of using a distributed version control system when developing a Rails app. My opening line would have been “Hi, I am Marcus and I have been Subversion free for six months”.

For some weird reason, so many people in the Rails community - and the open source community as whole - still talk about Subversion as something great. It is not. Subversion is decent at best if you are comfortable knowing that you are using second or third best tools, but believe me, it is a crap choice knowing the alternatives in distributed version control.