Lone Gunman

Yesterday evening, I installed Netbeans 6.1 since I use Netbeans for my Ruby on Rails development. When developing today, I wanted to use the debugger, but for some reason I couldn’t seem to install the Fast Debugger again. After some research on the Netbeans site, I came accross the answer.

Seems like there is a bug in Netbeans 6.1 that was discovered to late and ended up in the release. It will be fixed in a normal update, for the people that realy need the debugger (I guess every good developer), the fix is easy. Just uninstall the ruby-debug-base gem and install the fast-debugger-ide gem.

Everything is working perfectly now

I realy start to get into the Rails rabbit hole. The last 9 months or so, I’ve been working in some Rails projects for the company I work for during the day. I have learned a lot, but when reading other peoples blog, I still feel like a real Uber n00b. I started last weekend on a new project for Netronix . Since I wan’t this project to be like a future reference for other projects, I started to read a lot upon programming styles in RoR. One term that allways poped up was the REST. I saw it at the beginning when I just started to learn Ruby (and Rails) but never realy payed mutch attention to it. And it wasn’t mentioned even once in all of the Rails books that I read. So why bother.

For some reason, I just wanted to know what REST was. So I started the quest at your friendly neighberhood search engine Google . And yes, you get a lot of good hits, but also a lot of junk. During my quest of knowledge, I stumbled apon a nice PDF called RESTful Rails Development . Its not big, but it explains the whole theory in a playful way.

I could realy advice this light bedtime reading to everyone who has started learning Rails, and is just eager to improve his/her Rails skills.

So this weekend I’ll start on refactoring my project. Hopefully it will pay of soon . Maybe RESTful programming will become a second nature

Since I started my new job, I had to learn Ruby On Rails in a real quick pace. My employer wanted to step up to the next level with the web applications the company developed. For that, they chose for Ruby On Rails, so offcourse, like I was the new kid in the house, I had to start learning it.

Ruby is a very nice language to code in. It is totaly OO and the application structure and implemented patterns like ActiveRecord and MVC are just to die for. Not that I stop working in PHP (on the contrary, when I start developing in Rails, I simultaniously started learning the PHP Symfony framework).

During my learning proces in Rails, I came in touch with Active Scaffold. A quick way to develop a CRUD interface that adapts itself to your DB schema. So whenever you add an attribute later on to your table, You’re CRUD interface will automatically change.

At the beginning I have to say, I was a bit scepticle. I was still learning Rails (and still am) and the whole Active Scaffold thing was just overwhelming. I found it hard to get things done the way I wanted, just out of ignorence.
But after working with Active Scaffold for 2 months, I have learned its true power. Active Scaffold is just configurable in every way you want.

We have a project running at the moment that is totaly build upon Active Scaffold. Every CRUD functionality is based on Active Scaffold, and believe me, we have done some wacky things with it.

So living with Active Scaffold has been a real treat. I couldn’t work without it anymore. You save a lot of time creating a nice interface (you can easaly edit the CRUD to fit your needs in any way you want). I would suggest it to any Rails developer out there.

Anyone of you ever used Active Scaffold? If not, do it right away and let me know if you like it . Even you readers who have used it and probably still do, share your experiance with me, maybe you know some tricks I have not yet hear about.