Posts Tagged ‘rails’

Santa’s got Gems baby! Ruby Ireland Christmas Meetup 2009

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Ho ho ho! The month’s Ruby Ireland meetup sprag right out of the traps with early adopters showing up at 6pm in the lobby area of the Trinity Capital Hotel, Wed Dec 16th. Easing into the evening with a 4 euro pint and talk of Android phones – seemingly the top item of everyone’s Christmas shopping list – the latest crop of gems in the Ruby world was in hot debate, gemcutter in particular.

A couple of folks had been playing around with RubyGame for visualising data as it changes on the fly – showing that this framework is for more than just gaming. The XML/HTML parser Nokogiri was also mentioned a few of times in passing, with the particularly eye-catching quote “XML is like violence – if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it” adorning the home page of its website. And the cracking little tool tig was also brought up, which has a dinky little ncurses interface into git repositories. Pretty cool; not least because it makes it easier for newbies to avoid being bitten when they start git’tin.

The downstairs lobby in the hotel worked out great for people to meet up and relax, with most people turning up at the scheduled 7 o clock for kick off. From there we took over the, what has to be said, pretty classy meeting room complete with old style couches and some Joan Miró paintings. Just in tune with the creative buzz we had going on. There wasn’t too much talk of Ruby for a while as most people were in stunned admiration of the room. Then the food platter arrived. Impressively, this is when everyone showed off their good manners by looking shyly at the platter for a few minutes, with that kind of “You first, sir” glint in their eye, before taking the plunge and sinking into the pakoras and wedges! Pretty much undoing any good work in the gym from earlier in the day!

One of the funnier moments of the night was when someone went to check the tweets against the (now settled upon) #rubyireland hashtag. Only to find lost rubyists tweeting from the hotel lobby as to where the meetup was on. After a quick runaround the lobby to herd anyone wielding a Macbook into the meeting room, the evening was back on track. We split up into a few smaller groups, with the main walk-through being on the qtonrails – a Rails plugin to simply developing applications on Linux and other platforms using Nokia’s Qt framework atop Rails.

To finish off we had a bit of improv comedy from everyone at different closing stages of the evening; in particular Paul O’Malley with his faithful rendition of an emotion beekeeper. And yes now we’re straying off topic so it’s probably time to go. We’ll leave you with Paul’s write up of last night’s shenanigans :-)

Thanks to everyone who showed. Have a great Christmas and catch ye all in Jan 2010 – surely destined to be the decade of Ruby domination!

Ciao,
Dec

The Green Red Gems Find a Troika Home (Ruby Ireland in the troika persons in one deity hotel)

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Posted in Geek, Programming, RubyIreland, Rubyonrails, UbuntuIreland | No Comments »

Generate Rails Migrations from your PostgreSQL or MySQL database

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

1) Create a new empty Rails project called schemer

2) In your config/database.yml file, point at the database you wish to dump to a migrations file

3) Run the command ‘rake db:schema:dump’. This should create a db/schema.rb file. Amazingly this effectively is your migrations file!

4) To tidy up create a file called file db/migrate/20091125205635_create_initial_schema.rb

5) Then copy the create_table statements from the schema.rb file into the new file 20091125205635_create_initial_schema.rb. Here’s a template

class CreateInitialSchema < ActiveRecord::Migration

  def self.up
    # Put all create_table statements from schema.rb file here
    # Note: You don't need the 'ActiveRecord::Schema.define(:version' line or it's enclosing end statement
    # ...
    # ...
  end

  def self.down
    # Don't really need this
  end

end

6) Once you’ve all this done you can just run ‘rake db:migrate’ and you should have a new sqlite db up and running under db/development.sqlite3

Thanks to Justin Ball on this Nobody Listens Anyway blog at Dump an Existing Database Schema Into a Ruby On Rails Migration Ready Format for the basis of this tip. Sometimes somebody does…

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Posted in Programming, RubyIreland, Rubyonrails | 1 Comment »

Installing Ruby On Rails on Windows

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

There were a couple of great outcomes from the first Free Ruby Lesson we ran in the Havana cafe on Dublin’s Georges St last Monday. The first was getting everyone hacking with the Rails stack and some practical examples in double quick time. The second was managing to get RoR installed on Windows Vista as the lesson rumbled on in the background. Here’s how Rails conquered Vista.

We kicked off by following the instructions on the rails wiki. It’s worth paying careful attention to anywhere it says to set path variables. If you find that you are getting an error that says that you version of rubygems is not recent enough (and you can’t get rubygems to update itself) then you can install an older version of Rails, for example 2.3.2, using the following from the command line

gem install rails -v 2.3.2

(Note: If you have already installed a different version of rails you can uninstall it first by using ‘gem uninstall rails’).

The big problem however was getting sqlite3 working. We did install the SQLite Command Line Tool and the SQLite DLL as the Rails Wiki instructions said to – but to no avail. We kept getting a popup error saying that the sqlite3 dll was not found and to please consider reinstalling. Fortunately, we gambled on one of the answers on StackOverflow. Basically the solution was from the command line

gem uninstall sqlite3-ruby
gem install sqlite3-ruby --source http://gems.rubyinstaller.org

And with that we were away! The final thing was to get a nice friendly IDE installed so we plumbed for Netbeans on the Netbeans Downloads page. Look out for the special Ruby version of Netbeans which is one of the links around the middle of the downloads page.

Anyway, that’s all for this week. Happy Ruby hacking!

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Posted in Programming, RubyIreland | No Comments »

Offline Documentation for Rails (and other Ruby gems)

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

I used to pretty much always install gems with the –no-ri –no-rdoc options to speed up installation. Recently however, I’ve found myself needing to get access to documentation whilst on the move. So just in case you don’t know how that works, here’s the deal.

* Install your gems as per normal (ie. don’t use –no-ri or –no-rdoc)
* Run the command ‘gem server’ from the command line
* Browse to http://localhost:8808
* And voila! You should have all the docs you need available by clicking on the rdoc link for any given gem
* But if you really want to get fancy check out the searchable Rails documentation at http://railsapi.com – there’s an online version as well as the downloadable (the links are at the top of the page and can easily be mistaken for an advert!)

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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »