I am trying to emphasize the importance of installing your own machine, just like Jedi knights have to build their own lightsabers, you should be competent enough to install the required software on your development machine.

I will try not to go into platform specific rants or anything, just a guideline on how to do it.

1. Know your OS – be it windows, linux or osx, please be familiar with the os you are planning to develop on, if you get stuck, search for some tutorials on the web. You should be very friendly with the command line, if you are planning to use linux, and even in some cases osx.

2. Know your platform – be it ruby, java, python, .net or anything else, learn how to install the basic tools to get you running, you have great video tutorials for just about anything, so go ahead and watch them.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask someone – take this one with caution, it is ok to ask for an advice, or if you get stuck, but never ask another developer to install some of the tools for you, as you then seem incompetent in their eyes.

And do try to follow some of the people creating the technology you are using on social networks, you can see some tips and tricks, update and version release announcements and everything else. Looking at a few cat pictures is sure worth it considering the knowledge you are getting from these people.

So i had to deploy the app on windows 7, and i will show you how.

First, there are few steps you have to take care of:

1. Install Ruby with the ruby installer http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/

2. Install Ruby DevKit from the same source(this will be needed for you to compile some native binaries)

3. Install Thin server(gem install thin)

4. Set up dropbox deployment for your application(i know this is monkeypatching as hell, but if it works…) as described on Rob Conery’s blog

5. Test the app and make sure everything is working ok, (run rails server), then thin start -e production, just to make sure everything is ok, and all of your gems work on windows(fix or replace the ones that don’t)

6. Set up the task scheduler(this is a fine piece of software on Win 7 and up) as described  here, to run rails application almost as a windows service( you start with ‘thin start -e production -p 80 -c “path_to_your_app” ‘)

7. Write a nifty batch script that will restart the server, run migrations, compile the assets and whatnot.

cd "path_to_your_app"

bundle exec rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production

bundle exec rake assets:precompile

schtasks /End /TN "name_of_your_task_in_scheduler"

schtasks /Run /TN "name_of_your_task_in_scheduler"

8. After you pull to your dropbox synced repository, login to the server and execute the batch file from there to almost automate the deployment process.

I know this is not capistrano, and cap deploy, and it is hacked as it can be, and also, it works, it’s a small client so i don’t expect much trouble with this.

Lesson here: Try as much as you can to deploy your rails server on a linux server, best in a virtual machine. But if HP messes with you and you have some shitty hardware running windows, this is the best way i have found. If anyone has anything better, put it into comments, i’m happy to make my life easier.

References:

1. http://wekeroad.com/danger-danger/git-and-dropbox-sitting-in-a-tree

2. http://unicornless.com/systems-administration/run-thin-as-windows-service

It seemed as a hell of a solution, but i managed to make a simple plugin that works on all major browsers, except Opera. Using window.onbeforeunload, we can prevent the user from doing anything that would hurt their unsaved data. you just load the javascript file, put a tag into your forms that you want to protect and it works out of the box with JQuery.

var isSubmitted = false;
window.onbeforeunload = function() {
  var message = "You could have unsaved changes!";
  if ($('form[data-validate-exit="true"]').length > 0)
  {
    if (!isSubmitted)
    {
      return message;
    }
  }
}
document.ready = function() {
  $('form[data-validate-exit="true"]').find('button[type="submit"]').click(function() {
    window.isSubmitted = true;
  });
}

The message doesn’t show on firefox, but a convenient one will show, enough to warn the user on his actions.

The html code in your form should be like this:

<form data-validate-exit="true">

Your html here

</form>

One friendly suggestion if you follow this path, after you implement this on any of your web apps, use Opera for development, or comment the stuff out for your own sake, you will loose your mind clicking on the leave validations.

A colleague and me were supposed to hold a talk about creating our latest web app, a nursery management app created using Ruby on Rails and Oracle XE. As we thought, the talk was canceled and we were free of all obligation. But no, this saturday, 5 days before the talk, i was reviewing the agenda and found out the talk is on. So what can i do?

I will walk you through the steps, though they shouldn’t be used unless you are in a crunch, and it is not longer than an hour, luckily my talk is only half an hour.

1. Gather as much irrelevant info about the company and the client(our somewhat of a manager sorted that out)

2. If you are the developer, try to talk as much as you can about the technology and its integration( I love Rails so that is no problem )

3. Scrape out the basic workflow of the application you are presenting, user experience and why is something done in that way.

4. Take as much screenshots as it takes

5. Talk about details in the application, and finally leave at least 5 minutes for the audience to ask questions.

I managed to cramp all that into 30 minutes, i will update this post after i’m done thursday morning, to write how the talk went.

Lesson for everyone: Know your talking schedule at least one month before you are doing a talk, this way you can prepare and practice.

Update: The talk went surprisingly well, the hall was almost full, with 24 people listening. I haven’t got my reviews yet, but i feel they will be great for my first conference talk.

Load jquery-ui in your app/assets/javascripts/application.js

//= require jquery
//= require jquery_ujs
//= require jquery-ui
//= require_tree .

Pick and download a nice theme from: JQuery-UI themes site

Copy jquery-ui-1.8.16.custom.css(version number could differ) to your vendor/assets/stylesheets folder as jquery-ui.css (This will save you time later when you are updating or changing the theme) and include it in your app/assets/stylesheets/application.css

*= require_self
*= require jquery-ui
*= require_tree .

Copy images from the images folder to vendor/assets/images

Modify vendor/assets/stylesheets/jquery-ui.css and replace “images/” to “/assets/”

Now that you have everything set up and ready, go ahead and use the fancy JQuery-UI plugins

The solution is:

1. Make your checkboxes readonly by setting the readonly attribute to true

<%= check_box_tag "some_id", :readonly => true %>

2. Put this javascript in your document.load so the click will be overridden:

// Javascript:

$(':checkbox[readonly="readonly"]').click(function() {
return false;
});

// Coffeescript:

$(':checkbox[readonly="readonly"]').click ->
false

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :user
  attr_accessor :user_name
  def user_name
    user.name if user_id
  end
end

And the part in your view that i left out the last time, but this one is just better in my opinion:

< %= f.label :user_name %><br />
< %= f.text_field :user_name %>
< %= f.hidden_field :user_id %>

Also, you have to edit the CoffeScript that does the magic for you, so it will return the id into the hidden field:

$(document).ready ->
  $('#post_user_name').autocomplete
    source: "/ajax/users"
    select: (event,ui) ->
      $("#post_user_id").val(ui.item.id)

An easier way of doing it, and leaner on the database queries, at least one less.

I have two models in my app, post(title, body) and user(name, email) and i want to select user with autocomplete when creating the post. As a prerequisite, i have created 100 users with Faker gem.

First, you have to add JQuery-UI to your app/assets/javascripts/application.js file so it will look like this:

//= require jquery
//= require jquery-ui
//= require jquery_ujs
//= require_tree .

Next, we set up an ajax controller with rails g controller ajax users to have a controller with users action and automatic route. I like to call the controller ajax, or autocomplete, to keep things organized for this. Here is the ajax controller with everything just rendered into json that suits JQuery-UI autocomplete format

class AjaxController < ApplicationController
  def users
    if params[:term]
      like= "%".concat(params[:term].concat("%"))
      users = User.where("name like ?", like)
    else
      users = User.all
    end
    list = users.map {|u| Hash[ id: u.id, label: u.name, name: u.name]}
    render json: list
  end
end

Next we set up the post model with user_name attribute getter and setter

def user_name=(name)
  user = User.find_by_name(name)
  if user
    self.user_id = user.id
  else
    errors[:user_name] << "Invalid name entered"
  end
end
def user_name
  User.find(user_id).name if user_id
end

After this, it’s all CoffeScript which i add to app/assets/javascripts/application.js.coffee

$(document).ready ->
  $('#post_user_name').autocomplete({source: "/ajax/users"})

And that is everything needed for a nice autocomplete, be sure to include a suitable JQuery-UI theme in your vendor/assets/stylesheets folder.

The main problem is with CoffeScript and its compiling into “real” JavaScript. So here is an easy way to enable your machine for rails 3.1. You have to install Node.js on your machine( i have tried all other Javascript runtimes with no luck). All the instructions for other platforms are listed on the project’s GitHub page, i will include only the ubuntu procedure here.

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jerome-etienne/neoip

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nodejs

And that is all, hope i have made your life easier at least a bit.

I used DasBlog to BlogML converter for the conversion of posts, you have to download the whole folder and then point the tool at it.

After that, installed BlogML Importer plugin for WordPress, and used that in the import script. I’m very happy that the process worked like a charm.

Now that everything works again, i can dedicate myself to my new love, Ruby and Rails development.