Vladimir Penkin

Sinatra template

Recently I found myself doing a couple of very simple services for my cliens with Sinatra. Just some basic authentication, active_record and mysql2 database, few forms, rails view helpers. There is a lot of guides and tutorials around internet. But it seems that there is no good Sinatra template with testing coverate, basic files structure, etc. So I made one. GitHub

Features

* HTTP basic authentication 
* ActiveRecord orm
* Sqlite3 for development, Mysql2 for production
* 2 very basic but associated models
* HAML, blueprint, jquery
* User and Admin interfaces
* Scroller with products
* Full rake tasks for db management(hacked sinatra-activerecord gem)
* Testing suite out of the box(RSpec)
* Some essential Rails helpers 
* Ready for deploy with passenger(config/setup_load_paths.rb)

Some prefer to extract controllers, models and helpers in corresponding folders and split them over files. It is a matter of taste, bit hey! If you have that much code, consider using Rails instead.

Enjoy

Code reading Retrospectiva

2011-09-09T00:00:00+04:00

Remark

With this article I want to start a series of ‘code reading’ posts. I love to read source code, especialy good one. And I think it is important for you as a programmer to read others code. You can pick up some tricks or find a better way to structure code or even find new constructions you weren’t aware of. Also checkout code reading series: ARailsDemo, Code Safari

Code Reading: Retrospectiva

What is it?

Retrospectiva as it says on the site “open-source project management tool, intended to assist the collaborative aspect of work carried out by agile software development teams” by Dimitrij Denissenko. It came under my radar a long time ago and just recently I had opportunity to read across project.

I like a structure of the code and especially extension bindings. It’s very rails 2.x-ish and very clean. Everything has it’s own place.

$gems_rake_task

As a good rails app, Retrospectiva have it’s core functionality under /lib directory. The interesting thing in environment.rb is how it get activated:

Core doesn’t get loaded if rails environment is called via rake task. Appears that there is 2 global variables that allow you do define whether you are in rake or rails environment in your code $gems_rake_task, $rails_rake_task!

seeds.rb

How are yours db/seeds.rb file looks like? Usually I used to put ordinary Rails code there.

Althouth it can and need to be represented as a module! Remember Good coders code, great reuse. Retrospectiva does follow this rule in db/seeds.rb:

changelog.rb

It is great to have CHANGELOG file in your project, but it’s usually a pain to see what changed recently from the last version. Why don’t let ruby and git do this job for you? script/changelog.rb contain a ruby script that does the trick. You just need to write a good commit messages.

retrospectiva_installer.rb

Another great script for app installation script/remove/retrospectiva_installer.rb

tiny_git.rb

For integration with git, Retrospectiva using self written module that you could easily pick up at vendor/plugins/tiny-git.

it_should_behave_like

I wan’t aware of this feature of RSpec before. With share_as and it_should_behave_like you can describe general behaviour of an object and then mix it to your current spec. It’s like module/include/extend for specs.

Shared example group(RSpec docs)
Specifying mixins with shared example groups in RSpec-2

flash.keep

Keeps either the entire current flash or a specific flash entry available for the next action. ApiDock

Tips

A trick for 99% of your projects

Well thats all for today.

tips

Always trust projects .rvmrc file

A trick for 99% of your projects

Array#to_proc

Code reading

Importance of code reading:

teambox
locomotive_cms
hamster
facets

rails3_before_render plugin

2011-03-11T00:00:00+03:00

rails3_before_render plugin

I’ve just released small plugin rails3_before_render. It adds a hook like before_filter to your controllers that gets executed between when your action is completed and the template is rendered. It can really DRY up loading some data.

Please be carefull using that. Regular before/after/around filters is enough for most of the tasks that you can imagine. If not you always call method directly, that will increase readability of your code. Use before_render in exceptional cases.

Here is good presentation by David Chelimsky about code duplication and DRY concept.

Use case

Mostly I’ve needed that plugin for my mugen gem.

There is error check after each api request that populate Mugen.errors variable with messages. Every action of controller after all requests has been sent need to check that variable and populate flash messages with that. Without having plugin I used wrapper function like this:

After 5-th action code duplication seems unreasonable. Regular filters like before_filter and after_filter didn’t fit here. Errors parsing clearly needs to be executed right before rendering.

With that I could remove mygengo_request method along with wrapping each action in controller.

before_render

Before writing this plugin I have found before_render plugin by Todd Willey. Sadly it worked for rails 2.x only. Rails 3 brought us completely new architecture of ActionPack and as I have found even ActiveSupport had major changes. Callbacks module is now more efficient that is was before.

New ActiveSupport::Callbacks methods were used, in analogy with ActionDispatch. That allowed me to escape reimplementing callback filter chains.

TextMate Project Drawer Enhanced

2011-03-03T00:00:00+03:00

TextMate Missing Sidebar Enhanced

Missing Drawer is a better sidebar for Textmate project.

First thing to notice, is when you hiding project drawer it automatically resizes text window, so you can enjoy full screen without more actions.

Also it adds “Open Terminal Here” button. Handy! Because you never need cd to working directory anymore.

Although, there was a bug when you use it with iTerm 2. It always open new window instead of new tab. fixed

Also added nice enhancement that save me couple of seconds every day - GitX button.

While my pull request awaiting for a merge into master branch, why not try it out right now?

plugin

myGengo Api Labs Contest

Starting from a new years holidays I have participated in myGengo Api Labs

3 Things I have developed so far:

Mugen - ruby wrapper for myGengo API, based on httparty. Also include generators of nested rails app that provides basic interface. I have took a look on existing wrapper provided by myGengo Team, which was not very clear and rubyish way. Also it’s been a while since I wanted to try httparty gem by John Nunemaker. GitHub Mygengo Plugin page

Install it now by :

Radiant-cms extension - Is also using mugen to talk to myGengo servers. This extension integrates to your administration interface to set up jobs for translation. Translations can easily be stored in your database and inserted in your content. Extension page, GitHub Mygengo Plugin page

Radiant installation:

Zend Framework plugin - it took 2 days of hardcore digging in ZF documentation and coding all that classes in PHP. But I nailed it. Installation instructions for existing zf apps as well as quickstart guide available in readme. GitHub Mygengo Plugin page

Check out Winners page

My footprint on the Mars

I have never been on the Moon, on the Mars and at RailsConf. Although I had a chance to left my footprint on the RailsConf’10.

p.s. Mars - you’re next!

Switching ForkLift to use iTerm by default

To open current selected folder in iTerm instead of default Terminal.app from ForkLift, in ForkLift.app/Resources/OpenInTerminal.applescript file put following:

Pre and post hooks for external libraries

2011-02-02T00:00:00+03:00

Pre and post hooks for external libraries with alias_method

Ever missing hooks in your favorite libraries? before_filter and after_fileter is not working outside rails? Thanks to ruby awesomness it’s never been an issue for programmers who know how to use alias or alias_method.

Problem

Here I am, sitting in front of laptop, writing yet another API wrapper. As I get tired of ruby native NET::HTTP requests and wanted to try something more explicit and gave a shot to HTTParty by John Nunemaker. Syntax is very simple and I came with following code:

But apparently interaction is not so easy as it seems. All authenticated calls must be signed. The process of signing include arguments that was passed to current method. So in every method that called, it needs sign data before sending:

Seems like unnecessary code duplication. Isn’t this kind of thing that pre-hook is made for? To solve this problem you diffinetly shouldn’t google for that.

After digging httparty source code I haven’t found some pre- or post- hooks. Seems like we need to do it ourselves.

Cooking hooks with alias_methiod

Thanks to greatness of ruby, I can open and modify native or external classes:

Ok now we have self-cooked before_get method that will be called before original HTTParty.get and will do the work:

Remember to put original_get arguments back with last line

Things to watch out

Be aware alias is keyword so there is no comma after name of new method. But alias_method is method version of alias.

Also do not crush others code. If I put Mugen.set_params in httparty_extensions.rb this can easily break other code that rely on HTTParty.