“Any general advice for writing Rails generators?”
One person suggested this Rails guide. Another suggested looking in the Rails source code at the existing generators. Any other ideas?
Since last summer I have been one of our few “remote Pivots” after I moved from San Francisco, CA to Atlanta, GA. Pivotal and I agreed that I’d try working remotely, remote-pair programming full time with fellow developers in our San Francisco and NYC offices. Overall it’s worked out wonderfully for me, my teams, and clients. I use the same technologies that fellow remote-Pivot Chad Woolley recommended in 2008 — a VPN connection, Mac’s Screen Sharing.app and Skype video chat, but we’re always looking for ways to more seamlessly integrate our remote developers into their teams.
With that in mind I became very excited when the iPad 2 was released, with its front-facing camera and FaceTime app. How perfect! For the last month our team has experimented using an iPad as a “remote presence” device for me.
How did it work out? Keep reading to find out!
The goals were as follows:
As for why an iPad 2:
After a month of on-again, off-again iPad-Joe experiments with pair programming, meeting attendance and other tasks the results are in! Drumroll please…
The iPad 2 is a horrible remote presence device.
Overall, it’s a total bust. Oh well.
The iPad does function well as a remote presence device in a few cases:
While the iPad has a ton of potential as a remote presence device, there are many kinks that need to be worked out first.
There’s no dedicated Skype app for iPad. The iPhone app works, but poorly, though it’s noise-canceling does seem a bit better than FaceTime.
FaceTime is the largest disappointment.
Finally, hauling an iPad, an iHome, and a Snowball mic around the office totally defeats the purpose of ease-of-use and portability!
Many of these limitations might be solved via software updates. We’ll try again when Skype delivers an iPad app and when other iPad software updates come along.
(Edit: typos.)
Schubert warns us that Rail’s extensions that add to_time method may cast types in unexpected ways:
Date#to_time => Time
Time#to_time => Time
but DateTime#to_time => DateTime
Use === when checking equality with DateTime and you don’t care about precision (This does not work with Time however)
Your humble author cautions that the new Laullon GitX is not ready for prime time. When adding multiple files with a single click, a garbage commit with a long funny name is created without adding the files.
Instead, consider Brother Bard’s excellent fork of GitX
Ian “Waffles” Zabel mentioned that jQuery 1.6 has been released. Notable changes include case-mapping of HTML5 data- attributes, performance improvements, and more.
Lee Edwards reminds us “It’s Star Wars Day. May the 4th be with you.” <⁄rimshot>
You may be asking yourself why you’d want to do this in the first place. Well here’s why I would want to do it.
We had some Webdriver based Cucumber tests that passed fine locally but kept failing on our CI box. Our CI box is a bit underpowered at the moment so I thought what might be happening is that our tests weren’t waiting long enough for the Ajaxy stuff to happen because the Ajax responses were taking a long time.
After some poking around in the source code of jQuery, I found the $.active property. This property keeps track of the number of active Ajax requests that are going on and I thought this might help us out.
What I came up with was this gist:
I added this step right after my Cucumber step that caused the Ajax call so that Cucumber would wait to move on until I knew that everything was done.
This step solved our CI failures and all was good in our test suite again.
Check your instance variable and methods names for conflicts with libraries or frameworks you are using if you get unexpected failures
Example 1: defining @response in your RSpec test setup when expecting to use the response from a HTTP request overwrites the result of the request. (don’t expect @request or @url to do you any favors either)
Example 2: Don’t define a #process method on a Rails controller