Ask for Help
"How do I redefine a CSS class in javascript"
You can create a new <style> element and append it to the head. This should probably be avoided if you can help it.
If you simply want to toggle between 2 states, consider putting both sets of rules in the CSS and toggling a class on the body or other container.
*"Should I use BOSH for XMPP on the iPhone?"
Probably not. If you have a long-running low latency XMPP connection, you'll probably want to use a socket from the CFNetwork package. That's the most we know about iPhone development right now.
Interesting Things
- New tracker updates with better burndown charting!
I've been wanting to use Pivotal Tracker on my iPhone, so I wrote a little proof of concept using the Tracker API. I thought that a native application would be much more difficult than a skinned web application using ActiveResource.
I tried out Dashcode, Apple's recommended iPhone-compatible front-end web development tool, but was disappointed. I basically found myself developing the entire application in javascript, actually using XMLHttpRequest to talk directly to the API. This would have been pretty neat if I could have pulled it off, but I'd rather develop a data-heavy application in rails than javascript.
I ended up using simple CSS to skin the application called UiUI. It's the best looking iphone UI I've seen, with tons of elements to choose from. It's missing effects, of course, being only CSS. I also used Heroku, a free and scalable rails deployment environment to host my application. With it, I was up and running with a functional tracker application in under 3 hours. Since then, I've added the ability to create and update stories.
Check it out, let me know what you think: http://itracker.heroku.com
If you're not on an iPhone, be sure to use Safari. It doesn't look great in Firefox or IE.
Interesting Things
- The iPhone SDK version 2.2 was released.
- An interesting Selenium Object Pattern was discussed.
Ask for Help
"How big should a typical mongrel be? Ours is starting out at over 200 megs but is not leaking from that point."
Everyone agreed that 50MB to 70MB is standard and anything over 100MB is considered pretty big. People suggested RubyProf for inspecting object counts and possibly tracking down the memory hogging code.
"What pattern does everyone use for non-model Reports with ActiveRecord? We are trying to create a report that counts a single model and groups by two associated models"
There was consensus around modeling a distinct report object and calling the referenced models. For example, FooReport and FooReportController fit nicely in a RESTful Rails world.