Interesting Things

• The Rspec version 8.2 does not work well with appable_plugins: When running Controller Specs from within an appable_plugin, those plugin’s test fixtures will not load.
• We’ve created some Rake tasks to run all appable_plugin tests in one go. Nice!
• We’ve moved to a bigger, faster SVN server, so checkouts and updates should be faster.
• Following up on earlier events, we’ve successfully completed migrating one client’s codebase out of our SVN server and into their repository. Good job folks!
• Remember to use filter_parameter_logging in Rails, which prevents Rails from outputting the parameters you specify to any log files.
• Bidirectional polymorphic join tables and has_many_polymorphs: always best described as art!

Ask for Help

• Does anyone know how to exclude the ‘log’ directory from searches in the new IntelliJ IDEA Ruby Plugin?. The Java plugin allows for this.
  • UPDATE: Here’s how: in your project.iml file, add excludeFolder tags inside your content tag.

<code>
     &lt;content url="file://$MODULE_DIR$">
       &lt;excludeFolder url="file://$MODULE_DIR$/components" />
       &lt;excludeFolder url="file://$MODULE_DIR$/log" />
       &lt;excludeFolder url="file://$MODULE_DIR$/tmp" />
     &lt;/content>
</code>

Total Stand-up Meeting Time: 17:00 minutes

Interesting Things

• Rake tasks in Rails eat many errors, causing just about any error (including syntax errors) to to fail “silently”: instead of displaying the real error, Rake will tell you that your task is missing. Not nice.

Total Stand-up Meeting Time: 9:00 minutes

Interesting Things

• rals_spec_server is a Rspec test running server that does not incur the test-framework startup time tax once it is running in memory. Preliminary (unscientific) results show that individual ‘specs run 20-30% faster. But, you have to set config.cache_classes = false in test.rb for the server to reload everything and pick up any changes you’ve made.

Ask for Help

• Now that we are nearly finished successfully transitioning control of a client’s project to their developers, we want to use SVK to export a client’s code our of our SVN repository into their repo. We’ve never used SVK, so experience reports would be welcomed.

Total Stand-up Meeting Time: 13:00 minutes

Interesting Things

• JSON: the consensus seems to be that ActiveRecord’s to_json method is buggy, and that people wishing to transform their ActiveRecords into JSON should use the Fast JSON gem.
• Here’s a Rails gotcha: if you are performing a form POST from a Rails template, there is a risk that any query-parameters in your URL will “stomp” parameters with the same key in your form. In the following code example, id = 1 will be sent to your app:

<code>
    # id = 1 will be sent to the app below
    url: http://railsapp.com/person/play_with&id=1

    --- in play_with.rhtml:
    # id = 9 will NOT be sent to the app
    # because of the `&id=1` in the URL
    form_for :person, @person,
             :url => {:action => :something, :id => 99} do |form|
       # blah blah blah...
    end
</code>

Total Stand-up Meeting Time: 13:00 minutes

Interesting Things

• The has_many_polymorphs plugin is finicky: order of operations is important! If you have problems with your associations after installing HMP, play around with the order of your has_many associations and such.
• Also, “type is not type”: has_many_polymorphs’ use of the type column is not the same usage of Single Table Inheritance’s (STI) usage of type. If you are using HMP for an ActiveRecord using STI (say, “Student” which extends “Person”), HMP needs to reference the base class/table, not the subclass (i.e. reference Person, not Student.)
• If your Rspec test seem to be having problems finding the Models, Controllers, etc. that are the test subjects, make sure the directory ‘spec test structure is correct: “model” for model tests, “controller” for controller tests, etc. Rspec assumes that these test directories exist.
• Finally, as if you didn’t need to be told so, ActiveRecord will have problems if you create a table with only an id column.

Total Stand-up Meeting Time: 18:00 minutes

It’s Monday, and a blizzard in the Lake Tahoe area has stranded several of our developer. No interesting things for standup today.

Only project updates today.

Interesting Things

• After the appable_plugins folks applied some of our patches, we upgrade. Thanks guys!
• Beer suggestions welcome for the retrospective tomorrow!
• One of our guys presented at the East Bay Ruby Meetup. Subject: Pivotal Labs’ Capistrano extensions. Of note: when he asked the group of 45 Ruby enthusiasts who among them knew much about Agile Software Development and continuous integration, only 4-5 people raised their hands. Disappointing.
• We might present at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this April (topic TBD). We’ll post the details here if it works out.

Ask for Help

• Is something goofy happening with Rail 1.2 REGEX pattern matching? One group is having problems after the upgrade.
  UPDATE: Not really. It was a case where Rails 1.2 caught the bug that Rails 1.1 did not.

Total Stand-up Meeting Time: 10:00 minutes

Interesting Things

• If you are using named parameters, watch out! A routes-named-parameters bug bit us. It’s fixed in Edge Rails but not in a released version of Rails.
• … And as a public service announcement, Rails’ routing was rewritten for version 1.2. If you are experiencing weird routing behavior, check the bug list.
• False alarm! The REGEX bug we mentioned the the last standup meeting… our fault.
• Let’s say you have the desperate need to generate a drop-shadow for an image, or any other sort of shadow (haven’t we all?). Check out Rmagick’s Image::shadow() method, which can do it for you. Very cool stuff!
• More svn:externals problems. I won’t get into the gory details, but if are changing or removing a svn:externals property on a directory, your best bet is to delete that portion of the directory tree and get a fresh version from SVN. You’ll avoid most problems.
• One project is using the Rails Simple Captcha plugin with success, and even has a successful Selenium testing strategy.
• Watch out for this appable_plugins bug ActiveRecord models in your plugin do not reload when your environment sets config.cache_classes = true. End result: you might get “method missing” errors in your application for methods that the plugin’s model declares. Ouch. Details available upon request.

Ask for Help

• Doh! Somehow we broke ruby script/generate migration MyMigration. I suppose we should fix that.

Total Stand-up Meeting Time: 20:00 minutes