Ask for Help

"Need help overriding some of ActiveScaffold's css properties."

The general census around the room is that ActiveScaffold has been painful and we should think about replacing it with normal "scaffolding" functionality. Short of that, if anyone has experience with ActiveScaffold, please step forward.

Interesting Things

• On a clean project, setting up RubyMine 681 (possibly 535 as well?) with RSpec 1.12 only worked when RSpec was installed in the vendor/plugins directory. Others have had luck with RSpec installed only as a gem.

• RubyMine 681 file renaming is broken.

• Two cool new features in RubyMine 681 are the Gem Manager and Extract Method Refactoring.

• Running gem env from a terminal on Mac OS X often has two GEM PATHS: a sudo'ed one and a non-sudo'ed one. It's helpful to delete the non-sudo'ed one and only install gems using sudo (or geminstaller -s).

Help

"I am getting spam from working with rails site about once a week asking me if I am looking for work. I'm not, how do I make it stop?"

Besides the obvious, check the "I don't want email" box, nothing comes to mind.

Interesting things

• If you are running your site on Engine Yard and you want your site's "heartbeat" monitored, install the fitter_happier plugin. See EY's notes here.

• Be careful when calling #id on an object that's a Fixnum (especially if you think it's something other than a Fixnum, like say a user object). It will return (value * 2) + 1. Most likely this will go away in the next major revision of ruby given the "warning: Object#id will be deprecated; use Object#object_id".

• Josh Susser is giving a talk at Ruby Meetup tonight. Topic, Iterations and Blocks.

Interesting things

• After making some changes to our RSpec suite (namely moving to fixture scenarios), we realized almost a 50% improvement on our local dev boxes (generally iMacs with 4G of ram). However the CI box (a Mac Mini) remained at about the same duration. Increasing the InnoDB MySQL settings to the following caused a significant performance boost on our CI box (about 200 seconds down from 350 seconds):

[mysqld]

innodb_buffer_pool_size = 64M
innodb_log_buffer_size = 8M
table_cache = 512

query_cache_size = 8M

The theory is that our local dev boxes have so much ram that the disk reads are cached while the CI box is swapping out to disk often.

• Fixtures in RSpec can be slow due to nested describe blocks. Each time a new describe block is opened, the fixtures have to load. Therefore, if your test suite has many nested describe blocks with only a few tests in each describe, this will cause lots of fixture loading.

One possible solution is to use the underlying database (e.g.. MySQL SAVEPOINT and ROLLBACK TO SAVEPOINT) to save and reload the fixtures. Another possibility is to group your tests in a less-nested fashion.

Interesting things

• People seem to think it would be useful to chain associations in the same way that named scopes work. E.g., post.comments.authors. We might look at providing a patch to do so.

• Rspec and Rails 2.2 modifies rails to not rescue exceptions as it normally does. To fix that, add the following to your tests:

describe ThingsController do
   before(:each) do
     controller.use_rails_error_handling!
   end
end

• A project was running into a problem on non dev/test environments with rails 2.2 where if we did a db:drop and a subsequent db:create, the migrations were blowing up with an exception on the Rails::Initializer.run line in environment.rb. The models were being loaded before any of the migrations had run, thus failing because the tables didn't exist. To work around this, add config.eager_load_paths = [] in your Rails::Initializer. It was suggested this was either a bug in 2.2.2 and/or a bad interaction with desert.

Ask for Help

"console.log seems to be broken again in Firebug with 1.2.1?"

People have had some success with 1.3 beta. Get Firebug

"Suggestions for creating PDF's in Ruby?"

• PDF Writer
• Prawn

Interesting Things

• RubyMine - JetBrains has a preview of their new Rails IDE, RubyMine. Presumably, it's the same as IntelliJ without support for other languages and the Rails Plugin baked in. Feedback from Pivots thus far is that it's definitely an early Alpha with lots of bugs and slow to load projects. It's rumored to cost somewhat in the range of Textmate.

• Solr text field stemming problem - When creating an index on a text field in solr, it can be set to stem fields (e.g., running => run, runs => run, etc.) to increase relevancy. Thus, when a query is performed for "run", hits with "running", "runs", etc. will be found. However, if the query contains "running*" or "running~", the results do not take into consideration any of the stemmed versions. The recommended solution is to stem the query on the client-side, thus "run*" or "run~".

Ask for Help

"Rails 2.2 - has anyone heard any news? "

Some comments from Pivots:

• An RC candidate is out but may or may not work with Polonium.
• The new join syntax is cool, shallow routes are neat, internationalization is included.
• Core bundle seems to work
• Desert has problems due to class-loading changes.
• The country selector has been pulled out to a plugin, apparently for political reasons.

More info can be found here.