Author Archives: peter

Why Buying a Mac for (Rails) Developers is a Good Idea

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“It’s better to be a pirate than to join the Navy” (Steve Jobs)




This post was inspired by the last part of Jim Neath’s article on speeding up Rails development, titled “Seriously, Just Buy a Fucking Mac”. Some commenters insisted that you can do just as well on other systems (Ubuntu, in particular). In three short words, I don’t agree. In my opinion Ubuntu is a valid alternative but it comes in at second place, and the gap between the 1st and 2nd position is significant. Why?

Software

Some people, when it comes to a good PC vs. Mac fight, start to brag about the hardware – it’s overpriced, and not that much better, and my high end PC notebook is better because … etc. Because they most probably never ever used a Mac for a longer period, they don’t know that the real speed gain/ease || joy of use comes from the software (though it doesn’t hurt that there are no hardware conflicts, evar, no matter how much do you upgrade, no messing around with wifi/mic/video cards/you name it and the quality is top-notch etc.) No. The real secret sauce is the software:

The essential stuff

ruby_logo.pngrails.png

Ruby and Rails – I have spent a few years on Ubuntu from warty to gutsy, and though it was improving from release to release, when I bought an MBP a year ago, the difference was shocking. C’mon, installing Ruby and the whole Rails stack on ubuntu is still a considerable pain, whereas OS X ships with ruby/rails by default.

text_mate.png

A powerful editor – TextMate the best editor ever invented, hands down – mainly when beefed up with Ruby/Rails bundles (the ‘standard’ ones, as well as others like RubyAMP). No windows or linux editor comes even close – though this is hard to believe unless you tried TextMate for more than 5 minutes.
I have been drooling when I was on Ubuntu and checked out screencasts like peepcode Textmate 2 for rails – fortunately I bought a Mac, watched the video and using Textmate ever since, so the drooling stopped.

sequel_pro.png

An intuitive SQL GUI – CocoaMySQL/Sequel Pro. Sorry guys, MyPHPAdmin doesn’t count. Neither does mysql-query-browser, which is the windows 3.11 of the SQL GUIs IMHO. Sequel Pro rocks!

Other niceties

skitch.png

Skitch is something I had no clue I needed, but now I couldn’t live without it! “Skitch.com is a webservice that works hand in hand with our application Skitch to give you 1-click
uploading of images for fast and fun image sharing.”. Doesn’t sound that mind-numbing, but try it once and become addicted forever.

dropbox.png

Dropbox is a kickass utility to store, sync and share your files online. The best part is that it actually works – it’s not some half-assed solution, but a really working, beautifully executed powerful tool for sharing your stuff.

cyberduck.png

Cyberduck is an an incredibly useful FTP, SFTP, WebDAV & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac OS X. Really missed something similar under Ubuntu.

css_edit.png

CSSEdit – I was really missing a good CSS editor under Linux – the existing ones didn’t even come close to CSSEdit. CSSEdit’s intuitive approach to style sheets and powerful previewing features will make you deliver awesome standards-based sites in no time!

mars_edit.png

MarsEdit is a desktop blog editor, so you can write a blog without giving up the comforts of your Mac. Since I am using MarsEdit, blogging has become a whole new experience – instead of a clumsy web-interface which requires me to be on-line I can focus on blogging actually!

Once you get productive with these extremely powerful tools (and I didn’t even mention the standard built in stuff like Spotlight, iCal, iChat, Time Machine, …) your development time will be greatly reduced compared to that on an Ubuntu/Windows/… machine. For realz!

Everyone and Their Dog is on a Mac

So… why should I keep up with the Joneses – did the me-too club become popular recently? Isn’t Apple’s mantra ‘think different’? Why join the ‘cool kids’?

Valid questions – however, everyone else being on macs also means that

  • you’ll have a much bigger chance of getting quick support on the Ruby/Rails forums/IRC – which is not always easy with Ubuntu (I am on Ubuntu Rusty Robot build R2-D2. Everything is fine, but MySQL driver doesn’t compile because I ran dist-upgrade yesterday, and now everything is jammed. All the tutorials are up to Humpty-dumpty Drake only…).
  • Easier collaboration – sharing Dropbox folders, skitch images, iCal events etc. is very-very common – of course there are other ways of sharing data/notes/collaboratively editing documents, but these Mac tools take it to a whole new level.
  • Growing Mac usage means that more goodness is on the way!

A bit of Mythbusting

  • Macs are crazy expensive

    • You can buy a mac mini starting from $599, or a pre-owned one for $350. Doesn’t sound like bank-breaking. Good PCs are not cheap either – my last DELL was about the same price as my current (almost high-end) MBP. Of course you can buy an Acer for third of the price, but well, the drop in the quality will be proportional.

  • Mac software is expensive, on linux everything is free

    • From the above list, everything essential is free, except TextMate, which is a must, no matter how much it costs. Usually free alternatives exist for almost everything, and the commercial ones are just unbelievably good.

  • You are going to deploy to a linux server, so create your app on linux too

    • While OS X is not linux based, the difference is minimal – Darwin is a POSIX compliant OS so from the Rails development perspective it doesn’t really matter. I do not have accurate data but I don’t think so it’s easier to migrate an app developed on gentoo/fedora/suse/… to an ubuntu box than to do the same for an OS X Rails app. And even deploying from Ubuntu to Ubuntu can be a pain unless the boxes contain the same version of everything etc.

  • I think you just bought a Mac because the “cool kids” did

    • So what? Does this alter the fact that working on a Mac makes you more productive/effective as described above? Not at all.

Use the Best Tool for the Job

Yeah… in other words, seriously, just buy a fucking mac. It’s the best tool when it comes to (not only) Ruby/Rails development.

Rails Rumble Observations, part II – trends in gem/plugin usage

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rails_rumble.png
In part I I wrote about the hows and whys of gathering gem/plugin usage data based on Rails Rumble submitted user information, and in this part I would like to present my findings. So without further ado, here we go:

Prototype/jQuery

I already covered this in part I, but for completeness’ sake, here is the chart again:


prototype_jquery.png

It seems that jQuery is (not so) slowly replacing Prototype as the javascript framework of Rails – which is still better (from the Prototype POV) than with Merb, where jQuery is the default framework (oh yeah, I know, Merb is everything-agnostic etc. etc. but I think vast majority of merbists are using Datamapper, jQuery etc. (?)).

Skeleton Applications

Well… this chart is rather dull:


bort.png

One in every three teams used a skeleton application (which in this context can be replaced with ‘Bort’).
The sovereignity of Bort is a bit surprising given that it’s not the only player in the field by far – there are definitely others, like ThoughtBot’s suspenders, Blank by James Golick, starter-app by Pat Maddox, appstarter by Lattice Purple just to name a few.

I am not sure about the others, but the absence of suspenders from the chart has more to do with the fact that it was not yet publicly released before Rails Rumble – I am basing this claim on the fact that a lot of people used the gems/plugins which, combined together, are basically suspenders.

However, this doesn’t alter the fact that Bort is immensely popular – great stuff, Jim.

Testing Frameworks

I think there are (at least) 2 things to note here:

  1. Testing in Ruby/Rails is not considered optional even facing a very tight deadline. Even if we assume that the 49% didn’t test at all (which surely doesn’t sound too realistic – they probably just went with Test::Unit), more than half of the teams did!
  2. Though testing tools are a much debated topic nowadays, and the winner is not clear (yet) – I would guess, based on the above results there is roughly an 1:1:1 ration between Test::Unit, rspec and shoulda *currently* – there are definitely interesting alternatives to Test::Unit.


testins.png

Mocking


mocking.png

Not much to add here – though the above chart says nothing about how much people are using e.g. Mocha with rSpec (vs. using the rSpec built-in mocking tools), one thing is clear – as a stand-alone mocking framework, Mocha reigns supreme.

Exception Notification


ex_notification.png

Another point for ThoughtBot (not the last one in this list) – Hoptoad has no disadvantage compared to the more traditional Exception Notifier (if we don’t count getting an API-key, which takes about a minute) – on the upside, you get a beautiful and user friendly web GUI.

Full-text Search


full_text.png

I found the above chart interesting for two reasons:

  1. I thought that Ferret and/or acts_as_solr are still somewhat popular – it turns out they are not
  2. I also thought Thinking Sphinx is the de-facto fulltext search plugin, and didn’t know about Xapian – well, I learned something new again.

Uploading


uploading.png

ThoughtBot did it again – Paperclip is already more popular than the old-school attachment-fu. I am always a bit cautious when someone challenges the status quo (like Nokogiri vs.
Hpricot, Authlogic vs. Restful Authentication, attachment-fu vs. Paperclip etc.) but it seems Paperclip is ripe to take over. You can find some interesting tutorials here and here.

User Authentication

Another dull graph for you:


user_auth.png

I am wondering how homogenous this chart would be if Authlogic would have appeared earlier – it seems like a strong challenger (already watched by around 260 people on github) and I am sure it will take a nice slice of the pie in the future.

What’s more interesting is the openID support: more than one third of the apps offered openID authentication, and quite a few of them *solely* openID.

Misc

  • factory_girl was used to replace traditional fixtures in every 6th of the apps!
  • HAML/SASS is quite popular – used in about 20% of the applications
  • Hpricot was the only HTML/XML parser used (in 7 apps alltogerher)

What I am happy about the most is that there is still a lot of innovation going on in the Rails world – as you can see, newer and newer plugins/gems are appearing and in some (in fact, a lot of) cases are dethroning their good ol’ competitors. There is a lot of competition going on in almost every major area of Rails web development, and this is always a good thing.

Rails Rumble Observations, part I – jQuery on the Heels of Prototype

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rails_rumble.png
As a Rails Rumble judge, I spent quite some time reviewing the applications and I noticed several patterns regarding the gems/plugins used during the 48-hour contest. The participants were asked to submit whatever tools they were using to build their app. With a few exceptions they complied, creating an interesting data set to observe the current trends in the Rails world.

Collecting the Data

Unfortunately it was not possible to gather the information automatically using screen scraping or other mechanical methods, since the input was varying from free text (stating details like ‘we used Rails, macs, TextMate, cocaine (the drink!)’) etc. to the output of _gem list_ – and everything in-between, not following any guideline (perhaps because none was given). So I hacked up a small app with a single form and harvested the info manually. I only collected data for the first 100 entries, for two reasons: the stuff used in the rest of the apps was pretty much the same, and mainly: the task was rather daunting 🙂

Why Does this Matter?

I believe that because of the rules (I mostly mean the 48-hour deadline) the findings are quite representative – I am sure that every team reached after the most productive/easy to use/effective tool they could grab since the deadline was tight. Rails Rumble is not about experimentation or showing off some new shiny toys, but lightning fast hacking aided by state-of-the-art gems and plugins so I think it’s safe to assume that the tools used here are pretty much the crème de la crème of the Ruby/Rails world.

Prototype vs. jQuery

In the first exhibit, I’d like to check out Prototype vs. jQuery usage. To prepare this chart, I took the extra mile and didn’t rely on the user-supplied data, but opened the pages by hand and checked the headers for Prototype/jQuery javascript includes. Here is what I have found:


prototype_jquery.png

1 team was using mootools, the rest of the cake is divided between Prototype and jQuery.
Most probably the real result is even more in favor of jQuery, I would guess well above 60% – all the teams that added jQuery to their application.html.erb were actually using it (why would they bother adding it otherwise), while this is not necessarily true for Prototype, which is included by default and maybe some teams didn’t even use it, just didn’t care to delete it (as you will learn in the next part, every 3rd team used bort, which includes the Prototype/script.aculo.us files by default).

This is not the first indicator of jQuery’s rising popularity in the Rails world – Hampton Catlin’s Ruby Survey found out the same (i.e. jQuery is more popular right now than Prototype). Merb is using jQuery by default.

Is Prototype Dead?

My favorite Austrian Ruby-hacker friend told me over lunch a few weeks ago: ‘Prototype is dead!’. I think this statement is questionable at the moment to say the least, since Prototype is still the default javascript framework of Rails and this is not likely to change anytime soon due to the fact that Prototype is heavily used by 37singnals (and probably entrenched into other older Rails-apps as well).
However, the trend seems to be that jQuery is spreading really fast, replacing Prototype in a lot of cases.

So be sure to check jQuery out (it’s dead easy to install and use it) – I immediately fell in love with it (maybe I was used to Hpricot-style CSS selectors too much?) and I am happily using it in my projects now.

The Next Episode

Which testing tools are used by the community? How about rails skeleton apps? OpenID support? exception-notifier or hoptoad? attachment_fu or paperclip? mocha or flexmock? factory-girl or traditional fixtures? Find out in the next installment!

acts_as_state_machine for Dummies, part I

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I recently applied this great plugin a few times to tackle different tasks and would like to share with you the joys of thinking in state machines!

Disclaimer: This installment is ‘just’ an intro to the topic (a teaser if you like), it doesn’t contain actual instructions or code on how to use acts_as_state_machine – that comes in part II. Though the original intent was to write up a small tutorial with some example code, I started with an intro and the article grew so long that I decided to split it up – so stay tuned for part deux!

State what…?!?

A finite state machine (FSM for short) a.k.a. finite state automaton (FSA) is a 5-tuple (Σ,S,s0,δ,F)… OK, just kidding. I doubt too much people are interested in the rigorous definition of the FSM (for the rest, here it is), so let’s see a more down-to earth description.

According to wikipedia, Finite state machine is “_a model of behavior composed of a finite number of states, transitions between those states, and actions_”. Somewhat better than those gammas and sigmas and stuff but if you are not the abstract thinker type, it might take some time to wrap your brain around it. I believe a good example can help here!

Everybody knows and loves regular expressions – but probably it’s not that wide known fact that regular expression matching can be solved with an FSM (and in fact, a lot of implementations are using some kind of FSM on steroids). So let’s see a simple example. Suppose we would like to match a string against the following, simple regexp:

ab+(a|c)b*

First we have to construct the FSM, which will be fed with the string we would like to match. An FSM for the above regular expression might look like this:

fsm_correct.png

String matching against this FSM is basically answering the question ‘starting from the initial state, can we reach the finish after feeding the FSM the whole string?’. Pretty easy – the only thing we have to define is ‘feeding’.

So let’s take the string ‘abbbcbbb’ as an example and feed the FSM! The process looks like this:

  1. we are in q0, the initial state (where the ‘start’ label is). Starting to consume the string
  2. we receive the first character, it’s an ‘a‘. We have an ‘a‘ arrow to state q1, so we make a transition there
  3. we receive the next character, ‘b‘. We have two b-arrows: to q1 and q2. We choose to go to q1 (in fact, staying in q1) – remember, the question is whether we _can_ reach the finish, not whether all roads lead to the finish – so the choice is ours!
  4. identical to the above
  5. after the two above steps, we are still in q1. We still get a ‘b‘ but this time we decide to move to q2.
  6. we are in q2 and the input is ‘c‘. We have no analysis-paralysis here since the only thing we can do is to move to q4 – so let’s do that!
  7. Whoa! We reached the finish line! (q4 is one of the terminal states). However, we didn’t consume the whole string yet, so we can’t yet tell whether the regexp matches or not.
  8. So we eat the rest of the string (the ‘how’ is left as an exercise to the reader) and return ‘match!’

Let’s see a very simple non-matching example on the string ‘abac’

  1. in q0
  2. got an ‘a‘, move to q1
  3. in q1, got a ‘b‘, move to q2
  4. in q2, got an ‘a‘, move to q3 – we reached the finish, but still have a character to consume
  5. in q3, got a ‘c‘… oops. We have no ‘c’ arrow from q3 so we are stuck. return ‘no match!’

Of course the real-life scenarios are much more complicated than the above one and sometimes FSMs are not enough (for example to my knowledge it’s not possible to tell about a number whether it is prime or not with a vanilla FSM – but a regexp doing just that has been floating around some time ago) but to illustrate the concept this example served fine.

This is cool and all but why should I care?!?

Well, yeah, you are obviously not going to model an FSM the next time you would like to match a regexp – that would be wheel-reinvention at it’s finest. However there are some practical scenarios where an FSM can come handy:

  • sometimes the logic flow is just too complicated to model – an if-forrest is rarely a good solution (on the flip side, don’t model an if-else with an FSM :-))
  • encapsulate complex logic flow into a pattern and not clutter your code with it.
  • you are in a stateless world – for example HTTP
  • asynchronous and/or distributed processing where you explicitly need to maintain your state and act upon it

Some real life examples of FSM usage in the Ruby/Rails world are why the lucky stiff’s Hpricot (using Ragel) or Rick Olson’s restful authentication plugin (using acts_as_state_machine)

The Next Episode

In the next installment I’d like to focus on the practical usage of the acts_as_state_machine plugin – I’ll attempt to create an asynchronous messaging system in a Rails app using it.

Cool JS Shadow Library

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light_and_shadow.png Light & Shadow is a ProtoType-based library for creating great looking drop shadows easily. Check out the HTML I used to generate the example image and see it yourself that it’s not rocket science!

All you have to do is to set up a light source with a few parameters (distance, intensity, size etc.) and add the class ‘shadowThrowing’ to your elements which should… well, throw shadows :-). I won’t go into details here, you can find the explanation and other details on the Light & Shadow project page.

(Found via Gedankenkonserve – thanks Bernhard ;-))

Today Midnight

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I have been always uncertain about the exact expression denoting today midnight (or any day midnight, for that matter). Is 00:00 on e.g. April 24th the midnight between 23rd and 24th or 24th and 25th? If I want something to happen at today midnight, is that today’s date at 00:00? (for the impatient: no, it isn’t :-)).

Chronic to the rescue! (If you don’t know chronic, be sure to check it out – it’s a great natural language date/time parser). All I had to do is:

>> Chronic.parse('today midnight')
=> Fri Apr 25 00:00:00 +0200 2008

so actually it turns out it’s _tomorrow’s_ date at 00:00.

I couldn’t find time zone support though (I am not saying it’s not there, just that I couldn’t find it by looking at the API) – so what if I want to meet someone in Madrid today midnight? Why, I install the tzinfo gem and ask Ruby!

>> TzinfoTimezone["Madrid"].utc_to_local(Chronic.parse('today midnight').getutc)
=> Fri Apr 25 00:00:00 UTC 2008

Random Links from the Web, 21-04-2008

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Live Validation – Easy Client-side Javascript Validation

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live_validation.pngUpdate: Sergio, the author of the livevalidation rails plugin updated the plugin so you can disregard the finale of the article (validates_confirmation_of is working, as well as the newest version of livevalidation, 1.3 is used in the plugin – so no additional tweaking is needed, install and validate away ;-))

Surely I am not the only one who was a ‘bit nervous’ (that was a mild euphemism) when his carefully entered data disappeared after submitting a form to the server. Nowadays web applications are doing better than that – valid data is saved and only the problematic fields are pointed out.

Of course even that feels so 1990’s now. A contemporary (ehm… web 2.0?) web application is expected to validate the form on the client side already (WARNING! That doesn’t mean at all you shouldn’t validate on the server side though – client side validation is for the good guys but you should still look out for the script kiddies et al), pointing out the errors on the fly so there is no need to come back and change/edit those fields after submitting a form.

My library of choice is livevalidation, which has a Rails companion too – if you are using Rails form helpers and standard validation on your models, you don’t have to touch anything just install livevalidation (=drop it to your javascripts folder, it’s a single .js file). w00t!

The only major shortcoming (from my POV) of the Rails plugin is that validates_confirmation_of is not implemented. However, it’s easy to add it via standard javascript:

<input id="user_password" name="user[password]" size="30" type="password" />
<input id="user_password_confirmation" name="user[password_confirmation]" size="30"> 
<script type="text/javascript">
var validate = new LiveValidation('user_password_confirmation');
validate.add( Validate.Confirmation, { match: 'user_password' } );
</script>

That’s it!

One more note: the Rails plugin contains version 1.2 but there is a newer version, 1.3 so be sure to replace it.

Caffeine and Insomnia – Don’t Let Your Mac Fall Asleep

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caffeine.png Long-time Mac users probably have different solutions for this problem, but as a newbie, the screen going dim after a certain period of time – without an intuitive way to switch this off – drove me crazy! I wanted to enjoy my slideshow, video, presentation, reading something etc. and suddenly it all went dark. Arggghhh.

So I was delighted when I found Caffeine, a super-light program sitting in your menu bar that prevents your Mac from going to sleep/starting screen savers.

Note that Caffeine doesn’t help if you close the lid – if you want your Mac to stay awake in this case, InsomniaX is your thing – it disables the sleep when closing the lid so you can listen to music/control your Mac with the remote etc.

Random Links from the Web, 10-04-2008

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  • RubyFlow – Peter Cooper (of RubyInside fame) created “RubyInside’s sister site” – RubyFlow. Hope it takes off!
  • Thinking Sphinx Reborn – I thought a phoenix is the creature with the reborn ability – though that doesn’t mean a sphinx can’t do that! btw. “Sphinx is a very fast search engine that indexes data and provides flexible ways of searching it.”
  • Rails vs Merb – “The conclusion is simple, I recommended that my client go with Merb”.
  • RubyAMP – powerful looking Ruby TextMate bundle.

Compiling Firefox 3 beta 5 on OS X (with JSSH support)

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Since I bought my Mac, Safari has been my primary browser of choice. I have been using Firefox sporadically too – you can’t do serious web development without FireBug! Safari is light, zippy and renders wonderfully looking OS X look’n’feel pages – however with the arrival of Firefox 3 I am really pondering to ditch it in favor of FF (still no OS X look in there, tho’ ;-)). Firefox 3 beta 5 is just phenomenal – fast, powerful, and it has all the stuff I am missing from Safari (FireBug, del.icio.us toolbar, DOM Inspector, ton of other extensions) so I am really thinking that I will remain a Safari user on my iPhone only.

However, FF3 is missing some functionality I am depending on – most notably jssh support – DOM inspector was removed too, but can be installed as an add-on, and since beta 4 FireBug is working, so no major hurdles there. However, jssh, as usually was a harder nut to crack.

Fortunately Angrez, FireWatir‘s author pointed me to the right direction – which was in this case compiling Firefox 3 with jssh support! Here’s how:

Sit back, enjoy your coffee and in a few minutes you’ll have your own, new hot FF build with jssh support!

By the way, FireWatir 1.1 hit the streets just today! Grab it and let the testing commence!

Downloading a File Behind http-basic-auth

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There is a great number of possibilities to do this in Ruby (just to mention a few: standard net/http, curb, mechanize, rio etc.). I have chosen a semi-standard way (=no need to learn new syntax, but definitely simpler than net/http): open-uri.

require 'open-uri'

open('target.file','w') {|f| f.write open("my.url.com/source.file", :http_basic_authentication=>['ueser', 'pass']) }

I am using Ruby for more than 2 years already but it’s succinctness still keeps me amazed!