sorted by: recent | see : popular

Content Tagged with Planet + Programming

So… Rails and Merb are going to be merged into Rails 3. (link)

Has hell frozen over?

(it has in Portland the last week)

I’m curious about how the revised core team will incorporate the library-agnostic view points into Rails without increasing the complexity for configuration. For example, being able to use a different ORM is great, but at the same time, one of the things that I have really liked about Ruby on Rails was that it did make decisions ahead of time for you. Conventions over Configuration and all that jazz. While they intend to keep these defaults, I really wonder how much more configuration will be involved. Be that as it may, Rails and Merb are run by some of the best developers I’ve ever known… so I am sure these decisions will not be made without some deep consideration.

Rails application don’t all look and smell the same, but it’s nice to know that there is consistency across all of our client applications. What I’m concerned about (from an efficiency standpoint) is that this could lead to project-diversity at the cost of experimenting. Pre-Rails, the development teams that I was a part of was constantly trying out new libraries from client project to project, but this came at a huge cost. We weren’t able to leverage our experience with previous projects like our team does with Ruby on Rails currently. (hell, I even helped write two different ORMs in the two years before Rails for PHP… and still wasn’t satisfied)

But, this isn’t so much a technical problem as much as a people problem. The thing is… is that Rails helped solve a people problem with a technical answer. Having testing, consistency, and other best practices built-in did the world a huge favor. ...and all it took was someone like DHH to throw his opinion out there and stick to it. It took me nearly a full year to really embrace a lot of these conventions, but in the end.. it paid off.

While I do feel that it’s in developers best interests to try out new approaches, I just don’t think it should be on your clients dime. This was part of the reason why I quit my last job to start Planet Argon full-time. I really wanted to get away from that cycle.

Since we (Planet Argon) adopted Ruby on Rails four years ago, we’ve been able to build off of every project we had worked on before. We since adopted things like RSpec and JQuery, but our team decided on these changes after someone took the initiative to experiment with these on internal and personal projects. Having this foundation has freed up a lot of our time to focus on other issues as a team, like Interaction Design, Usability, and client collaboration.

As far as Merb itself, I honestly haven’t tried to do anything with it since about 0.2/0.3. I gave up quickly though because the documentation didn’t help me get anywhere and my time is valuable. I’ve since seen that documentation has improved drastically, but I haven’t been able to prioritize the time needed to really play with it. With Merb being merged into Rails 3, it means that I really should spend more time exploring it as we might be able to leverage some of it’s benefits without as much of an investment.

Much of the lack of great interest in Merb was because I felt Rails had consistently provided our team with a solid foundation for a majority of our internal and client applications. The old saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Not to say that others haven’t expressed a lot of excitement about Merb and it’s benefits, I just didn’t see there being enough of a productivity gain to warrant the time investment required to really learn and use a new framework… and the one thing that I have had trouble with was that it didn’t sound like Merb encouraged a default set of libraries. I could be totally wrong, but that’s been the perception I’ve had based on how it was branded.

But… the best part about this for you, me, and the Rails community? Is that I don’t need to register robbyonmerb.com anytime soon. ;-)

I hope that you’re all having a great end to 2008 and am excited to see all the energy in the Ruby/Rails/Merb community. I suspect that between these two (now-merged) teams, we’ll have an even better platform to develop web applications on. I believe this is great news and I’m all in favor of seeing the Ruby community conquer these challenges that lay ahead.

Anyhow, I’m just thinking out loud. What are your thoughts?

Do you find yourself copying and pasting the same code from Rails application-to-application as new projects start? Our team has a handful of projects in development right now and we notice that some of these reusable components tend to get out of sync when we bounce between projects. So, we’re making an effort to spot these and are creating a handful of plugins so that we can keep them updated between projects. (I’m sure that a lot of you do this as well)

In an effort to share some of our patterns, we’ll try to release them into the wild for others to use and perhaps if you have better patterns to offer, we’re always interested in improving our approach.

Introducing Flash Message Conductor

Over the years, our designers and developers have approached the management of flash messages several different ways. In Rails, the default way to add something to a flash message is to do something like this in your controller.

flash[:message] = "You have successfully signed in to your account."

What we began doing a while back is to create a few controller helper methods:

add_message( "You have successfully signed in to your account." )
add_notice( "You've Got Mail!" )
add_error( "Oops! Something got fucked up!" )

Really, nothing too crazy here, just a pattern that our developers have preferred to managing our application’s flash messages.

Okay, so now for the part of the puzzle that we aimed to make consistent across our projects. Rendering flash messages would usually result in several lines of conditionals in our application layout to check if the flash had any values assigned to it. As we worked with our HTML/CSS designers to define a consistent pattern, we moved our code into a helper for rendering flash messages.

With Flash Message Conductor, we just need to pop in the following into our application layout.

<%= render_flash_messages %>

If we had called add_message, it’d render the following:

<div id="flash_messages">
  <p class="message">You have successfully done XYZ...</p>
</div>

Or, should you have called add_error, it’d render the following:

<div id="flash_messages">
  <p class="error">Oops! Something went bonkers!</p>
</div>

What we’ve done here is defined a consistent pattern for our designers and developers to follow. We’ll always have a div container that will use a p tag to display the flash messages with a CSS class value that maps to the type of flash message that we’re displaying. This makes it easier for us to reuse the same flash message styling (and tweak if necessary), but we know that it’ll produce the same HTML across our applications.

Installing Flash Message Conductor

Like most modern Rails applications, you can install with:

script/plugin install git://github.com/planetargon/flash-message-conductor.git

Then all of our helper methods will be available to your application. We’ve also included an example CSS file, which you’ll find in the plugin directory.

Sample output:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Anyhow, we’ve posted the plugin up on GitHub for you all to use, if you’d like to adopt a similar approach. If you have any alternative patterns that has helped your team, do share and I’m looking forward to sharing some more of ours in the near future.

For more information, visit the Flash Message Conductor plugin on GitHub.

If anything, hopefully this will inspire those of you who find yourself copying/pasting artifacts from application-to-application to extract that code into it’s own reusable plugin. :-)

A few weeks ago, I moved RubyURL from subversion to git. During that process, I decided to use my invite to GitHub and have decided to go ahead and open up the source code.

It’s currently a whopping 92 LOC with a 1:2.5 code to spec ratio. (I had a goal to keep is below 100 LOC)

• RubyURL on GitHub: http://github.com/robbyrussell/rubyurl
• Public Clone URL: git://github.com/robbyrussell/rubyurl.git

Feel free to grab it and help contribute. This has served almost 14 million redirects since August 2007 and is running on a Rails Boxcar.

To grab it with git.. run: git clone git://github.com/robbyrussell/rubyurl.git.

Feel free to submit tickets to the Rubyurl ticket system.

• http://planetargon.lighthouseapp.com/projects/4059-rubyurl

Enjoy!

UPDATE Ryan McGeary was kind enough to be the first person to help track down a bug and submit patches. :-)

I’m guilty of it. Many of you are likely guilty of it… and I know that several customers of our Rails Code Audit and Review service are guilty of it.

How many times have you realized (after a few months has passed) that your Copyright date/year on your web site was no longer current?

How many of you had the same problem last year? The year before?

Let me share some advice with you all… DRY (a)!

Don’t Repeat Yourself (again)!

This is really a simple problem to fix but when we’re busy tackling bigger problems… little things like this slip by. Don’t worry, you’re not the only one who was reminded by a colleague three months into the year that you forgot to update this.

On client projects, we have a handful of helpers that we drop into the application. We’re starting to extract more of these into plugins and will be releasing those as time permits. It just happened that I found myself looking at yet-another Rails code base this afternoon that was showing 2007 in the footer. An easily forgivable offense.. but if you’re going to go in there and change it (again), take a moment to do the right thing. ;-)

Our solution at Planet Argon on client projects is to create a basic view helper that renders the current year. This allows us to do the following.

  <div id="footer">
    &copy; Copyright <%= current_year -%>. All Rights Reserved.
  </div>

The helper code looks like:

  # add to application_helper.rb
  module ApplicationHelper
    def current_year
      Time.now.strftime('%Y')
    end
  end

Voila. Not rocket science.. is it?

Guess what? I’m getting really tired of adding this to every Rails project that I touch. So, I bottled this little gem into a new Rails plugin that we’ll just add to future projects.

Introducing Year after Year

This is really the smallest plugin that I could put together (and it includes specs!)

What does it provide you?

YearAfterYear will provide you a helper that will render the current year (dynamically)! That’s right… just add the plugin to your Rails application and you too can enjoy New Years 2009 without having to have a deployment ready with a one line change from 2008 to 2009!

To use.. add the following to any view from within Ruby on Rails.

  <%= current_year -%>

Installation

As I’m using git, you’ll need to grab this and put it into vendor/plugins. That’s it!

You can grab it on GitHub!

• http://github.com/robbyrussell/year_after_year/
• Bugs / Feature Requests here

Happy New Years (8+ months early)!

Just a friendly reminder to not forget the small stuff… because your visitors will notice! ;-)

Updates…

I got a few requests for this to also provide a range of years for people who like to do: 2005-2007. So this is now provided as well.

year_range(start_year)

  <%= year_range(2005) %> # => 2005-2008

Throughout our design and development process, we’re working around areas of the site that are not yet implemented but we also want to be able to allow our clients to demo their application. In an effort to manage their expectations, we need to be careful about what we link to. If a page/widget isn’t ready to be demo’d yet, we should avoid providing pathways to get interact with or navigate there. However, when we’re implementing HTML/CSS for pages, it’s sometimes makes sense to not hide certain things on the screen.

For example, let’s suppose that you’re working on the primary navigation of an application. You know what the other sections are going to be, but you’ve only implemented a few of them so far. Your HTML/CSS person is working on the design for the navigation and wants to have them be proper links… even to pages that don’t yet exist.

One option, which is quite common, is to provide a link with href="#". This works to some extent, but when people click on things, they naturally expect something to happen in response.

This approach doesn’t mesh well with our team as we don’t really want to field any questions like, “the navigation links are all broken. Nothing happens!”

So, a pattern that we’ve been using for a while is to trigger a javascript alert for every link within an implemented area that is linking to something that isn’t yet implemented.

Let’s take a really basic javascript function like:

# public/javascripts/application.js
function unimplemented() {
  alert("NOTICE\n\nThis feature is not implemented yet. Please check back again soon!");
}

This allows us to do the following:

  <a href="javascript:unimplemented();">link text</a>

When someone clicks the link, they’ll see a typical javascript alert message. This informs our clients/beta testers that we’re paying attention to what works and what doesn’t.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Let’s take it a step further and push this into a view helper.

# app/helpers/application_helper.rb
def link_to_unimplemented( link_text, *args )
  link_to_function( link_text, 'unimplemented()', *args)
end

Now, we’re able to use link_to_unimplemented and pass any arguments that you’d pass to the default link_to view helper.

<%= link_to_unimplemented( 'link text', { :class => 'link_class_name' } ) -%>

Now our web designers can go about their work and use this helper as necessary.

An nice benefit for doing this is that we have a pattern that we follow so that we can rely upon to make sure that we don’t forget anything. This is the equivalent of adding @TODO@s throughout our code base.

If we search through app/views for ‘link_to_unimplemented’ we should be able to prevent missing any broken links. In the next screenshot, I’m using grep with colorized matches.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

As you can see, we have something left to implement in that area of the application. :-)

This has been one of those lightweight patterns that we’ve been able to adopt and it’s definitely helped manage the expectations of our clients throughout our development process.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. How does your team handle things like this?

Related Posts

• Designers, Developers, and the x_ Factor
• Spice up your Terminal with colored grep pattern results

Two years ago, I wrote an article titled, The Art of Delivery. I wanted to post a few updates based on how our process has evolved since then (and continues to).

Over the past few years, we’ve been fortunate enough to work on quite a diverse collection of projects. This has enabled us to work with many different clients and solicit feedback on our process. This has given us an opportunity to evolve a set of best practices that fulfills the long-term project goals/budgets of our client while making sure that we’re able to maintain a design and development process that is agile.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, our team typically bills work per-iteration on projects rather than per-hour or a flat-bid per-project. Since iterations are bite-sized pieces of the entire project and limited to 1-2 weeks, our teams estimates are much more accurate and we’re able to keep things rolling and on track.

The basic structure of our project looks like this.

• A Project has many releases
• A Release has many iterations
• An Iteration has many deliverables
• A Deliverable has many tasks

Before we begin working on an iteration, we outline a set of goals that we want to create solutions for. This process comes out of discussions between our client and us until we agree on what is the highest value/most critical to the success of the project, based on our shared understanding of where we are today. These goals translate into Deliverables, which in a typical iteration might require Interaction Design, Interface Design, or Development. We tend to break our process up into stages so that Interaction Design on Module XYZ would be implemented in a following iteration. This is because it’s unrealistic to expect someone to provide an accurate estimate on how long it’ll take to implement something before you know how people will interact with it.

Within any given iteration, our team is spread across several sets of deliverables. As a team, we breakdown these deliverables into smaller sets of tasks. It’s our aim to keep tasks smaller than a full days worth of work as it’s much easier to measure progress across the iteration when we can track tasks at a granular level.

Essentially, tasks are the individual steps needed to achieve these goals. We don’t go out of our way to list each one of those during an estimate process as some tasks take less time than it takes to generate an estimate for them. Each person providing estimates should avoid getting too granular and aim to find a good balance that compliments their workflow.

Like most things… mileage may vary.

Through this process, we can get calculate the estimated costs for each deliverable, which then provides us an cost for the entire iteration. In addition to deliverables, we also budget a set of hours/days so that we can be compensated for handling small requests, bug fixes, and project management. It’s important to factor these things into your process.

In future posts, I’ll discuss how we’re handling this process while working on multiple projects… as that’s where it can chaos can start if you’re not careful. ;-)

How does your team work? As we’re always evolving our process in an effort so that we can be more efficient and speed up our delivery cycle, I’d love to learn from those in the community.

This question, “where can I find documentation for Edge Rails?” still comes up quite often on mailing lists, IRC, and other places. I just wanted to point out a few resources for you.

In March 2006, our team announced that we’d be updating a RDOC site a few times a day as the Rails project gets commits.

You can still access the PLANET ARGON Edge Rails documentation here:

• http://edgedocs.planetargon.org

Caboose also has some Edge Rails documentation here:

• http://caboo.se/doc.html

If you’re aware of any other online resources for Edge Rails documentation, please let me know.

Yesterday afternoon, we were helping our newest employee, Paige Saez, get setup with new accounts across all of our applications. She uses Google Reader and couldn’t understand why her Basecamp RSS wasn’t working in it. We explained that Google doesn’t provide any way to subscribe to authenticated feeds (yet)... so it wasn’t something she could do. (I still use NetNewsWire because of this problem…)

During the discussion, I said that it probably wouldn’t take much effort to build a proxy for an authenticated feed… and Andy said he’d give it a shot.

10 minutes later… he had an initial version of a RSS proxy application, written in Ruby.

15 minutes after that, we had it up and running on a private server for all of us at PLANET ARGON to begin using.

...and here is the proof!

Wee! Authenticated Basecamp RSS feeds in Google reader. It even works with the openid authentication.

You can grab the code from Andy’s blog post and finally make the switch off of desktop RSS readers to Google Reader, because you know you want to. ;-)

Thanks Andy!

Yesterday evening, I deployed the new version of RubyURL. This was a collaborative effort between Chris Griffin and I, which we’re happy to finally push live.

There are a few things that we’re going to push out in near future, such as an API and a new RubyGem.

Chris volunteered to work on the new design and I did most of the programming in Ruby on Rails. When we worked on this, we really wanted to keep the process as simple as possible, despite some of the problems that the site has been having.

In the end, we have a Rails application that is only 85 lines of code and has a 1:2.3 code-to-spec ratio. I wanted to keep it under 100 lines of code. This means that there is some breathing room for further development.

We also tried out a beta account that I was given for RoundHaus for Subversion hosting. We had a really good experience using their service and were impressed by the plethora of useful features that came with the repository, such as continuous integration, rcov/code coverage stats, and twitter integration!.

If you find a bug, be sure to submit a ticket on the RubyURL bug tracker.

On a side note, we deployed this on a brand new Rails Boxcar, our new hosting solution that will be launched in the very near future. ;-)