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Content Tagged with X + Ruby

While it was pretty momentous last year when Mac OS X (Leopard) was released with full support for Ruby and Rails included with the OS, it seems that the Ruby train is still rolling with Apple.

A recent InfoQ article highlights some ways that Apple is using Ruby that you might have missed - including:

• The iPhone Configuration Web Utility - A tool written in Ruby on Rails for allowing enterprise customers to manage iPhones.
• The SproutCore JavaScript framework - Which is designed for making desktop-like applications on the web and is used in Apple's new MobileMe applications. SproutCore is installed as a gem, uses generators written in Ruby to create resources and it utilizes Merb to generate HTML artifacts. (Update: SproutCore isn't a Ruby project / Ruby-based system per se, but it does offer some good tie-ins to the Ruby ecosystem.)
• The MacRuby project - Apple's own port of Ruby to the Objective-C runtimes - which should make it much easier to integrate with Cocoa for Desktop development.

I haven't played with the MobileMe web applications much, but I recall thinking that they looked fairly impressive. Have any other Ruby developers tried SproutCore yet? How's it working out for you?

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Promise and Peril for Alternative Ruby Impls [Implementations] is a lengthy, but interesting, essay by Charles Nutter of the JRuby team. He looks at Ruby 1.8, Ruby 1.9, JRuby, Rubinius, IronRuby, MacRuby, and some minor implementations, and covers their background along with their current development state and how they might proceed in future. For those interested in the state of the many Ruby implementations, this is a must read.

For those who want a shorter version without any of the context or smart insight Charles brings: the Ruby 1.8.7 previews have thrown a spanner in the works, Ruby 1.9 still doesn’t run Rails (but will very soon), Ruby 1.9 might not prove better enough to woo developers, JRuby rocks, Rubinius is cool but improving performance will be hard, Rubinius seems to be retreating to using more and more C primitive functions and moving away from “Ruby in Ruby”, IronRuby is clever but might have trouble running Rails properly, MacRuby is a great idea, and all of the other, minor implementations seem stuck in the mud.

Trivia: Two Freudian slips when writing this post. I mis-typed “Peril” as “Perl” in both cases.

John Muchow has put together a three part (so far) set of blog posts that guides you through using Ruby as an alternative for AppleScript on OS X (part 1, part 2, part 3) using the rb-appscript library. It’s very slow moving so even if you’re a complete AppleScript / OS X newbie, you’ll be able to follow it.

Ruby > AppleScript

With all of the developments going on between OS X and Ruby lately, I’m becoming convinced that Ruby could become the de-facto OS X scripting language of choice within the next few years. I’m a programmer, but I find AppleScript hideous enough to avoid it wherever possible, and I’m not the only one. I forget where, but I recently read an article about AppleScript that suggested while it reads like English, it’s not particular easy to code in because it isn’t English and the constructions are very rigid. Compare this AppleScript code:

tell application "TextEdit"
    get paragraph 1 of document "Read Me"
end tell

To this Ruby alternative:

app(’TextEdit‘).documents[’Read Me‘].paragraphs[1].get

The AppleScript reads better in English terms, but the Ruby version is, arguably, easier to remember how to reconstruct, as long as you’re familiar with Ruby syntax. Ruby’s reflection / inspection capabilities also ensure that even if you forget the name of a method / term, you can look it up on the fly! Try that in AppleScript! (Oops, I’m wrong, for now.)

RubyOSA

As well as rb-appscript, let’s not forget RubyOSA, a Ruby bridge to the Apple Event Manager, a library that makes controlling OS X applications child’s play:

Justin Williams has put together an all-in-one RubyOSA tutorial that’s worth reading and demonstrates how to control NetNewsWire from Ruby.

Ruby & OS X Books?

Lastly, where are the Ruby and OS X books? Are you writing one now that you can tell us about? Are you a publisher looking for someone to write such a book? Is there already a book that’s dedicated to using Ruby specifically with OS X? If not, it’s finally time for one.

Castanaut is a Ruby-backed screencasting domain-specific language that allows you to script screencasts in code. When these scripts are run, Castanaut takes control of your Mac and produces the desired effect. It’s simply automated, scripted screencasting.

The Origin

Two weeks ago I was reading a post on 37signals’ blog about producing screencasts. Joseph Pearson’s comment got me all excited:

At Inventive Labs, we’re experimenting with scripted screencasts. That is, you run a script, and at the end of it you have a screencast.

For example, this movie was generated by this Ruby script. No human was involved at all.

Obviously we would replace the text-to-speech narrative with a real voice actor for any screencast we put out, not least because the robot suffers from the Uncanny Valley effect. But it does ensure that timing is right.

I e-mailed Joseph and gave his system a try. It’s now publicly available under the superb WTFPL license.

Why?

One of the common problems with screencasts is that they take a long time to produce, and this often means they fail to get updated when situations change (new versions of products, updated interfaces, etc.) With Castanaut, you could script your screencasts and rapidly reproduce them each time your software has a major update. If the changes are just at the interface level, you could even reproduce the video, paste the old voice / sound track over the top, and you’d be done.

As an aside, if you’re more interested in producing screencasts the “old fashioned” way, I can heartily recommend Geoffrey Grosenbach’s “Screencasting On The Mac” video. It costs $9 but you get a lot of information for your money. PeepCode is a sponsor of Ruby Inside but I am recommending this separately to that. I watched it last week and took away a lot of useful information, although now I’m being tempted by Castanaut instead ;-)

Ext JS Powered Administration System Generator for Rails 2.0

Davide D’Agostino writes in with news about Lipsiadmin, his Ext JS powered administration system generator for Rails 2.0. Ext JS is an interesting JavaScript framework that lets you quickly put together AJAX-powered Web pages that look and feel somewhat like Windows applications. Lipsiadmin takes this attribute of Ext JS and builds backend administrator systems for your Rails applications that feel more like GUI apps than Web pages. It’s pretty interesting work.

RailsConf 2008 Registration Now Open

Just a quick note to those who are interested that the registration for RailsConf 2008 is open. Get in quick as it typically books out fast. David Hansson gives some brief background.

“Rails Is Shitty”

There’s no thought given to the general problem to solve, it’s just improved PHP + “ActiveRecord, lol”. This means Rails doesn’t have solutions that are particularly good or scalable or make sense, only hacks that happened to solve someone’s specific problem at a time and were implementable in 5 minutes or less. Rails is heaps better than PHP, but it’s still only good for what PHP is good, and that’s not writing webapps. This permeates Rails all the way down: it’s got hacky modules that only solve particular problems, those modules have hacky functions that only solve particular problems and those functions only do hacky things that solved someone’s particular problem.

Maciej Kataflasz

A post on comp.lang.lisp recently caught the eyes of several Rails developers. It’s inflammatory and a prime piece of flamebait, but Maciej Kataflasz makes a few good points amongst the hate.

Easy Restful Rails Screencast

In the “Easy Restful” screencast, Fabio Akita takes a 50 minute journey into putting together RESTful Rails 2.0 applications in an efficient manner.

Installing Rails and PostgreSQL on OS X Leopard

Robby Russell has put together an easy to follow, complete guide to getting a full Rails stack along with PostgreSQL installed on OS X Leopard. Lots of screenshots and hand holding. Nice work!

Someone / some people who have been responsible for integrating Ruby and Rails into the latest version of Mac OS X (Leopard) have written some notes on what was involved and how Ruby and Rails work in Leopard. The Ruby build is a customized 1.8.6 p36 and actually integrates into Xcode and Interface Builder.. now making it a relatively easy task to put together Ruby GUI apps on OS X. RubyGems is also installed with a smattering of the most popular gems preinstalled by default.

If you work on Mac OS X, you may have noticed how cool Macs deal with complex documents, things like Keynote presentations or applications themselves. They're stored as directories. The Finder hides this, making them look and act like individual files. This works nicely, often the contents of a bundle are simple text and XML files ... whereas the equivalent under Windows is either a very proprietary (and potentially fragile) binary format, or multiple files and folders that YOU have to treat as a unit.

Alas, this all breaks down when using Subversion. You can't just check in MyPresentation.key into SVN ... it will create those pesky .svn directories inside the bundle, and those will be destroyed every time you save your presentation.

My solution to this is to convert the bundles into an archive, and check in the archive. The bundle folders are marked as svn:ignore. I guess this reveals that I mostly use SVN as a safe, structured backup.

In any case, manually creating those archives can be a pain. So ... out comes my solution to many problems: Ruby.

The goal here is to find bundles that need to be archived; do it efficiently (only update the archive if necessary) and do it recursively, seeking out bundles in sub-directories.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

# Used to prepare a directory for commit to Subversion. This is necessary for certain file types on Mac OS X because what appear to be files in the Finder
# are actually directories (Mac uses the term "bundle" for this concept). It is useless to put the .svn folder inside such a directory, because it will
# tend to be deleted whenever the "file" is saved.  
#
# Instead, we want to compress the directory to a single archive file; the bundle will be marked as svn:ignore.
#
# We use tar with Bzip2 compression, which is resource intensive to create, but 
# compresses much better than GZip or PKZip.
#
# The trick is that we only want to create the acrhive version when necessary; when 
# the archive does not exist, or when any file
# in the bundle is newer than the archive.

require 'optparse'

# Set via command line options

$extensions = %w{pages key oo3 graffle}
$recursive = true
$dry_run = false

# Queue of folders to search (for bundles)

$queue = []

def matching_extension(name)
  dotx = name.rindex('.')
  
  return false unless dotx
  
  ext = name[dotx + 1 .. -1]
  
  return $extensions.include?(ext)
end


# Iterate over the directory, identify bundles that may need to be compressed and (if recursive) subdirectories
# to search.
#
# path: string path for a directory
def search_directory(dirpath)
  
  Dir.foreach(dirpath) do |name|
    
    # Skip hidden files and directories
    next if name[0..0] == "."
    
    path = File.join(dirpath, name)
        
    next unless File.directory?(path)
                  
    if matching_extension(name)
      update_archive path
      next
    end
    
    if $recursive
      $queue << path
    end
    
  end
  
end


def needs_update(bundle_path, archive_path)
  
  return true unless File.exists?(archive_path)
  
  archive_mtime = File.mtime(archive_path)
  
  # The archive exists ... can we find a file inside the bundle thats newer?
  # This won't catch deletions, but that's ok.  Bundles tend to get completly
  # overwritten when any tiny thing changes.
  
  dirqueue = [bundle_path]

  until dirqueue.empty?
    
    dirpath = dirqueue.pop
    
    Dir.foreach(dirpath) do |name|
      
      path = File.join(dirpath, name)
      
      if File.directory?(path)
        dirqueue << path unless [".", ".."].include?(name)
        next
      end
      
      # Is this file newer?
      
      if File.mtime(path) > archive_mtime
        return true
      end
      
    end
    
  end
  
  return false
end

def update_archive(path)
  archive = path + ".tar.bz2"
  
  return unless needs_update(path, archive)

  if $dry_run
    puts "Would create #{archive}"
    return
  end

  puts "Creating #{archive}"
    
  dir = File.dirname(path)
  bundle = File.basename(path)
    
  # Could probably fork and do it in a subshell
  system "tar --create --file=#{archive} --bzip2 --directory=#{dir} #{bundle}"

end

$opts = OptionParser.new do |opts|
  
  opts.banner = "Usage: prepsvn [options]"

  opts.on("-d", "--dir DIR", "Add directory to search (if no directory specify, current directory is searched)") do |value|
    $queue << value
  end

  opts.on("-e", "--extension EXTENSION", "Add another extension to match when searching for bundles to archive") do |value|
    $extensions << value
  end
  
  opts.on("-N", "--non-recursive", "Do not search non-bundle sub directories for files to archive") do
    $recursive = false
  end
  
  opts.on("-D", "--dry-run", "Identify what archives would be created") do
    $dry_run = true
  end
  
  opts.on("-h", "--help", "Help for this command") do
    puts opts
    exit
  end
end

def fail(message)
    puts "Error: #{message}"
    puts $opts
end

begin
    $opts.parse!
rescue OptionParser::InvalidOption
    fail $!
end

# If no --dir specified, use the current directory.

if $queue.empty?
  $queue << Dir.getwd
end

until $queue.empty? 
  search_directory $queue.pop
end

I do love Ruby syntax, it is so minimal, and lets me follow my personal mantra less is more.

I'm sure there's some edge cases that aren't handle well, such as spaces in path names and maybe issues related to permissions. But it works for me.

You do need to have tar installed, in order to build the archives. I can't remember if that's built in to Mac OS X (probably) or whether I obtained it using Fink.

In any case, you need to remember to execute prepsvn in your workspace, to spot file bundles that need archiving, before you check in. It would be awesome if Subversion supported some client-side check-in hooks to do this automatically.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, OpenOffice.org caught it’s first worm. Sophos reports the first sightings of an OOo scripting worm in the wild. It uses an OOo document to carry itself. Remarkably, the worm is cross platform and uses perl on Linux, ruby on Mac OS X and JavaScript on Windows to infect other files and distribute itself through instant messaging.

The damage? It looks like the worm does download and display a porn image.

To the delight of Sophos, the presumable author did send the file directly to Sophos address.

The freely available Aptana IDE seems to be moving faster than ever. Aptana is a web developer's IDE with extensive Ruby and Rails support through the RadRails plugin. Having announced support for AIR right after Adobe released a Beta, the latest Aptana IDE already supports development for the just-released Apple iPhone.

Among the features that Aptana IDE provides for iPhone developers include:

• Preview of your iPhone projects in hortizontal and vertical mode
• iPhone Project contains starter files to get you going easily on your iPhones apps
• Easy import of Ajax libraries into iPhone projects
• Help and online documentation
• Integrated server that enables you to serve your iPhone apps directly to your iPhone for easy testing
• A version of Joe Hewitt’s Firebug for iPhone
• Export wizard for bundling and deploying iPhone applications (coming soon)
• Integrated content assist for iPhone-specific APIs (coming soon)

Check out the Aptana for iPhone development page for more information. They also provided a nice intro to iPhone development screencast for a quick start.

Note: If you like Aptana IDE, you may want to consider joining their team, as they're currently hiring developers.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, OpenOffice.org caught it’s first worm. Sophos reports the first sightings of an OOo scripting worm in the wild. It uses an OOo document to carry itself. Remarkably, the worm is cross platform and uses perl on Linux, ruby on Mac OS X and JavaScript on Windows to infect other files and distribute itself through instant messaging.

The damage? It looks like the worm does download and display a porn image.

To the delight of Sophos, the presumable author did send the file directly to Sophos address.

Over at the O'Reilly Ruby Blog, Jim Alateras laments the recent stalling of development on RadRails, but suggests an alternative solution: E-TextEditor, a "TextMate" alternative for Windows. The initial reports I've read about it are that it's rather good, and after watching the screencast I'd say it looks to be a pretty good editor and I'd give it a try if if used Windows. If you're a Windows user, give it a look.

Now for the editorial bit..

I don't know Allan Odgaard, the developer of TextMate, at all, but I'm a happy user of the editor, despite not understanding almost any of the advanced features. I can't speak on his behalf, so just take the following as editorial waffle, but I think Apple should buy TextMate and release it for free or at low cost (as currently). If Allan isn't interested in selling it, then fine, but if he is, it could be a big win for both him and Apple.

So why? 1) The E-TextEditor homepage mentions TextMate six times. 2) A few people have converted TextMate's snippets to operate in other editors. 3) There's even a 200 page book about TextMate on the market. 4) If you've been floating around the various freenode Ruby and Rails related channels in the past couple of years, you'll have undoubtedly seen at least several Windows or Linux users drop by raving about TextMate and lamenting their inability to buy a Mac. Yet.. they've ended up actually buying a MacBook (or similar) after several months, and continue to rave about TextMate (Jamie van Dyke is one example that sticks in my mind).

These points all demonstrate that TextMate has rapidly become a standard of its own in the text editor market, and it has undoubtedly help OS X become the de facto platform for Rails development. Apple has even acknowledged this and are including Rails with Leopard. People from all platforms have seen TextMate and been captivated by it enough to the point that they lament the lack of its existence on their platform. This doesn't happen with many Mac-only apps, and from what I've read, Allan isn't particularly interested in developing non-OSX versions of the software, so the developers of copycat editors like E-TextEditor are not to blame.

Apple tends to be very good at releasing products that people are afraid of copying too well. Even before iTunes was released on Windows, there was nothing as elegant and as usable. There's nothing quite as good as iMovie, Pages, or Aperture in their respective niches either (although Adobe is trying on the last one). Apple is a fierce defender of its trademarks, and with TextMate under the Apple wing, it could become an even bigger driver for the OS X platform since copycat behavior could be restricted.

I am no fan of trademarks or patents being fiercely defended, nor a fan of Apple owning all of the apples in the cart (pun not originally intended), but from a totally objective point of view, I think it'd make sense for Apple, and if Allan were to turn down, say, a million dollars from Apple, he's a far more principled man than I!

I'm now off to put my flamesuit on..

Mosquito is a new, automatable, testing tool that uses RubyCocoa and OS X to perform Web operations and take screenshots of each point along the way. It's a little like the Windows-only Watir. I can see the technology used by Mosquito also being useful for automating Web operations even without the testing focus.

Rb-AppScript is an event bridge between Ruby and OS X that allows you to get AppleScript-esque control in OS X. The Appscript creators claim Appscript is a 'serious alternative' to AppleScript and it certainly looks good. Check out this example:

AS.app('TextEdit').documents[1].paragraphs[1].get

The equivalent AppleScript?

tell application "TextEdit"
    get paragraph 1 of document 1
end te