Working with Rails published an interview they did of me , check it out

Don’t believe that they are just emailing random people to offer them software development books (that would be cool though). O’Reilly is simply saying thank you for my contribution to the Rails core:

If you also want to thank me (for anything you want, really), feel free to send me cheques, books, food, coupons/vouchers, cash, animals under 15 pounds but above 2 or plane tickets.

The Rails hackfest is a chance for people to be rewarded for contributing source code to Ruby On Rails. The value of their contributions are accumulated and the results charted.

I’m honored to be listed as contributor number 4 few days before the end of the month.
I know I got lucky with some of my patches getting merged in and that I might not be able to stay in the top 10, but I’m still glad I was able to help.

I know it’s not fair that my patch got merged in while other people (Josh Knowles for instance) have outstanding patches waiting to be merged in so he could get in front of me

Hopefully my other patch will be merged in before the end of June and I’ll be able to stay in the top ten. But for some reason I doubt that would happen and that’s why I took a screenshot

This would work on Mac and Linux, sorry Windows users, you’ll have to slightly change the code below.

Live on the Edge

This is actually a bit tricky but it was very well covered by John Nunemaker in this post

To sum John’s post:

Create a normal rails project:

$ rails my_project
$ cd my_project

$ rake rails:freeze:edge

(or use checkout edge in the vendor folder)

$ cd ..
$ ruby my_project/vendor/rails/railties/bin/rails my_edgie_project

You now have have a real Edge project called myedgieproject. You can delete the my_project folder since we only used it to create our real edge project.

Now, we are not really done since we need to add the Edge files into our vendor folder so we don’t use our local rails gem.

I would refer to another post from John, that you can find there

$ mkdir ~/rails
$ cd ~/rails
$ svn co http://dev.rubyonrails.com/svn/rails/trunk .

We just created a rails folder called rails in our home folder and we checked out edge/trunk in it.
Now let’s go in our Rails app and setup a symlink to the trunk folder we just created.

$ cd ~/rails_projects/my_edgie_project
$ ln -s ~/rails/trunk vendor/rails

If you are using subversion, you can ignore the symlink so it doesn’t try to version it:

$ svn propset svn:ignore "rails" vendor/
$ svn commit -m "using new sweet rails setup as recommended by John Nunemaker"
$ svn up

Read more for advanced settings etc…

Install RSpec

Very straight forward, you just need to follow the documentation

$ cd ~/rails_projects/my_edgie_project
$ ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/tags/CURRENT/rspec
$ ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/tags/CURRENT/rspec_on_rails

If you have TextMate, you might want to download the latest RSpec-X.Y.Z.tmbundle.tgz Bundle

Next thing you want to do is to install ZenTest

$ sudo gem install ZenTest

Make sure you install all the required packages.

If you are using Growl create a new file called .autotest in your home directory:

$mate ~./autotest

and add the following 2 lines to be warned when your specs/examples fail/pass

require 'autotest/redgreen'
require 'autotest/growl'

Now, lets go back to our project and create a model using the rspec scaffold (it uses scaffold_resource generator and create all the specs for you)

$ cd ~/rails_projects/my_edgie_project
$ ruby script/generate rspec_scaffold User first_name:string last_name:string :age:integer

Now, let’s start autotest (from zentest) so out code is tested in the background

$ autotest

There you go, really to modify your RSpec examples, make them fail, fix your code, examples should pass, refactor your code and start again