RubyCampLyon 2010: wrapping up

The RubyCamp Lyon 2010 took place yesterday, Saturday 17th. I was great meeting all those people interested in Ruby, for both professional and amateur matters. Eyrolles was sponsoring the event and offered 10 books (I didn’t win one though – that’s for the sucking part :)).

I also obtained a last-minute sponsoring from Engine Yard, but as I obtained the required info the night before the presentation, I only showed a little bit the interface but didn’t do anything real with it. Instead, I used Heroku and presented the 60-second deployment stuff. I think I made my point there: configuring servers and low-level stuff isn’t fun anymore, let’s put the application at the center of all.

So here’s my slides. Be kind with the layout and content, it was best seeing me (or anybody else talking :)) live than it’s gonna be reading it.

I haven’t had time to go thru the other presentation I prepared called “Ruby Software Architecture”, but I’ll do that during another event.

Anyhoo… I’m looking forward to the next “Apéro Ruby” now that the group is in motion!

Rails 3, Railties and Engines

Rails 3 brings a lot of useful features. The main one, in my humble opinion, is the introduction of the classes Rails::Railtie and Rails::Engine.

They bring the modularity that made code more reusable and easily integrable in your current code base. They also prove that there no reason to say that Rails is not ready for the Enterprise. One quick tip for the party poopers (you know who you are ;)): JRuby makes things even easier for your development operations team members as it allows you to run your Ruby app (ie: Rails) within your favorite App Server (Websphere, Tomcat, you name them).

In this article, I will try to explain a little bit what are these new classes, how they were implemented and how to start using them.

If you want to see a live presentation of this, come and join us to the RubyCamp Lyon 2010 on April 17th.

Live-Note got its own Google Chrome Extension

Thanks to Luciano Live-Note has got its own Google Chrome Extension.

He even shot a video about it:

So I guess it’s time for me to make Live-Note a real product by setting up a couple of tools like an issue tracker and a wiki (for the documentation).

Few figures I’m kinda proud of. Live-Note is today:

• 42 users
• 3700+ notes added to Google Wave. These waves/blips are completely yours, only you (and the robot) have access to it, so it’s entirely private.

Fatal: GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java) is not supported by JRuby

If you ever encountered this when installing JRuby on Ubuntu:

Fatal: GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java) is not supported by JRuby.

Doing

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre

could do the trick, given you’ve installed sun-java6’s packages on your machine.

I hope it’ll help.

Introducing Live-Note(.appspot.com)

I was about to call this article “Gemcutter Webhooks on Google Wave (and Google App Engine) part 2” but then I realized that it was no more about that I wanted to focus on, but more on the Wave part (sorry Rubyists friends, but I had fun with Python (as long as I don’t try to do metaprogramming Python is nice to play with :)).

Google released the Google Wave Robot API v2 (hurray). In that major revision, they are introducing the Active Robot API that makes it possible for robots (i.e. GAE-baked applications) to interact with Waves. In the previous version, your robot was being notified each time a wave (or wavelet, or blip) was modified or when a participant was added to the wave, but now, your application can actually be active and contact Wave on its own.

In the first part of this series of articles, I was demonstrating how to build a GAE-baked application and how to subscribe to a web hook (being a Rubyist I was taking the webhooks from Gemcutter / Rubygems.org). I went only half-way as I wanted to actually see the result inside Google Wave. But then I think to my self, what a wonderful world think it would be to do something actually useful in my everyday life instead of just demonstrating mix of technologies (even if it’s neat to be able to make applications talk to each others).

So today, it’s gonna be about a 12-hour-design application: Live-Note.

Rails 3: Let ActiveRecord Manage Your Translations

With the previous versions of Rails we have the choice between storing the translations into a YAML file (one per language) and standard Ruby Hashes.

Bringing the ActiveRecord backend to light, the I18n gem allows us now to manage all our translations in a regular database.

Executing binary files with Ruby on Rails and Heroku

One would easily wonder why in hell someone else would want to do that, but it’s actually often because you are forced to.

In this post, I’ll explain how to proceed.

Talk to Gemcutter's API using XMPP/Google Talk

Working with Ruby in my day job made me try other exciting things, especially with Google App Engine. Programming in Python is not so bad, but I won't say I'm having fun remapping my brain onto the weirdosities of the language. Anyhoo... Tonight I wanted to talk to Gemcutter, but not programmatically, I wanted to have it in my GTalk contact list and start having a little chat...

Git Fast Forward Merges

Moving our current projects codebase from Subversion to Git was a nice move. This plus the adoption of the feature-centric way of developing (BDD + Scrum + Kanban) and our repositories are now cleared of any form of waste (useless LOC written "just in case"). Now, we must adapt the usage we have of Git and one that we just initiated is the non fast forward merge.

Gemcutter Webhooks on Google Wave (and Google App Engine) part 1

So what are Gemcutter webhooks? It’s a way to automatically notice an online app (say gemhooker.appspot.com for instance) about the activities of your favorite (or all) Gemcutter’s gems...