HappyCodr

Rapleaf and Rails 1.2.6

Sonny Parlin — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:47:09 +0000

Unfortunately rails 1.2.6 doesn’t have support for ActiveResource, so I was forced to write my own Rapleaf integration model instead of simply using REST.

class Rapleaf < ActiveRecord::Base

def self.grab_contacts(login, password)
response = ""
http = Net::HTTP.new("api.rapleaf.com", 443)
http.use_ssl = true
response = http.start do |http|
req = Net::HTTP::Get.new("/v2/abook?login=#{login}&password=#{password}",
{‘Authorization’ => ‘your_key’})
http.request(req).body
end
original = XmlSimple.xml_in(response, { ‘ForceArray’ => false })
contacts = original[‘contact’]
end

end

Then in my view I just did this:

<% @contacts.each do |contact| %>
<%= contact[‘email’] %> <%= contact[‘name’] %>
<% end %>

Perhaps I’ll make this into a plugin, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort…

Mod_Rails

Sonny Parlin — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:40:30 +0000

“I was initially skeptical about mod_rails. The developers had the cojones to start promoting it weeks before it was ready, and they managed to generate a lot of hype around it before anyone had used it.” nubyonrails.com

Hulu

Sonny Parlin — Sun, 11 May 2008 22:29:46 +0000

Hulu launched in January and is probably one of the best new Rails sites out there, I use it every day. hulu.com

Evolution

Sonny Parlin — Sun, 11 May 2008 22:23:37 +0000

Check out this evolution of a Rails project on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud over the course of 1 year, written by Geezeo’s star system administrator. elwoodicious.com

iChat Status

Sonny Parlin — Sun, 11 May 2008 22:19:22 +0000

Update Your Friends iChat Status With A Twitter Direct Message, Simply Because You Can… railstips.org

The Case Against Haml

Sonny Parlin — Sun, 11 May 2008 15:49:44 +0000

Haml seems to be the (not so) new hawtness in the rails world. I’ve had some developers who work for me love it and others who hate it. I’m part of the latter group, for two main reasons.

First and foremost, Haml adds a learning curve to your development team. Granted, it’s not a huge learning curve, but it’s a learning curve nonetheless. The problem in this regard is that if you don’t spend a lot of time writing views, going back to edit old Haml code is very difficult because people tend not to “know it by heart” like they do HTML. So the learning curve never really goes away unless you’re constantly writing Haml code. The simple fact is that most developers have been writing HTML code for years and are intimately familiar with it, adding a layer above this is going to slow them down. Also, when new developers enter the organization, if they don’t already know Haml, they will have to spend time learning it instead of hitting the ground running.

Second, anytime you have to render Haml into RHTML, you’re taking a performance hit. Here is an excerpt from the Haml release notes. “My benchmarking seems to show that Haml is now only 5% to 12% slower than ERB when run through ActionView.”

Yes, Haml makes pretty views, but is it really worth it to sacrifice work performance and site performance for pretty views that the end user will never even know about? Me thinks not.

GitHub Gem

Sonny Parlin — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:54:27 +0000

Err the Blog wrote a great post on ways to use the GitHub gem. errtheblog.com

Rails Brain

Sonny Parlin — Sun, 11 May 2008 07:19:45 +0000

My favorite rails documentation site is by far RailsBrain. You can view the docs online or download them to your mac and run the RailsBrain application natively. railsbrain.com/

Boost Textmate performance by excluding heavy files from your project

Sonny Parlin — Sun, 11 May 2008 06:29:30 +0000

Textmate has been dogging me lately, to the point that I couldn’t take it anymore. After talking with other developers and exhaustive google searches, I found out that Textmate doesn’t like large files. So, with a little hack that my boy Kyle showed me, I think I may have fixed the problem.

I opened up my Textmate preferences, clicked on Advanced, then clicked on Folder References and added my log directory to the list of folders to be excluded from the file browser in Textmate. The problem is that I have some large (5MB and up) log files in my log directory, which Textmate was choking on. I also added and vendor/rails to the list as well for good measure. After doing this, I restarted Textmate and it was like night and day with performance.

HappyCodr is back… as a blog

Sonny Parlin — Sun, 11 May 2008 05:26:55 +0000

I’m excited to bring back HappyCodr is a rails blog! The Happycodr database has been moved to Working With Rails. You can browse all sites here and there is a showcase here.