As some of you may know, I have recently moved flats, with a brief stint as a nomad. We are now south of the river and lined up for some tennis in June.
Thanks to everyone who put up with us and helped us out. We hope to have you over soon.
Tonight was the monthly London Ruby Users Group meeting (kindly hosted by at the Fotango offices), with guest speaker Chad Fowler.
Although Chad had prepared material, he chose to just stand and speak to the 20 or so people present.
It was interesting to hear that, despite initial concerns, he believes that Rails code exemplifies what Ruby can really do. People coming to Rails from other languages are unaware that they are using advanced Ruby idioms. They are using advanced concepts without realising it - there is no distinction between basic and advanced in Rails.
He also mentioned that he is working on a large Rails application which uses Ruby metaprogramming to provide a more manageable codebase. I hope that he will be able to share some of that with the community.
Chad also sneakily announced that Ruby Central intends to do a European RailsConf in London, this September (14th & 15th). In the pub, he mentioned that they already have several notable speakers lined up including DHH and Jamis Buck.
I went to Blogging Demystified at the Apple Store last night.
I wasn't going to go, but there was some sort of emergency at Holborn station which required two fire engines and a few police cars. I decided to walk over to Regent Street, since I was headed that way anyway.
I listened to all of them speak, and I'm sure it would have been interesting if you knew nothing about blogging. As the evening went on, I wondered who was this mystified about blogging.
The first speaker was Annie Mole. She spoke a lot about blogs making you money and famous. She kept saying that they won't. Tom Reynolds was up next. He uses his blog as his online identity, even though he's not really Tom Reynolds.
The highlight of the evening was Inky Circus. They were the most enthusiastic about what they were blogging and seemed to be genuinely interested in their audience. After their talk I wanted to visit the site.
Kudos to all the speakers for getting up in front of the crowd and chatting about what they thought about blogging. They reminded me that I should probably write an up to date about me page and be more regular in my postings.
Rails Engines are a way to distribute a feature you intend to use in several of your Rails applications.
There are a number of ways to get engines to work in with your application. I will use login_engine in this example, but the principle applies to all engines, including your own.
Engines are just plugins and can be installed the same way as other plugins.
script/plugin source http://svn.rails-engines.org/plugins
script/plugin install engines
script/plugin install login_engine
This will work and you will get the latest releases of engines and the login_engine.
If you want to update your plugins:
script/plugin update
Now if you're using subversion (you are using subversion right?), you probably won't use the script/plugin install as you would have to update your repository each time you updated your plugins.
More likely, you will use one of the next methods.
You can have the plugin script setup the svn:externals for you:
script/plugin install -x engines
script/plugin install -x login_engine
You can see the svn:externals that have been created:
svn propget svn:externals vendor/plugins
login_engine http://svn.rails-engines.org/plugins//login_engine
engines http://svn.rails-engines.org/plugins//engines
Whenever you checkout your application, it will go and fetch the latest stable version of your engines. This is all well and good, but you may encounter problems if you are using a newer version of an engine than you had tested with.
To have more control over what you are using, then use svn:externals yourself.
svn propedit svn:externals
While developing track the release branch:
engines http://svn.rails-engines.org/engines/branches/rb_1.1
login_engine http://svn.rails-engines.org/login_engine/branches/rb_1.0
When you are ready to release your application, then settle on the latest release tag for the branch you were working on:
engines http://svn.rails-engines.org/engines/tags/rel_1.1.0
login_engine http://svn.rails-engines.org/login_engine/tags/rel_1.0.0
This method is the one I use and recommend. Depending on what you are trying to achieve you can choose any of the above. It is not too difficult to switch from one way of doing things to another.