Ramblings

This is the first in a series(???) of posts detailing things that I’ve found in the process of updating rails (and other plugins/gems) for an application.  Due to politics, it’s using JRuby, running inside a JBoss container, with a Derby backend.
Things which are getting updated include:

Rails
ActiveRecord-JDBC
ActiveScaffold
ActiveScaffoldExport
Goldspike is being replaced with Warbler

Here’s a list of what [...]

I got tired of typing the same commands all the time and/or looking up urls for plugins.  Hence this script….  Yes, I know it’s been done before, but this does what I want (for now; I’m sure I’ll edit it).
It does the following:

Creates rails instance (optionally setting the database, etc.)
Installs rspec & rspec-rails
Installs acts_as_statemachine
Installs restful_authentication
Modifies [...]

This is partly for myself, and partly for anyone after me…..
I have a controller generated via rspec_scaffold — yes, I know, it might not be what all the cool kids are doing, but it works.  I also have restful_authentication set up to use rspec.  So, when I go to add before_filter :login_required, autotest frowns at [...]

autotest / zentest are really useful tools.  However, it’s important to remember to run migrations for the test database — otherwise your tests will fail (miserably!)
I’ve found the following to be helpful for using autotest:

Getting started with Autotest - Continuous Testing
Autotest RSpec Notifications for Ubuntu « My Pragmatig life

Recently Mozilla Labs released a prototype of snowl, a rss/atom/twitter feed reader. It is a firefox plugin and provides two views of messages — a “traditional” message view, as well as a “river of news“. I thought that this could be easily “redone” as a rails application. The rest of this article [...]