Dare to Dream? » Ruby

Block magic for Rails helpers

Mayank Jain (makuchaku) — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 20:48:03 +0000

Ever wondered how can you have something like this

<% some_helper do %>
  Some text here
<% end %>

Well, here how it is…

def some_helper(&block)
    content = capture(&block)
    concat("this comes before the block", block.binding)
    concat(content, block.binding) # adds "Some text here" to the view
    concat("this comes after the block", block.binding)
end

Neat! Isn’t it

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Will be introducing MAIT students to Ruby & Rails…

Mayank Jain (makuchaku) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:53:26 +0000

Now this is going to be fun!

: Workshop for MAIT students (part 1 of 2)

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Super sexy BDD with Cucumber and Webrat

Mayank Jain (makuchaku) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:11:04 +0000

Fatal – you don’t have any automated test cases
Recoverable – you have some sorts of test suite in place
Best – you are already using unit/integration tests or have TDD/RSpec in place

Without wasting words, I’d put you right to the Cucumber and Webrat goodness…

Points worth noting…

This was ALL the code I wrote to test the login scenario
The webrat helper (generated by Cucumber) did most of the work (steps 2, 4, 5) – out of the box!

An excellent screencast you should see if you are interested in BDD for your Rails app with Cucumber and Webrat

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Learning from the best!

Mayank Jain (makuchaku) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:58:47 +0000

Just bought “Programming Ruby 1.9” from Flipkart.

From For Blog

When I joined IBM ISS UI team and my tech lead suggested that we should start doing things in Rails- and I was prompt enough to pop up a suggestion – “that why don’t we use Python based web app frameworks Django or Turbo Gears (as I had some python experience)”.

All he replied was – “when we are looking for the best framework, why not use the one everyone’s trying to become”.

And hence, the awesome journey to Rails began.
Understanding Ruby better will make it so much more fun.

PS: No disrespect meant to the awesome work being put in by the Python community. Python rocks! So does Ruby!

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Super easy SUB-URI hosting with mod_rails

Mayank Jain (makuchaku) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:54:40 +0000

With an Amazon EC2 instance up, next very obvious task was to get the hosting up. Objective was to host static content along with multiple Rails apps on the same EC2 instance. Purists might not agree to this, but getting up and running was the first target.

Apache is configured with DocumentRoot as /mnt/app/shared

My Rails apps live inside /mnt/app/releases//

should be exposed as http://blah-blah.com/dev

/etc/apache2/sites-available/ looks like

DocumentRoot /mnt/app/shared

RailsBaseURI /dev

DocumentRoot /mnt/app/shared

RailsBaseURI /dev

(This is important)
Inside the /mnt/app/shared directory, my /dev symlink now points to /mnt/app/releases//public

And inside my /config/environment.rb, just before the Initializer block ends, add

config.action_controller.relative_url_root = "/dev"

And you’r done! Touch the /tmp/restart.txt file and reload your app in the browser! It should be running!

Some excellent material to read before attempting this…

Oh yeah, the AMI being used is Webficient’s Ubuntu 8.04 image, with Rails 2.3.2, passenger, etc etc.

Next target – move over the configuration to Puppet!

Good Luck

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Revisting Ruby – Array.each

Mayank Jain (makuchaku) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:56:46 +0000

I’ve been in love with Ruby for long now – and its only obvious that I should get serious about it.

Hence, I’ve decided to go through Programming Ruby 1.9 – a chapter a day.

Understanding Array.each and blocks

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
class MyObject
attr_accessor :data
def initialize
@data = %w{maku chaku was here}
end
def simple_yield_example
puts "start"
yield
yield
puts "end"
end
def each
idx = 0
while idx < @data.length
yield @data[idx]
idx += 1
end
end
end
puts "##############"
MyObject.new.simple_yield_example { puts "Hello there!" }
puts "##############"
MyObject.new.each do |val|
puts val
end

Output

[makuchaku@Warrior ruby]$ ./each.rb
##############
start
Hello there!
Hello there!
end
##############
maku
chaku
was
here

Explanation

Objective was to implement a lookalike of “each” as as iterator. A code block, when associated with a method call can be called by the method by using “yield”. The number of variables being passed into each block should match the number of variables being passed into the yield.

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