This tutorial shows how to use distributed ruby to connect a rails application with another ruby service not running inside Rails. Read the rest of this entry »

I finally found an editor which supports code completion for Ruby called JEdit with the Ruby Editor Plugin. I don’t know how they do it, but it’s working pretty good…

The instructions forget to mention, that you need the ErrorList, ProjectViewer and SideKick plugins, but at least these plugins were easy to find and install with the built-in plugin manager.

Evil folks and stupid users expose webapplications to requests no sane developer usually expects. To find methods that cannot cope with unexpected input I added a simple test to my current Ruby on Rails project. The test calls all public actions via all http actions and uses some dummy parameters. There are no assertions in this test, because I don’t know if an action should succeed or redirect. The only thing checked with this test is that the action does not fail.

def test_dummy_calls
  ac = ApplicationController.new
  @controller.public_methods.each do |action|
    unless ac.respond_to?(action)
      [:get, :post, :head, :put, :delete].each do |http_method|
        [nil, '', 'abc'*80, '-23', '123456789012345'].each do |param|
          method(http_method).call(action, :id => param)
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

Technorati Tags: ruby, rails, tests

Have a look at these nice Ruby T-Shirts: Read the rest of this entry »

When I tried to build the documentation for my current RoR project, I got this (not very helpful) error message:

$ rake appdoc
[...]
unrecognized option `–line-numbers –inline-source’

For help on options, try ‘rdoc –help’

rake aborted!

The same call had worked fine yesterday. Fortunately, I remembered having updated the gems because of another strange problem (which wasn’t solved by the update - but that’s not the point).

$ gem list
[...]
rake (0.7.0, 0.6.2)
    Ruby based make-like utility.

After I removed the newer rake (gem uninstall rake -v 0.7.0) my problem was gone. Could anybody explain me if this is a Rails (I’m running 1.0) or rake problem or is it just bad karma?

Update

Seems like it was a Rails problem. I found a fix for it.

Technorati Tags: ruby, rake, rails

Ruby on Rails has a pretty good template-system. You can use these templates for HTML output, XML output or if you want to send mails. But for reasons probably only known to David Heinemeier Hansson the method url_for cannot be used in ActionMailer templates.

Technorati Tags: ruby, rails

A growing list of things I don’t want to forget… Read the rest of this entry »