Category: Ruby

Things I Learned at Startup Weekend Calgary

Posted by mendicant – May 4, 2011

Last weekend I went to Startup Weekend Calgary. The event was hosted by @deveshd and @justinnowak at CoworkYYC. Our Startup Weekend coordinator was @thubten. I would like to give a massive shout out to all of these people as they did an incredible job making the weekend great.

As I had never been to a startup weekend before, I really had no idea what to expect. Despite never having been to a startup weekend I had two goals:

  • I wanted to meet some new people in my field or a related field
  • I wanted to try something a little bit new and different and fun

I’m sure there’s a ton of people who have written posts about what happens at startup weekend. Aaron and Chad sum it up much better than I will likely be able to anyway.

My Journey

The night started off with the pitches. There were a ton of good pitches and some very exciting ones. I had some ideas but there was exactly one reason why I didn’t pitch: All my ideas had some sort of resemblance to applications I have built at work – And I came here explicitly not to work on the sort of things I do at work. I came to work on something fun.

My night started off by getting on a team with @clangager. Despite my goal of working on something fun, the original idea we were working on centered around bridging two applications via a middle tier. Luckily for us, the problem had already been solved and in such a way that it wasn’t worth attempting over.

Finally, after a night of deliberating, Chad and I ended up deciding on building @sextrics (Sex+Metrics), initially created to be iPoo of sex. Yes, a ridiculous idea. And if you check our twitter stream, many, many laughs were had over the weekend.

Here is the interesting part. Despite being a totally crazy and outlandish idea (I mean – “Hey! We’ll track how often you have sex, what position, what room and we’ll give you some badges and everyone will laugh”) everyone was intrigued. Literally every single person who came through the space came by to see just what the hell we were doing. And laugh. And talk. We had a ton of fun building it and a ton of fun with each other.

Halfway through the day Saturday, we were also joined by @ianj_alberta, who had never used Ruby, Rails, GitHub or Heroku before. We had a lot of fun discussing Ruby, what it was and how it works. However, where his expertise really shone was due to the fact that not only was he a developer, he is also a photographer with Photoshop experience. He built all of the location icons and helped cut out all of the position icons.

In the end, we made our pitch and came in second to @MidoDeals. Congrats to that team.

My Lessons

It was a long weekend and my description above is a very distilled version of the weekend. However, I learned one very valuable lesson.

Any idea, no matter how small or ridiculous you might view it to be has the power to become great if you are just willing to throw it out there and see what people say.

I never thought we would get as far as we did with our idea. But we did.

I never thought an idea that started out as a sex trophy case could turn into a viable prospect. But it did.

I never thought the experience would have such a profound effect on me. But it did.

My Takeaways

  1. Take a step outside the norm. It doesn’t even have to be outside your comfort zone. Just something different.
  2. You would be surprised what you can accomplish in 54 hours.
  3. Never limit yourself. Negativity and nay-saying could prevent you from seeing true value of something.

Oh, and if you’re going to pitch something – make sure you have some sort of a business plan. We didn’t and I’m sure it cost us winning the weekend. Not that I care because I came away from Startup Weekend learning things that are far more valuable than a first place finish ever would have been.

Rubicant’s first real build

Posted by mendicant – September 13, 2009

So I’ve been using rubicant for a while personally, but never on anything beyond my own projects and not for anything big. After reading Ayende’s post about building Rhino Mocks with PSake, I wondered if rubicant could so something similar, so I decided to port his build script.

Of course, I didn’t have a generate assembly info method, so I basically took Oren’s and ported it as well (sorry Oren, I’ll take it out if you want). At the same time, I took the opportunity to remove the dependency on configatron from rubicant as well. It just seemed like overkill to require configatron when it really wasn’t buying me much.

In the end, I came up with this, which on the whole I don’t think looks too bad. I personally like it better, but I’ve been on a bit of a vendetta against PowerShell scripts since I wrote my first one some time ago. I don’t know why, but the friction it gave me over writing ruby scripts just always rubbed me the wrong way.

 

require 'fileutils'
require 'rake'
require 'rubicant'
include Rubicant

base_dir  = File.expand_path(".")
lib_dir = "#{base_dir}\\SharedLibs"
build_dir = "#{base_dir}\\build"
buildartifacts_dir = "#{build_dir}\\"
sln_file = "#{base_dir}\\Rhino.Mocks-vs2008.sln"
version = "3.6.0.0"
human_readable_version = "3.6"
tools_dir = "#{base_dir}\\Tools"
release_dir = "#{base_dir}\\Release"
upload_category = "Rhino-Mocks"
upload_script = "C:\\Builds\\Upload\\PublishBuild.build"
mbunit_dir = "#{tools_dir}\\MbUnit"

task :default => :release do
end

task :clean do
  rm_rf buildartifacts_dir
  rm_rf release_dir
end

task :init => :clean do

	generate_assembly_info({
		:path => "#{base_dir}\\Rhino.Mocks\\Properties",
		:title => "Rhino Mocks #{version}",
		:description => "Mocking Framework for .NET",
		:company => "Hibernating Rhinos",
		:product => "Rhino Mocks #{version}",
		:version => version,
		:cls_compliant => false,
		:copyright => "Hibernating Rhinos & Ayende Rahien 2004 - 2009"})

	generate_assembly_info({
		:path => "#{base_dir}\\Rhino.Mocks.Tests\\Properties",
		:title => "Rhino Mocks Tests #{version}",
		:description => "Mocking Framework for .NET",
		:company => "Hibernating Rhinos",
		:product => "Rhino Mocks Test #{version}",
		:version => version,
		:cls_compliant => false,
		:copyright => "Hibernating Rhinos & Ayende Rahien 2004 - 2009"})

	generate_assembly_info({
		:path => "#{base_dir}\\Rhino.Mocks.Tests.Model\\Properties",
		:title => "Rhino Mocks Tests #{version}",
		:description => "Mocking Framework for .NET",
		:company => "Hibernating Rhinos",
		:product => "Rhino Mocks Test Model #{version}",
		:version => version,
		:cls_compliant => false,
		:copyright => "Hibernating Rhinos & Ayende Rahien 2004 - 2009"})

	mkdir release_dir
	mkdir buildartifacts_dir

	cp_r "#{mbunit_dir}\\.", build_dir
end

task :compile => :init do
	MsBuildRunner.new(:properties => { :OutDir => buildartifacts_dir },
					  :project_file => sln_file).run
end

task :test => :compile do
	begin
		MbUnitRunner.new(:mbunit_dir => build_dir,
					 :test_files => ["Rhino.Mocks.Tests.dll"],
					 :report_type => 'Html').run
	rescue
		fail 'Error: Failed to execute tests'
	end
end

task :merge do
	begin
		rm_f "#{build_dir}\\Rhino.Mocks.Partial.dll"
		mv "#{build_dir}\\Rhino.Mocks.dll", "#{build_dir}\\Rhino.Mocks.Partial.dll"

		sh "#{tools_dir}\\IlMerge.exe " +
			"#{build_dir}\\Rhino.Mocks.Partial.dll " +
			"#{build_dir}\\Castle.DynamicProxy2.dll " +
			"#{build_dir}\\Castle.Core.dll " +
			"/out:#{build_dir}\\Rhino.Mocks.dll "+
			"/t:library "+
			"/keyfile:#{base_dir}\\ayende-open-source.snk " +
			"/internalize:#{base_dir}\\ilmerge.exclude"

	rescue
        fail 'Error: Failed to merge assemblies!'
	end

	puts "done merge"
end

task :release => [:test, :merge] do
	begin
		puts "Zipping files"
		sh "#{tools_dir}\\zip.exe -9 -A -j " +
			"#{release_dir}\\Rhino.Mocks-#{human_readable_version}-Build-#{ENV['ccnetnumericlabel']}.zip " +
			"#{build_dir}\\Rhino.Mocks.dll " +
			"#{build_dir}\\Rhino.Mocks.xml " +
			"license.txt " +
			"acknowledgements.txt"

	rescue
        fail 'Error: Failed to execute ZIP command'
	end
end

task :upload => :release do
	if (File.exists?(upload_script) )
		begin
			log = sh 'git log -n 1 --oneline'
			MsBuildRunner.new({:properties => { :Category => upload_category,
											   :Comment => log,
											   :File => "#{release_dir}\\Rhino.Mocks-#{human_readable_version}-Build-#{ENV['ccnetnumericlabel']}.zip" },
							   :project_file => upload_script }).run

		rescue
			fail "Error: Failed to publish build"
		end
	else
		puts "could not find upload script #{upload_script}, skipping upload"
	end
end

If you want to give this script a try (I’ve tried everything but the upload piece, which for obvious reasons I couldn’t test) just follow these steps:

  1. Get a copy of the rhino mocks source.
  2. Make sure you’ve got ruby installed.
  3. Make sure gem is up to date: “gem update –system”
  4. Add github to your gem sources: “gem sources -a http://gems.github.com”
  5. Install rubicant: “gem install mendicantx-rubicant”
  6. Copy the above script into a file named rakefile.rb in the rhino mocks directory.
  7. Run it: “rake release”

God willing, this will work. I’ve tried it on a couple of fresh systems, but have no good way of knowing if it works beyond my machines. If you do on the offhand decide to try it, please let me know below!

rubicant – MsBuild Task added

Posted by mendicant – January 30, 2009

I just added an MsBuild task for rubicant tonight. I’m not very familiar with the command line options for MsBuild so some of these could probably be improved a bit, but until I know more I will leave them as they are.

The MsBuild Task is used to create tasks which will use MsBuild. This should help with people who need to build WPF applications (since MsBuild is the only way right now), or (fingers crossed) migrate from MsBuild.

The MsBuild Task is used as follows: 

   1: MsBuildTask.new(:task_name => :dependencies) do |msb|
   2:   msb.no_autoresponse
   3:   msb.target
   4:   msb.logger
   5:   msb.distributed_logger
   6:   msb.console_logger_parameters
   7:   msb.validate
   8:   msb.verbosity
   9:   msb.no_console_logger
  10:   msb.max_cpu_count
  11:   msb.ignore_project_extensions
  12:   msb.file_logger
  13:   msb.distributed_file_logger
  14:   msb.node_reuse
  15:   msb.properties
  16:   msb.file_logger_parameters
  17:   msb.project_file
  18: end

Each of setters matches a command line option for MsBuild. For more information on what each one does, please view the documentation at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms164311.aspx.

Values that can only be set (for example, /noautoresponse) can be set to true (set) or nil (unset).

Values, such as /property that take a list of option settings, must be passed a hash where the keys are the options and the values are the option values. For example, to set the output directory and Warning Level for a csproj compile, you could use: 

   1: MsBuildTask.new(:compile) do |msb|
   2:   msb.properties = { :OutputDir => ".\\Output", :WarningLevel => 2 }
   3:   msb.project_file = ".\\Project1\\project.csproj"
   4: end

As of yet, I haven’t added an MsBuild helper to help create this function. I will probably get this done fairly shortly.

rubicant update – Easy installation via gem

Posted by mendicant – January 25, 2009

Since I already had rubicant building as a gem, it made sense to make it available as a gem. I have moved the project to github and it is now located at: http://github.com/mendicantx/rubicant/

In addition, you can also install rubicant via gem:

   1: gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
   2: sudo gem install mendicantx-rubicant

You should only ever have to run the gem sources command once. This adds github to your sources of remote gems. From what I understand, there’s a ton of great projects there.

Now you don’t have an excuse to try it out!

Introducing Rubicant – Part 3 – The inner workings

Posted by mendicant – January 22, 2009

Don’t forget to check out Part 1 and Part 2.

Rubicant basically has 4 main parts, as mentioned in the first part of this series. They are as follows:

The CscTask

The CscTask is used for compiling C# files. It’s usage is like:

   1: CscTask.new(:task_name => :dependencies) do |csc|
   2:   csc.target = 'library'
   3:   csc.references = FileList["libs\*.dll"]
   4:   csc.out = "hello_world.exe"
   5:   csc.debug = "full"
   6:   csc.files = FileList["src/**/*.cs"]
   7: end

target: Any target that the csc compiler takes (exe, winexe, library, etc)

references: The list of assemblies that are referenced during compilation

out: The output filename

debug: if this is set(to anything), the compiler will be passed /debug:full to create debugging information

files: The list of files to be compiled

CscTask also has a shortcut that can be accessed as follows:

   1: csc(name, dependencies, opts)
   2:  
   3: ex:
   4: csc :name, [:dependencies], { :target => 'library',
   5:                               :references = FileList["libs\*.dll"],
   6:                               :out = "hello_world.exe",
   7:                               :debug = "full",
   8:                               :files = FileList["src/**/*.cs"] }

 

The MBUnit Helper

The MBUnit helper is used to run tests using mbunit v2. It is used as follows:

   1: mbunit(mbunit_dir, test_dir, test_files, opts={})
   2:  
   3: ex:
   4: mbunit("/path/to/mbunit/dlls",
   5:         FileList["/test/dlls/test.dll"],
   6:         {:working_dir => "/dir/to/run/tests/in",
   7:          :assembly_path => FileList["/assemblies/to/include/*.dll"],
   8:          :report_folder => "sets /rf:",
   9:          :report_name_format => "sets /rnf:",
  10:          :report_type => "sets /rt:",
  11:          :show_reports => "sets /sr:",
  12:          :transform => "sets /tr:",
  13:          :filter_category => "sets /fc:",
  14:          :exclude_category => "sets /ec:",
  15:          :filter_author => "sets /fa:",
  16:          :filter_type => "sets /ft:",
  17:          :filter_namespace => "sets /fn:",
  18:          :verbose => "sets /v{optionvalue}",
  19:          :shadow_copy => "sets /sc:" }

For a complete listing of the mbunit command line options, please visit http://docs.mbunit.com/help/html/gettingstarted/MbUnitConsoleRunner.htm.

This runs the tests in test_files in the test_dir with the dlls from mbunit_dir using the options in opts. Currently, this will physically copy the minimum required mbunit dlls and mbunit.cons.exe to the test dir, run the tests and then remove the files.

The CopyFiles Task

The copy files task will copy files from one directory to another, while maintaining the folder structure.

   1: CopyFiles.new(:name) do |cf|
   2:   cf.base_dir = "/some/dir"
   3:   cf.file_globs = ["**/somefiles/*.cs", **/otherfiles/*.cs"]
   4:   cf.target_dir = "/another/dir"
   5:   cf.excludes = ["AssemblyInfo.cs"]
   6: end

base_dir: The base directory to start copying files from

file_globs: The globs of files to be copied from base_dir

target_dir: The target directory to place the files in

excludes: (Optional) list of files to be excluded from the copy.

The Expand Template File Task

Usage is:

   1: expand_template(template, output_file)

This will read in the file specified by template and expand it out and write it to the location of output_file.

WARNING: I am fairly certain that the only reason this is working right now for me is because I use configatron, which is accessed as a singleton. It is entirely possible that variables declared in your build script will not be accessible during template expansion. I will be testing this in the near future, however.

Framework Selection

Currently, only the .Net 2.0 and .Net 3.5 frameworks are configured. .Net 3.5 is the selection by default. However, you can choose which framework you want to use by adding framework={framework} in the build line. For example:

   1: rake deploy_local framework=net20

This will run the deploy_local task in the default rakefile using the .Net 2.0 framework.

Valid framework values are:

net20 – .Net 2.0

net35 - .Net 3.5

These frameworks are discovered using the registry, so you shouldn’t have to put in the location of your csc.exe file.

What else?

Well, that’s about all it really does right now. The rest is just built in rake and ruby goodness. I would like to add msbuild support for those that are building WPF apps. I would also like to add some nunit support, as well as some support for other things like easy creation of assemblyinfo.cs files and possibly some deployment tasks for iis7. Who knows. We’ll see how I like things and if I really take to using this (I think I will).

Introducing rubicant – Part 2 – A sample script

Posted by mendicant – January 22, 2009

Update: There is also a Part 1 and a Part 3.

Alright, so here is a sample build script for rubicant. First you will have to get rubicant installed. To do that, you need to get the source from https://rubicant.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/. I believe the username is rubicant-read-only.

In the root directory type:

   1: E:\projects\rubicant>rake gem
   2: (in E:/projects/rubicant)
   3: c:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/gempackagetask.rb:13:Warning:
   4:  Gem::manage_gems is deprecated and will be removed on or after March 2009.
   5: mkdir -p pkg
   6: WARNING:  no rubyforge_project specified
   7: WARNING:  RDoc will not be generated (has_rdoc == false)
   8: WARNING:  deprecated autorequire specified
   9:   Successfully built RubyGem
  10:   Name: Rubicant
  11:   Version: 0.0.1
  12:   File: Rubicant-0.0.1.gem
  13: mv Rubicant-0.0.1.gem pkg/Rubicant-0.0.1.gem
  14:  
  15: E:\projects\rubicant>

Now you’ve got the gem built, you just need to install it:

   1: E:\projects\rubicant>gem install pkg\Rubicant-0.0.1.gem
   2: Successfully installed Rubicant-0.0.1
   3: 1 gem installed
   4:  
   5: E:\projects\rubicant>

 

There. Now for a test application. Suppose we’ve got 3 projects that make up a console app. The UI, the Engine (I KNOW) and the Tests. They look like:

solution

For now, let’s ignore the internal workings and focus on building it.

The build script looks like this:

   1: require 'rubicant'
   2: require 'configatron'
   3: include Rubicant
   4:  
   5: BASE_DIR = File.expand_path(".")
   6: SRC_DIR = "#{BASE_DIR}/src"
   7: SRC_APP_DIR = "#{SRC_DIR}/app"
   8: SRC_TEST_DIR = "#{SRC_DIR}/test"
   9: CONFIG_DIR = "#{BASE_DIR}/config"
  10: BUILD_DIR = "#{BASE_DIR}/build"
  11: DEPLOY_DIR = "#{BASE_DIR}/deploy"
  12: TOOLS_DIR = "#{BASE_DIR}/tools"
  13: MBUNIT_DIR = "#{TOOLS_DIR}/mbunit"
  14: RHINO_DIR = "#{TOOLS_DIR}/rhino"
  15:  
  16: UI_SOURCES = FileList["#{SRC_APP_DIR}/Rubicant.Test.App.UI/**/*.cs"]
  17: ENGINE_SOURCES = FileList["#{SRC_APP_DIR}/Rubicant.Test.App.Engine/**/*.cs"]
  18: TEST_SOURCES = FileList["#{SRC_TEST_DIR}/**/*.cs"]
  19:  
  20: #### Build Initialization
  21: task :initialize_build do
  22:     rm_rf BUILD_DIR if File.exists?(BUILD_DIR)
  23:     mkdir_p BUILD_DIR
  24:     rm_rf DEPLOY_DIR if File.exists?(DEPLOY_DIR)
  25:     mkdir_p DEPLOY_DIR
  26: end
  27:  
  28: #### Loading Properties
  29: task :load_local_properties do
  30:     configatron.configure_from_yaml("local.properties.yml")
  31: end
  32:  
  33: task :load_test_properties do
  34:     configatron.configure_from_yaml("test.properties.yml")
  35: end
  36:  
  37: #### Deployment Targets
  38: task :deploy_local => [:load_local_properties, :deploy]
  39:  
  40: task :deploy_test => [:load_test_properties, :deploy]
  41:  
  42: task :deploy => [:test, :expand_app_config] do
  43:     cp FileList["#{BUILD_DIR}/{hello.exe,engine.dll}"], DEPLOY_DIR
  44: end
  45:  
  46:  
  47: #### Compile Targets
  48: csc :compile, [:initialize_build, :compile_engine], {:files => UI_SOURCES,
  49:                                                      :target => "exe",
  50:                                                      :out => "#{BUILD_DIR}/hello.exe",
  51:                                                      :references => FileList["#{BUILD_DIR}/*.dll"] }
  52:                 
  53: csc :compile_engine, [], {:files => ENGINE_SOURCES,
  54:                           :target => "library",
  55:                           :out => "#{BUILD_DIR}/engine.dll"}
  56:                 
  57: #### Testing Targets                
  58: task :test => [:compile_tests, :run_tests]
  59:  
  60: csc :compile_tests, [:compile], {:files => TEST_SOURCES,
  61:                                           :target => "library",
  62:                                           :out => "#{BUILD_DIR}/tests.dll",
  63:                                           :references => FileList["#{BUILD_DIR}/**/*.{dll,exe}", "#{RHINO_DIR}/*.dll", "#{MBUNIT_DIR}/*.dll"]}
  64:  
  65: task :run_tests do
  66:     mbunit(MBUNIT_DIR, BUILD_DIR, FileList["#{BUILD_DIR}/tests.dll"], {:assembly_path => FileList["#{BUILD_DIR}/engine.dll", "#{RHINO_DIR}/*.dll"].to_a})
  67: end
  68:  
  69:  
  70: #### App.config expansion
  71: task :expand_app_config do
  72:     expand_template "#{CONFIG_DIR}/App.Config.template", "#{DEPLOY_DIR}/hello.exe.config"
  73: end

The point of this build file is to be able to churn out two different builds based on two different sets of properties. This is based off of my builds that I do at work where we need to deploy and test in a test environment before going into production. It would be as simple as adding a production.properties.yml and a deploy_production target to simulate this fully in this script.

So basically, we call deploy_test (or deploy_local), which in turn loads the test properties, and then the deploy task.

Deploy calls the test task, which builds the app, builds the tests, runs the tests. If any tests fail, the build will fail here, making sure we don’t deploy any code that doesn’t pass tests.

Finally, we expand our app.config in a way suitable for the environment we’re going into.

Finally, run the executable to see that it worked!

   1: E:\projects\Rubicant.Test.App>deploy\hello.exe
   2: Hello, World! (Test Version)
   3:  
   4: E:\projects\Rubicant.Test.App>

 

You can download the source from http://blog.beigesunshine.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/rubicanttestapp.zip and try it out for yourself. The default rakefile goes to an exe and an assembly. You can also run both deploy_local and deploy_test and create a single exe file by using rake -f rakefile_single_exe.rb deploy_local.

Coming up, a post on some of the specifics of rubicant.

Introducing rubicant

Posted by mendicant – January 15, 2009

Update: Don’t forget to check out Part 2 and Part 3.

In previous posts I have mentioned that I think that there might be a better way to automate builds than NAnt. I also mentioned that I had looked at a few of them and been mostly underwhelmed. I’ve spent a large amount of time building a process for builds that works well for me and none of them seemed to erase my pains.

I also mentioned that I would be working on some items that may even drive some content to this blog, among other things. Today, I introduce the fruits of my labour.

Please note that this is NOT recommended for any sort of production environment. It is currently at best a way to try out Rake on .Net projects.

What is rubicant?

rubicant is my own personal set of tasks that sit on top of rake, a rubyish interpretation of make. I’ve used ruby for some scripting in the past, and also used rake in a rails app that I developed. I felt that the combination of both would alleviate some of the pains that I (and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone here) feel when I use NAnt.

I was admittedly scared to even try building my own set of tasks, and actually didn’t even know where to start. I kept rolling the idea around. One day I was going to start doing it now. Then the next I wasn’t. As a father of young children my spare time is very limited and very few and far between, especially for something that would demand so much of it.

And then the I started coming across others experimenting with exactly what I was talking about. First it was a post by Dave Laribee, as well as another post in his comments. And now as I read over them again, I’m seeing that there’s more people feeling like I do. I started to google and found some great posts by Jay Fields and to a lesser extent one by Martin Fowler.

Anyway, in my looking it seemed like no one had actually put out a reusable library that anyone could just pick up and automatically compile a project within 5 minutes.

And thus, with some much needed inspiration from the above sources, rubicant was born.

What isn’t rubicant?

Well written for one thing. Take a look at my tests and they’re enough to make someone blow a gasket :D (I kid, I LOVE his twitter rants) I started writing them thinking I knew what I was doing and let me clear something up for you. At the time, I had a greatly misguided view on BDD/Specification testing. Either way, it’s still got my code covered and has helped to drive out some of the design, especially when loading framework information.

Another thing it is not is a complete solution. I had 4 goals in functionality that I wanted. They were:

    1. Build C# code
    2. Test C# code (with MBUnit)
    3. Copy selected files in a meaningful hierarchy
    4. Template expansion using configatron to allow for easy configuration swapping.

Why rubicant?

First off, automated builds are the only thing that I feel I truly have a grasp on. I feel comfortable enough in myself and my process that I could come up with something useful. I don’t think of myself as a guru, but I do know that I have a set of build scripts at work that are robust and involved while trying to stay (somewhat simple). In other words, I don’t consider myself a guru, but I do feel I have a grasp on the subject.

I was also feeling too much pain with NAnt. As well, I didn’t feel that any of the other solutions out there really felt like what I was looking for. I was also looking for a learning project in ruby. I wanted to try driving out a design via testing using ruby. A lot of things. Either way, I felt like I wanted to do something for myself, but that also might provide some sort of benefit to the community, even if it just ended up as a failed attempt. In a sentence: I wanted to try and provide SOMETHING back to a community that I feel has given me so much.

Even if this ends in failure, it’s been exactly the experience that I’ve wanted thus far, and though I’m sure I’m in for some rough waters ahead, I think that it will continue to drive me to learn, improve and better myself. Okay, so there is definitely some selfishness there, but hopefully you can forgive me in the name of Continuous Improvement, even if it’s my own.

How do I get it? How do I use it?

Well, if you want to get it, you can go to the project site on google code and download the source. There are instructions there on how to install it. As for how to use it… stay tuned for a sample project and build file. Hopefully very soon.

 

Update: Don’t forget to check out Part 2 and Part 3.

Building’s the Foundation

Posted by mendicant – November 25, 2008

 

Let me get this off my chest. I think about Build Scripts all the time. I spent the better part of the first 6 months at my current job migrating old legacy .Net 1.1 web apps from  CVS to .Net 2.0 and Subversion. Part of that included migrating the projects from CVS to SVN, then taking the old projects and migrating those into our current directory structure for projects. After that, I had to template the config files and create build scripts that could build a local, test or production version of an app with a single command.

During the course of this, I used PowerShell, Ruby and of course, NAnt.

I found that, like many things, I was able to find some things I loved about all of them. And lots of things I hated about most of them. PowerShell, for one, has some great ideas in it. It’s truly a good idea. I love the idea of being able to leverage the .Net Framework from my scripts. It really is a good idea. But after the few scripts that I wrote in PowerShell, I don’t think that I could use it again. I found the syntax either annoying or clunky the whole time. Especially once I started writing the scripts in Ruby.

Now Ruby I have some experience in as I’ve done a bit of Rails development. Lots of the notations I like. I have some difficulty in using a dynamic language at times, most notably I find myself missing method signatures that are strongly typed. However, the annoyances are small, and mostly come in the form of me running into issues with working with the file system. I think those annoyances mostly come from me not fully understanding some of the intricacies of working with the filesystem on windows with ruby.

I find the biggest difference between the two is how easy it is to use Ruby from within a CygWin Bash shell. I’ve been a longtime linux user, and actually my first unix-like operating system that I used at home was FreeBSD. Because of FreeBSD, I was a long time user of tcsh. In fact, it was less than a year ago that I finally made the move over to bash. Either way, both of these shells provide power, ease of use and so many advantages that I can’t believe that Microsoft doesn’t have them in any of it’s shells. I mean seriously, how does anyone live without a searchable history in a command prompt?

And this brings us to NAnt. I was in love with NAnt when I first started. It was great to use, simple and it could do so much. But I started to find myself hitting situations where things would become very murky and difficult to keep track of where things were happening, especially when I tried to make things generic so they could be called in many places. For example, here is how a template file is expanded in our code:

   1: <target name="expand.template.file">
   2:     <copy file="${template.file}.template" tofile="${template.file}" overwrite="true">
   3:         <filterchain>
   4:             <replacetokens>
   5:                 ....lots of tokens...
   6:             </replacetokens>
   7:         </filterchain>
   8:     </copy>
   9: </target>

 

But where does ${template.file} get set? Why, the line before we call expand.template.file of course!

   1: <property name="template.file" value="${some.dir}\app.config"/>
   2: <call target="expand.template.file" />

 

I just find that this can be confusing, especially to newcomers who don’t know which targets act as functions. I know that you could do a search through the code and find it, but it’s just not as clean or explicit as something like:

   1: expandTemplate(filename)
   2:  
   3: def expandTemplate(filename)
   4:     ...expand in here...
   5: end

 

So I think that you can see where I’m going with this. After a while of doing this, I started to think a lot about Rake. After all, I had used it in Rails projects previously. As you can tell, I’m quite a fan of Ruby. After a while, things began to cool off. I had gotten almost all of our projects converted and I wasn’t writing build files as much anymore. But I kept on thinking about it. Recently, I’ve been writing build files again. I’ve also been reading that I’m not the only person who feels this way.

I’ve noticed a few projects that seem to be reaching for what I want. There’s Boo Build System (and yes, it is shortened to BooBS. Nice work Ayende), PSake (which JP seems to have picked up) and then there’s Rake. Rake seems to be the only one that isn’t geared towards some sort of .Net problem (not that it can’t). It turns out that though there was a lot of hype around boo a while back, I just don’t think it’s something I’m up for learning just yet. And as for PSake, I downloaded the source and nothing against James (it’s not his fault, it’s the syntax!) I barely made it through the first PS1 file before my head hurt and I remembered why I stopped writing PowerShell scripts in the first place.

That leaves me with Rake. And it seems like I’m not the only one. The only difference is that I would absolutely love to see a Gem built with some custom .Net tasks for rake. This is something that I’ve been seriously contemplating putting some time into, but haven’t fully explored yet. Most notably, I would like to take the syntax of: 

   1: require 'lib/nunittask'
   2:  
   3: Rake::NUnit.new do |nunit|
   4:   nunit.library = "foo.dll"
   5: end

 

And replace it with something along the lines of:

   1: require 'lib/nunittask'
   2:  
   3: nunit :test, :library => 'foo.dll', :depends => [:load_properties, :compile]

 

I get the feeling that this could be wrapped up in a function which could use Hash which could hide away the nastiness of Rake::Task.new do |task| block and take these scripts to an entirely new level. I’m not entirely sure how the naming would work, but I’m sure it would.

After writing this, I think I’m going to start taking a much closer look. Has anyone heard of anything like this in the works/already released?

Extremely Simple Calendar Integration for Rails

Posted by mendicant – August 8, 2007

UPDATED 2011-05-06:

This is by far my most viewed blog post. Honestly, these days, I just use jquery-ui and the datepicker widget.

UPDATED 2008-11-19:

I didn’t update my blog for over a year, and as such decided to perform a reboot. The information previously contained on this page was out of date, and as such I didn’t keep it around. However, it turns out there’s a few places linking to this page, so I’ve decided to at least keep this from 404′ing.

The original blog post was centered around a plugin that you can now find at: http://code.google.com/p/calendardateselect

It really is a great plugin, and if you go to the site you’ll find it’s got very simple instructions on how to install and use it.

Good luck!

Update 2008-11-25:

Found the text of the old tutorial.

Today we’ll go over an extremely simple way to add a javascript/css calendar to your Rails app. We will be using the Calendar Date Select Plugin. It is a small, easy to use calendar based on the prototype library.

This was written back in the day for Rails 1.2, so take all this information with a grain of salt.

Installation is simple, and uses the typical installation syntax:
script/plugin install http://calendardateselect.googlecode.com/svn/tags/calendar_date_select

Voila! Installed!

Now, we just need to integrate it.

First, in your layout you need to add the javascript tag:
<%= calendar_date_select_includes “silver” %>

You can also use “red”, “blue” or “nil” for other color schemes.

Also note that you need to have prototype included as well, so if you haven’t already, you should also add the following to your layout:
<%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>

And now, we’re ready to use it! Usage is simple. I was using it to keep track of an expiry date for a property, so I used to the following tag:
<%= calendar_date_select_tag “property[expiry_date]“, @property.expiry_date.to_s %>

If you wish, you can also check out the demo section for more information on using it with Form Builder.

Finally, I didn’t like the default ‘natural’ syntax for the date “August 8th, 2007″, so I changed it to use my preference, hyphenated syntax. To do this, open your environment.rb file and add the following line:
CalendarDateSelect.format = :hyphen_ampm

There! That is all I needed to do. Of course, there are more options, simply adding a :time => true will allow you to have a time field as well. There are a few more configuration options available for the calendar. You can find out more and get some more screenshots by visiting the project’s homepage.

Cascading Selects in Rails

Posted by mendicant – July 18, 2007

Update 2008-11-19:

I would like to apologize. After not updating my blog in almost a year, I decided to perform a reboot. During that time I decided that the information contained in this post was not current and decided not to keep it. It turns out that some people were linking here, despite the fact that I had only written two posts! I was quite happy to learn that, but sad to find out you were all getting 404s now.

I’m sad to say that the information is no longer available, and I’m not able to rewrite it with some more current information. However, it looks like you can find a better and more up to date tutorial here.