SeeSaw's blog

Progressbar: a new tiny widget added to the rails-widgets

Jacopo Murador — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 07:35:00 -0500

Paolo has just released a brand new widget. He has taken the Tobias Lukte’s super-simple-css-bars and has wrapped it in an helper following the rails-widgets way. You can take a look at the result here.

Besides the new widget, we’ve officially moved the rails-widgets project to Github. We’ve chosen Paolo’s Github account, given that he’s the real father of the project:

http://github.com/paolodona/rails-widgets

This change is due to the easy to use collaboration features provided by Github and… honestly, to a strange disappearance of the rails-widgets google group, which made us doubt a bit about it. Anyway our purpose is to involve as many people as possible to improve the project. So feel free to contribute, you just need to have a github account. Even a small comment or a snippet of code are more than welcome!

A change of season

Jacopo Murador — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:46:00 -0500

If you’re a reader of this blog you are probably wondering why we’ve been so quiet lately. A lot happened during the past month and a half.

As a company we’re doing pretty well, we doubled our revenues, we opened a new office in beautiful Verona (Italy) and we have substantially improved the way we deal with project management and development. We are very proud of the fact we’ve always been profitable even if we received no money from VCs or other investors, slowly but constantly growing our business.

What we’ve not been able to do is to stick to what we really wanted to do. When we started we had a goal: we wanted to develop our own web application and sell it as a service. But the hard reality is we are a self funding firm and we ended up only doing client work to pay the bills. We only did client work for two years. Even if we know a consultancy agency would love to find itself in our position, we aren’t happy at all with that. Honestly nobody of us is happy anymore. We haven’t been pursuing our dreams, we only have been working hard on things which haven’t helped us achieve aour goals. At the end of the second year of SeeSaw’s life we sadly had to admit that we weren’t what we were expected to be and this forced us to make some hard decisions.

This’s why now SeeSaw will change a lot.

Paolo decided to move to London with his beloved girlfriend. He’ll start a new adventure, new challenges, will meet new people and have new opportunities. In his heart a foreign experience is what he always wanted to do. If you’d like to keep in touch with him or you’re interested in his Tabnav/RailsWidgets plugin, please visit his blog or consider subscribing to his RSS feed.

Michele will continue doing Java and Ruby development. He has a couple of personal projects he’s working on, after taking deserved break. You’ll probably hear about it in a few months.

Last but not least there is me. I will keep the company running and will lead the new SeeSaw way. From now on SeeSaw will build the web application it has been founded for. It is a financial analysis application for small/medium sized companies that – imho – will revolutionize the way they manage their resources and assets. No more client work, just stuff that matters.

Keep in touch, the new season is here!

Business Cards

Jacopo Murador — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:26:00 -0500

In the last two years we worked mainly with customers inherited from our previous freelance activity and the business card was a useless thin cardboard. But now that SeeSaw has entered into a new era (you will be able to read about it on this blog in the next days), the first item in our to-do list is business cards.

Well, our brand new business cards are just arrived from Moo.

But what do we expect from our business cards?

They must be different and amaze those who get them
Even when stumbled upon months later at the bottom of a drawer, they must bring to mind who we are. (Is there anything better than visual memory? ndr)
And of course they need to provide contact information

Goal accomplished, what do you think?

Last chance to register for next week's workshop

Paolo — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:00:00 -0600

Hi guys, time is flying here and we’ve got a few more seats for next week’s Ruby On Rails Workshop.

This is a great opportunity to learn the great Rails 2.0 and understand how to be really effective and productive with this amazing framework! There are so many new juicy things we’re gonna cover I hardly can hide my excitement!!! This is definitely going to be our best workshop ever…

PS: If you’re a blogger or a group of people let us know, a discount may apply :) Hope to see you there!

Widgets repo has changed!

Paolo — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:47:00 -0600

From now on you can download and install the Rails Widgets Plugin from its Google Code Project.

To install use: script/plugin install http://rails-widgets.googlecode.com/svn/widgets

That’s the stable tag which will be constantly updated. If you feel brave you can also install it from the trunk: script/plugin install http://rails-widgets.googlecode.com/svn/trunk or help us improve it.

File Encoding Conversion

Paolo — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:47:00 -0600

This morning I struggled a bit to find a decent encoding converter for osx… from time to time I get stuck on encoding issues so I wanted to have something ‘friendly’ to handle this kind of problems…

I found Cyclone based on Apple Text Encoding Converter (look for TEC) but it kept failing in some strange ways (It gave me weird messages about converters creation). After googling for a while I gave up. It seems there are no good-free-GUI alternatives on the net…

Sometimes the solution is closer than you think and the good old iconv rescued me in a snap:

[paolo@fingus]$ iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 utf16_file.txt > utf8_file.txt

you can list the available encodings with:

[paolo@fingus]$ iconv -l

The cool part is you can use it in conjunction with TextMate’s Filter Through Command feature thus enabling in-editor lightning-fast conversions.

The only missing part was discovering the original file’s encoding, in order to pass iconv the correct -f option. The not-so-reliable way I used was to open the file with Firefox and inspect the encoding using the View -> Character Encoding menu item.

That’s it, problem solved. If you know better ways to do this… let me know!

Opening up the Rails Widgets Plugin repo

Paolo — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:26:00 -0600

The Rails Widgets plugin is our most successful open-source effort so far. Lately its development has been put a bit aside and hasn’t got the love it surely deserve. This is mainly because this little piece of software is pretty stable and just suits our needs.

But of course it could be improved, more widgets could be added and the code could be refactored. Why should our own needs stop its development? There are many people on the Widgets Users Mailing List who come up with great ideas about its development so we finally decided to open up the repo and let this plugin find its way through the community!

The repo is now officially hosted on Google Code at http://code.google.com/p/rails-widgets and a brand new Developers Mailing List has been set up to coordinate the development efforts.

We’re willing to find new committers who share our vision about the plugin and help us take it to the next level, so if you’re interested, feel free to join us!

Hope you enjoy it!

Next RailsWorkshop in Verona, March 12

Paolo — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:07:00 -0600

After examining the poll results at www.railsworkshop.it, it was pretty clear that the workshop location wouldn’t be that far from our office this time… A lot of people voted for Padova or Brescia, and a timely coincidence made possible to have a gorgeous conference room at Quadrante Servizi in Verona, right in the middle of those two most voted locations, not that far from both of them.

So everything is set up. Next RailsWorkshop will be held in via Sommacampagna, 61 on Wednesday, March 12 for your and our pleasure.

Expect it to be a great event! The workshop has been upgraded to cover all the new stuff introduced with Rails 2.0, and will be exciting like never before! You’ll find all the informations you need at www.railsworkshop.it, or just feel free to drop us an email. See you there then :-)

Next RailsWorkshop location poll

Paolo — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 09:09:00 -0600

We’re planning our next RailsWorkshop, and we need you!

Where would you like it to be? What’s your most comfortable location? We set up a poll so you can express your preference.

Thanks for your vote!

When sqlite3 file locking matters...

Paolo — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:53:00 -0600

Yesterday we spent all day dealing with a strange bug… something I want to share with you. Basically we have an app which runs from CDROM and stores its data in a sqlite3 database file inside the user home. We manage the updates from a remote website downloading and swapping the sqlite database file on the fly.

What we do is something like this:

# download the new DB file
new_data = URI.parse('http://foo.com/new.db').read
File.open("#{home}/new.db", 'w') {|f| f.write(new_data)}

# connect to the downloaded DB file
ActiveRecord::Base.estabilish_connection :adapter => 'sqlite3',
                               :database => "#{home}/new.db" 

# do something with the updated DB
# eg: read data for your updates and use it

# reconnect the original DB
ActiveRecord::Base.remove_connection 
ActiveRecord::Base.estabilish_connection :production

# remove the downloaded DB file
rm "#{home}/new.db"

We tought that calling remove_connection would suffice to disconnect the new.db database, but when we tried to delete the file (the last line) we sadly discovered that under Windows it was kept locked by our own process even if no database connections were active on it. The problem seems to be inside the sqlite_adapter that once connected to a sqlite database, never calls the close method, leaving it locked forever.

So how do we close those open connections?

Thanks to ObjectSpace we can inspect all the sqlite database descriptors (SQLite3::Database instances) in our application and close them by hand. Voilà, this way we can safely delete our temporary database files, without cluttering our user’s home dir.

 
def disconnect_all_sqlite3
  sqlite3_descriptors.each {|c| c.close }
end

def sqlite3_descriptors
  open_descriptors = []
  ObjectSpace.each_object(SQLite3::Database) {|x| open_descriptors << x}
  open_descriptors
end

Just put a disconnect_all_sqlite3() call before the ActiveRecord::Base.estabilish_connection :production and everything will start working as it should!

Rome Javaday Quick Interviewabout RoR

Paolo — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:34:00 -0600

Wow, what an honor!!! I’ve been interviewed a week ago by the great guys at ICTV.it and today I’m on the HTML.it homepage. Well, the interview is nothing special and sadly it’s in Italian only, but is always good to promote the language and framework you love! Go Rails Go!!!

<!~~- inserisci contenuto alternativo in assenza del Flash Player -~~>

Rome JavaDay Report

Paolo — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 10:50:00 -0600

You guys just cannot Imagine how cool this JavaDay has been.

On my four hours trip to Rome I was revising my speech and felt a bit skeptical about this event.

I know a bunch of the staff people and I know they are great guys, but you know, we’re towards a 2008 drenched in a very mature web-two-oh environment. Java just doesn’t seem that cool anymore.

At least this was my feeling. I’m working a lot with Ruby and Rails and in the Ruby community everything containing the word Java smells old, if doesn’t even stink.

I didn’t expect to find great enthusiasm around this meeting, I thought It would have been just a little JUG meeting on steroids.

Only god knows how I was wrong…

Entering the Rome’s University Engineering Faculty I was shocked. Hundreds of people waiting in line to get in! Young students, freelancers, great minds of the Italian community I knew during my past years of Java development, everybody was there!!!

Wow, I said to myself… let’s now see if the speeches are good or not. Tapestry5, Cool Agile Techniques, Aspect Oriented Design… surprise after surprise, every single speaker was good… some of them really great, and I could learn many interesting things I didn’t know about. My trip here has been definitely worthwhile. The only sadness is that with 5 concurrent tracks, you always end up missing something cool.

Here a quick list of what I’ve seen:

Marco Pugliese: Tapestry in Action

I knew Marco’s passion for Tapestry (he attended one of ours RailsWorkshop) and he’s proven a good speaker, showing us the good leap forward this framework has made from previous releases. I’ve been a fan of Tapestry myself. I really like the separation of the view (plain html files) from the logic. Worth giving it a spin.

Luca Garulli: Rad development and domain driven development with Roma framewok

Luca explained us the Roma Framework, a tool you can use if you want to keep your business objects independent from the proliferation of java web frameworks that pollute our lives. With it you can keep the core of you app free and be sure you won’t rewrite it when switching underlying persistent layer of presentation technique.

Daniela Ruggeri and Alessandra Paola: Second Life and Java

Daniela is a long time friend I met at the Java Italian Association. With Alessandra she explained how they implemented a marketplace in Second Life, backed up by a J2EE web site. Pretty interesting stuff, and I had the chance to see something more about SecondLife (I’m not a SecondLifer yet and don’t know If I will ever be…).

Lucio Benfante: Java DAO without implementing them with Parancoe

Lucio is a close friend of mine, we founded together the JUG Padova years ago and is now partner at SeeSaw. I cannot spend other that good words for him. I’ve already seen his Parancoe DAO’s speech but this time it was just plain better. I’ve seen a good improvement in his presentation skills and watching him you can feel the passion and the effort he’s putting in Parancoe.

Roberto Favaroni and Andrea Bozzoni: Aspect Oriented Programming

Roberto and Andrea gave a good speech about AspectJ. I’m not a big fan of AOP in general, but I must admit that the Spring implentation is cool to use as it mix seamlessly with the rest of the framework. The room was very crowded, I bet more than 250 people here… impressing!

Luca Guidi: JRuby and DSL

Luca is a fellow Ruby programmer and like me had the difficult task to speak in front of a crowd that knew less than nothing about Ruby. Luca’s been informative and convincing, even if the topic was no easy at all. I bet his talk woke up the curiosity of more than one attendee.

Paolo Donà: RubyOnRails

Hey ma, look it’s me rocking the stage again… I had basically prepared a speech about my feelings… after using Ruby and Rails for 2 years and a half I had many thougths about it. I wanted to express pros and cons of using Rails, and compare it with the Java frameworks I used to use.

But… there was a but.

About an hour before the speech I asked myself: “Am I going to deliver the speech these guys want?”. Isn’t it a bit too abstract? I heard many “abstract” talks in the past and I know I don’t like them.

I started doubting they could understand my points ignoring what Rails is and how it works.

So without having prepared anything specific I’ve fired up an editor and have shown a sample of the application I teach during my workshops. It ended up being a very informal and pratical talk which I really enjoyed doing. I also got interviewed by the HTML.it guys! The video should be available on www.ictv.it soon. In the meanwhile you can find my (minimalistic) slideshow on SlideShare.

Conclusions

In the end this has been a great experience. Congratulations to the staff and Mara Marzocchi who made all this possible. This is so much better than the Sun microsystem’s annual Java Conference that I would suggest them to hire these guys for their next official event!

Here you can find a few pictures of the event , now I have to prepare myself for the next trip to Rome in Dec 12, where we’ll do a Rails Workshop. There are still a few seats available, this is a great chance to enter with the right foot into the wonderful RubyOnRails world!

Rome JavaDay & yet another workshop

Paolo — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 11:29:00 -0600

Hi guys, I’m glad to announce we’ll be participating at the Rome JavaDay 2007 on Saturday, Dec 01 kindly set up by our friends at Jug Roma.

I’ll be there with a speech on… guess what? RubyOnRails! Pretty strange, I’ll probably feel like going to an heavy metal concert wearing a Britney Spears’ t-shirt…

And in just a few days we’ll be in Rome again for our beloved Rails Workshop (on Dec 12). There are still a few seats available so subscribe, subscribe, subscribe!

If you cannot make you mind about the workshop, check out the pictures of past events to get a glimpse on how it feels.

I’ll try to meet a few Ruby-it friends on Friday night, so if you wanna join us, you’re more than welcome (note that they’re meeting on Thursday too).

See you in Rome then!

A Google Group for Widgets Users

Paolo — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 12:51:00 -0500

Hi guys, we’re receiving many emails regarding our beloved Widgets plugin. We’re happy to receive them but we’d like to keep the discussion open, because so far it’s been like a one-to-many chat.

That’s why we just opened a Google Group about it. You can subscribe and start asking questions, share ideas about new widgets and give us feedback.

Subscribe to SeeSaw's Rails Widgets Users

Email:

Visit this group

Hope you join the group and enjoy it!

Paolo

RailsWorkshop in Rome on dec 12, 2007!

Paolo — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 15:01:00 -0500

This just to let you know our next RailsWorkshop will be held in Rome on December 12, 2007. Among different available places we’ve chosen the Polo Didattico which seems the best solutions for our needs.

Very well served by public transportation, large and comfortable room with projector, dashboard, large desks and broadband internet connection for everyone!

What are you waiting for? You can subscribe and find out more info at www.railsworkshop.it!