SeeSaw's blog: Tag seesaw

Ruby training in Rome

Paolo — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 15:08:00 -0500

I’ve just got back from Rome where we did a great RubyOnRails workshop. The guys at Ideazero arranged the whole thing and drove me around the city.

You can see a few pictures of the event here. Andrea and Maurizio (who attended the workshop) are very good photographers, and given the good quality of their shots we could make this little slideshow… enjoy!

www.RailsWorkshop.it: the RubyOnRails training in Italy!

Paolo — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 14:42:00 -0500

Hi guys, we’re happy to announce our brand new RailsWorkshop! We’ve been training people on Ruby and RubyOnRails in Italy for more than a year now, and the constantly growing demand pushed us to do something more…

We’re basically packaging all our development experience in a 1-day workshop. We’ve taken the best from our past courses and made up a schedule that lets you gain confidence and become productive with the minimum effort ever!

Should you waste your time reading cryptic documentation and doing yet-another-beginner-mistake? Should you spend weeks just to understand if Rails is the right choice for your company? Should you get bored reading a five hundred pages book before getting started? The answer is No.

We want you to master Rails the painless way.

Dear italian readers, check RailsWorkshop out and let us know what you think.

Tabnav speech at London Ruby User Group's April meeting

Paolo — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 20:07:00 -0500

Hi guys, I just got back from my one-day trip to London where I’ve just given a speech about our little Tabnav plugin. I had a chance to talk at the April LRUG meeting and I have to admit it’s been a beautiful experience. It seems that Ruby and Rails are getting momentum in London, the meeting was well organized and really interesting and the conference room (kindly offered by skillsmatter) was a perfect fit for the event.

We started with my talk, I had the difficult task to warm up the crowd… and you know what I mean if you’re not a native English speaker. Luckily enough I made it pretty decently and started explaining how to use our beloved plugin, interleaving the speech with some mind-refreshing gag… (Mr.Monkey knows what I mean). At first I was kind of worried about the crowd reaction.. It’s been my first speech inEnglish and didn’t know if I could really express myself clearly. Laughs in response to my gags and questions after the speech confirmed me that everything went very well, and in the end I could gather suggestions on various ways to improve the Tabnav. Then we continued with a discussion about REST and how it’s been implemented in Rails 1.2. I already discussed this topic with a few co-workers and we’re using it extensively here at SeeSaw so I was aware of the fact that’s a topic that would need more than and hour to be properly dissected and analyzed. My feeling was right, the discussion generated a nice debate but was impossible to get to a conclusion. It’s really difficult to say if all this RESTful stuff in good or not. For sure the REST implementation is not giving programmers that “right feeling” we were used to have with ActiveRecords or RJS. I’d like to see that topic not only under the technical point of view but also from the “programmer happiness and sustainable productivity” perspective. Does REST make programmers happier? Is my productivity more sustainable using this approach? I think these questions will still remain unanswered for a while.

A good tradition about LRUG meetings is the “after-meeting” also known as “the pub around the corner”... You can imagine what happens when you mix passionate geeks and beer. You can find a few pictures of the event here, the slideshow and the video of the event will be online soon. I want to personally thank Murray, Jonathan, Dan, James, Eleanor, Piers, Daniel, Paul, Alec and all those guys whose name I cannot remember.

A special mention to my friend Jason Lee who let me surf his couch last night, after a 2am banana split (He is also the author of http://big.first.name, the software LRUG uses to print tag names during their meetings).

Hope to see the LRUG guys soon again…

Do you want some more links? here we are: http://www.lrug.org, LRUG Mailing list, Skillsmatter RLUG page.

Tabnav for Rails 1.2

Paolo — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:43:00 -0600

(If you’re looking for tabnav documentation click here!)

Hi guys, we have just released an updated version of the Tabnav. Now it should work well with the brand new Rails 1.2. What have we done then?

Refactored the plugin to better match the usual plugin Module/Class structure (inspirated by simply_helpful).
Removed the Reloadable support, and fixed the code to make it work with the new Rails dependency mechanism.
Added support for restful routes inside tabs definition.
Fixed a bug that cached evaluated Proc(s) after the first call in production environment.
Moved tabnav design logic out of the generated partial, it now contains only the css (you can of course move it to your stylesheet and delete the partial now)

A sample of the new code you can write is:

class PostsTabnav < Tabnav::Base          
    add_tab do 
      named 'Posts list'
      links_to proc { hash_for_posts_path }
    end

    add_tab do 
      named 'New post'
      links_to proc { hash_for_new_post_path }
    end

    add_tab do 
      named proc{ "Show: " + @post.title }
      links_to proc{ hash_for_post_path(:id => @post.id) }
      show_if proc{ !@post.nil? && !@post.id.nil? }
    end

    add_tab do 
      named proc{"Edit: " + @post.title }
      links_to proc{hash_for_edit_post_path(:id => @post.id)}
      show_if proc{ !@post.nil? && !@post.id.nil? }
    end
end

This version is still young so please report any problem you encounter with it. You can install this version with ruby script/plugin install svn://svn.seesaw.it/tabnav/trunk. If you’re still using Rails 1.1.X please download the old version with ruby script/plugin install svn://svn.seesaw.it/tabnav/tags/0.2.

Note: previously generated Tabnav models are still compatible, just remember to remove the include Reloadable line. Unluckily the new generated partials are different so, you have to regenerate them :-(.

If you want to dig more you can download a lousy sample app here: svn://svn.seesaw.it/tabnav_testapp/trunk.

Other new features are on the way so stay tuned! btw feedback is very appreciated, as usual.

RailsConf Europe Report Day1

Paolo — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 01:00:00 -0500

We just got back from RailsConf Europe in London.. we’re tired but happy and excited. What is really great about attending this kind of meetings is the motivation and stimuli you get from all the great guys there.

We’ve finally seen all of our heroes at work and had the possibility to talk and share ideas with them… I’m wondering what we could ask more…

We had also a good Italian presence there with 2 speakers, it’s a pleasure to introduce our friends Luca Mearelli and Ugo Cei.

For a brief showcase of the talks we attended just keep reading…

David Heinemeier Hansson: ActiveResource and SimplyHelpful

David is surprisingly a very very good presenter. He came in without a keynote presentation ready… it just wrote a bunch of pages with textmate and did the talk with that. It turns out that has been really amazing! Good points, good style… his mastery and vision about how web development should be is impressing. Now I’ve figured out why he’s so popular and so “leader” in the rails community.

The tack was about ActiveResources, a new way to intend REST web-services and the brand new SimplyHelpful plugin that will get some order in rails view. You’ll be able to do things like:

<% div_for(person)  # convention for generating div ids
   render(:partial => @people) # convention for partial names
%>

This will add even more conventions on how people do things in Rails, giving you the freedom to think about higher targets. Nothing spectuacular yet ‘per-se’ but how Rails is using its building blocks to provide high level funcionalities is just impressive. We hope to see how this is evolving after release 1.2.

Kathy Sierra: creating passionate users

Kathy has a strong background in game development and gave us the best presentation I ever seen! She wonderfully explained us how to turn your “sucker” product into a better percieved one and deep digged the reasons that make users passionate or not about a product. Brain vs Mind, being provocative, read the f. manual, the learning path… she’s been so smart we can just love her work! I thing everyone interested in developing products should subribe to her blog.

Her talk also convinced me to read these books:

Jamis Buck: Capistrano

Jamis from 37Signals entertained us with a brief talk about Capistrano 1.2 and the new shell feature. For sure a nice tool to play with but nothing so new or revolutionary to drive the crowd crazy.

Marcel Molina Jr: RJS reuse

Marcel (he’s from 37Signals too) gave us a simple but smart presentation about how we should try to reuse RJS fragments. The technique explained is not rocket science but seeing the chain orf thougts that drove him to that solution has been heplful. You just put your shared RJS methods in helpers and add it to a page object like:

page << replace_xxx(@article)

This way you won’t mix your page code with custom extensions and will made your methods available on views.

link_to_remote_function(replace_xxx(@article))

Nice to see that guy at work.

David Black: Rails & Databases

David Black is famous for running RubyCentral and organizing all these great conferences we’re attending. Is commitment to Ruby communities improvement is impressive, and he’s the man you have to talk with if you want to organize something in your country. I talked with him… so you can imagine we’re trying to organize something cool in Italy…

The speech has been an interesting overview of the approach Rails is using on different areas such database integration, controllers, views, pointing out differences and noncoherent things we should be aware of.

Thomas Fuchs: Javascript Testing

Thomas is the scriptaculous author, a smart guy who shown his way to UnitTest Javascripts. Great talk but I’m wondering how many people really need to unit test their js. Not all of us are scriptaculous developers…

Panel Discussion Rails Core Team

At the end of the day the rails core team answered attendants questions and DHH did a mini talk about those people who feel entitled to talk bad about rails even not contributing at all. He’s right there has been a lot of discussion about those people who felt offended by the rails incident (routing bug) a few weeks a go… His way to say what he thinks is somtimes rude and not polite, but otherwise he couldn’t have gotten the “rock star” status he has. For sure his strong points will make some people go away but will keep other stay even more firmly. Here a piece of code he shown and made me laugh:

Vendoritis.symptoms = %w[Entitlement Indignation]
Vendoritis.tratments = [
  Range('Fuck You'..'Yes Massa')
  Range('Sarcasm'..'Umor')]

That’s it for the 1st day. Doesn’t sound like we had a great time? Soon we’ll report the 2nd one too… keep in touch!