XAOP RSS Blog Feed

Rails cycle helper

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:37:29 GMT

You all probably know the Rails helper function ‘cycle’, most commonly used to specify alternating classes when iterating over a collection :


<% for item in @items %>
  <tr class=<%=cycle('even', 'odd')%>>
    <td><%= item.name %></td>
  </tr>
<% end %>

Well, apparently it is even more usefull than I thought, and it was simply a matter of reading the rails documentation ...

Some Ruby Goodness

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:04:35 GMT

Last week, while I was writing the following expression for like the 1000th time, it struck me…


name = Product.find_by_code('code') ? Product.find_by_code('code').name : nil

WTH am I doing writing this crazy, long, duplication bloated one-liner in ruby ? YES, in RUBY ! That ’s just plain WRONG! There just HAS to be some great, DRYer, magic, aaaah’s and oooooh’s generating, no-longer-than-5-characters expression that handles this!

So instead of bashing my laptop against the wall I IM’d my colleague and local ruby-guru Peter.

Simple Windows Active Directory LDAP Authentication with Rails

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:46:31 GMT

In this short tutorial I’ll describe an easy way to make your Rails application even more enterprise-ready ;-)

For our latest project, our customer asked to change the authentication module, they wanted to be able to use their Active Directory credentials to enter the application.

So, we have an existing rails application :

running in production (Windows environment)
using the restful_authentication plugin for the login system.

What do we need :

User should be able to keep using the old login system (at least temporarily, until all users are ‘upgraded’)
User should be able to login with his LDAP credentitals

EC2 at XaoP

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:57:33 GMT

At XaoP, we have recently started checking out Amazon’s EC2. Although the use of virtualization technology is hardly new in hosting technologies, Amazon’s take on it offers extra flexibility for developers to exploit.

Libxml-ruby memory leaks

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:49:46 GMT

Some time ago, we pointed out a serious memory problem when using libxml-ruby. We found a solution, but recently Ben Lam told us about another way to solve this. Details inside.

IPhone ReviewNG test

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:39:47 GMT

I don't know about you, but I had a pretty inspiring weekend. First of all, I checked out the two significant new features of EC2 - Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones - which help you to run reliable web sites and other applications within Amazon EC2.

Then I watched the IPhone SDK for Web developers video. I started to test the ReviewNG DRP application via Safari on the IPhone Simulator.

The application works pretty well on the IPhone, but it would be even better if it could work in full screen. Unfortunately, the full screen mode is not working in my release of the simulator.

Using GIT on an SVN project

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:50:15 GMT

SVN is great, or maybe I have to say, version control is great. It makes sure your code doesn’t get lost, keeps track of all the changes, makes collaboration easy, allows for efficient project management (linking changesets to tickets) and so on. But for all these advantages to be really usefull, you should constantly commit your changes to the repository: bug/ticket closed => commit, feature implemented => commit, plugin/library updated => commit, ...

Problem: you probably don’t have constant access to your SVN repository. You might be on the bus, SVN is blocked by your client’s firewall,...

In comes GIT, and more specific, GIT-SVN.

Using DOCPublisher

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:56:13 GMT

Internship

In December, my internship at XAOP for the Erasmus Hogeschool Brussel was concluded with success. I was rewarded with an iPod Touch 16GB.

DOCPublisher

After my internship, I was offered to continue working at XAOP on Saturdays. Given the unique experience this job offers me, I gladly accepted. My primary occupation is the further development of DOCPublisher. To clarify the concept of DOCPublisher, we published a document describing the usage of DOCPublisher .

Setting up a simple user permission management system

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:45:06 GMT

For one of our current Ruby on Rails applications, we only had a simple login system, based on the acts_as_authenticated plugin.

However, there was a growing need to have some kind of (basic) permission system.

We wanted to keep it as lightweight as possible and came up with the following solution.

This tutorial starts from an existing project that is already using the acts_as_authenticated plugin for the user accounts.

How To Browse Oracle Databases from within Netbeans

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:05:54 GMT

I started using Netbeans about two months ago for Ruby and Ruby on Rails development. Before, I was working in Eclipse with the RadRails plugin and it’s not very likely I’ll ever go back to it. It was good, but Netbeans is just a little bit better in everything.

But that ’s not what this post is about, in fact, there was a feature that I couldn’t get to work in Netbeans: the database browsing from within the IDE, and more specific for an Oracle database. Today I gave it another try and guess what, it’s working now :-). It turned out to be pretty easy, but I suppose I’m not the only one who is having difficulties with this, so here ’s how I did it: