1. Install fossilize plugin

$ ./script/plugin source http://opensvn.csie.org/mmediasys/trunk/rails/plugins/
$ ./script/plugin install fossilize

2. Create the default script and configuration for your application

# will create config/application.yml and bin/my_rails_app
$ ./script/generate fossilize MyRailsApp

3. Edit config/application.yml if needed (author name, email, gem version etc.)

4. Generate the gem (in pkg/ directory)

# will produce pkg/my_rails_app-x.y.z.gem
$ rake package

5. Usage

$ gem install my_rails_app
$ my_rails_app /path/to/install

Google announced their new toy – Google Notebook . There are already several reviews for it on the net. People complaining about missing tagging etc. GNotebook come with Firefox extension. Pretty cool. And there is already Python Google Notebook API . Hm, where is the Ruby one? ;)

And another happy news from Google – hosted domains already have calendars!

Gmail for your domain just rocks! After 1 or 2 weeks of waiting you can have the latest on the web 2.0 email market for your own domain (personal or the company one). I already have my Gmail-based family webmail ;) Still moving the whole stuff from the @gmail accounts is in front…Hope there is some tool for easy transfer between accounts – emails, labels, filters etc.

Test Driven Development (TDD) has you define the behaviour of your system by writing small tests that precisely define some small piece of your system’s behaviour. Then you implement that behaviour. Then you clean up and improve your design…It is no surprise that it takes beginners some time to get to the understanding that TDD isn’t about testing at all...if they ever do.

How true!!! Until today I didn’t pay much attention to the TDD. Like most people my opinion was ”Why to lose time for testing my small programs. Some day…on bigger project…maybe”. Oh no…I was sooo far from the true. But I’m going to change…

Everything started from a post in the Dave Astel’s blog: A New Look at Test Driven Development . He explain very well my and maybe other people’s confusion about TDD - all these Test class names, trying to test every class and method (1-1 relationship) etc. In the same post he is proposing a new look on the same problem – writing specifications of what your code will have to do. The name for this new look is Behaviour Driven Development . It’s already implemented in Ruby – the RSpec framework . For bad luck there is still not good Rails support in it.

So on first time I’ll start with the old, but well supported rails testing framework. A very good starting point: Putting REST on Rails – step by step REST implementation. The article itself is better to be tryed with Rails 1.0, because Rails 1.1 way for implementing REST is different and seems easier. But the flow of creating the application is good. I’ll try to follow it.

Found very good site: steve.org.uk

Some interesting stuff:

• Argo — Xen Monitor / Control Panel. Simple, extensible, framework for controling a host running multiple Xen instances. Exactly what I need for the company.
• lua-httpd — simple, but pretty good Lua http server. Even have support for vhosts!
• Fortress — a simple script-based security scanner. C++ code, but tests should be written in Lua.

Steve Kemp have also very interesting weblog .

via Aidan Finn’s blog :

widgEditor is a small simple lightweight editor. It provided basic rich functions such as bold, italics, links, lists, images and headings. Rails integration:

• Download widgEditor and uncompress
• Copy the widgEditor.js file into …/public/javascripts folder
• Copy the widgEditor.css file into …/public/stylesheets folder
• Copy all the images from the widgEditor distribution …/public/images folder
• Include the javascript and css files in your layout file
• Give any text field you want to be an editor field a class of ”widgEditor”

Example:

<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'widgEditor' %>
<%= javascript_include_tag "widgEditor" %>
<%= text_area 'node', 'content', :cols => "50", 
    :rows=>"3", :class=>"widgEditor" %>

mongrel_cluster makes it easy to manage multiple Mongrel processes behind a reverse-proxy server and load balancer such as Pound, Balance, Lighttpd, or Apache.

See also:

• Apache: Scaling Rails with Apache 2.2, mod_proxy_balancer and Mongrel .
• Lighttpd: Using Lighttpd With Mongrel
• Litespeed: setting up litespeed with mongrel

Via RedHanded :

Park Place , a clone of Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service.) It’s written entirely in Ruby, with heaps of help from the Camping 4k web framework. Oh, and no SOAP support to speak of.

gem install camping --source code.whytheluckystiff.net
gem install mongrel activerecord
svn co http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/svn/parkplace/trunk parkplace
cd parkplace/lib
ruby parkplace.rb

Great. Your own private S3. Now you can try all S3-based solutions for free.

Lighttpd after version 1.4.9 requires the full path in the “bin-path” part of the lighttpd.conf file. Also from version 1.4.10 you will have CWD in your config files:

"bin-path" => CWD + "/public/dispatch.fcgi" 

So if you have old lighttpd (<=1.4.8) and old rails applications (<=1.1.0) you can have a problems (with existing or just created applications):

• upgrading only the lighttpd, but not the rails (solution: convert relative paths to the absolute ones)
• upgrading only the rails, but not the lighttpd (CWD keyword support is missing in the old lighty versions, solution: remove CMD+ part from the path).

The best solution is maybe:

• convert all paths to absolute ones for the existing applications
• upgrade lighttpd to the latest version (1.4.11 in the moment)
• “freeze” the existing applications (put in /vendor/rails/ the correct rails version files)
• upgrade the rails (no need to do anything when generate new projects)

Rubricks is a new Ruby on Rails based CMS. The demo looks pretty good. For bad luck it’s crashing my Firefox browser everytime I tryed it :( Working with Safari.

The english site is still not fully functional (the registration at least working). If you decide to go with the japanese site , the registration is different for the both sites, so you cannot try both of them with one registration. Heavy Ajax usage – be sure your browser have JS enabled.

2006/04/02 Update: And another Rails-base CMS Eribium (the demo is also available)