Saint Louis: The Pursuit of Rubyness ('06)

Well, this has certainly been a breakout year for Ruby in the St. Louis, Missouri area. Our little Ruby brigade (Stlruby.org[1]) saw its attendance mushroom from an average 7-8/meeting to around 20. So much so that we are seeking a larger space to hold meetings. We have been thankful to Mark Volkman and the staff at OCI [3] for sponsoring our group and providing a place to meet since our second meeting. Thanks Mark and everyone at OCI.

Curt Hibbs kicked off our first meeting at a dinner with Dave Thomas at the Gateway Software Symposium (the "No Fluff, Just Stuff tour,") in March of 2005. I wish I could have been there, but we reprised the dinner this year in March. We got to meet Dave, Bruce Tate, Justin Gehtland, Neil Ford and some other NFJS'ers. These guys are all very young, super brainy and quite funny. I had a blast at the dinner. Pics here[4]

Curt also presented this year at RailsConf in Chicago, a talk titled "Inside Instant Rails," about his ubiquitous InstantRails project for Windows. Curt hasn't sat on his laurels for both the InstantRails and One-Click Ruby projects for Windows. 2006 saw a new book co-authored by Bruce Tate and Curt: Up and Running Ruby on Rails. [5] He also contributed to Ajax Hacks by Bruce Perry [6]. His One-Click Ruby project hit 1 million downloads in November. It is always near the top of the most active projects on Rubyforge. Sliiiiiick!

Our numbers may have grown, but the reason might not be solely due to the explosion of interest in Rails. Occasionally, we've asked our membership what they are doing with Ruby and the answer seems more or less split 50-50 between Ruby and Rails work/interests. St. Louis has a fairly large number of web development organizations and a lot of enterprise shops in the biotech, aerospace and financial industries. Ruby is beginning to make inroads in Java shops and even a few Microsoft shops (of which there are a lot in this area.) Mark has even used Ruby at Scott Air Force Base.

Speaking of Mark and NFJS tour, Mark gave a presentation titled "Ruby Tools" this year. Mark's talks are always well done and very interesting even if you've never heard of the subject. I remember his Distributed Ruby presentation (when we could still all fit in OCI's conference room,) with great appreciation. I went home and built a Rails Wiki using no DB, just the DRb stuff. Mark will return with "Ruby Plays Well With Others" at the 2007 Gateway Software Symposium. The talk will cover JRuby and writing C extensions. A few people from our group attended the talk by Charles Nutter on JRuby at the Gateway Java group. Ruby and Java are certainly two great tastes that taste great together!

Mark and Rob Smith have taught various Ruby and Rails classes at OCI in 2006 with more to come in 2007. Ruby training has seen its biggest increase in 2006. The interest has led two of our members, Mike Sullivan and Jeff Barczewski to form a new training consultancy (Inspired Horizons [7] specializing in Ruby and Rails training. It kicks off in 2007, registration is now open for the first workshops which will cover enterprise stuff with Rails and JRuby. (There is that Java thing again.)

Our membership sure gets around. In addition to Curt, Jeff, Mike and Kyle Cordes attended the RailsConf in Chicago. (I am counting Kyle as a member and sponsor at-large. He currently hosts our web site, and promotes Ruby in his Agile talks. Can't wait for your Lua Users Group to start up, Kyle!) Around town, Curt, Mark, Rob, Jeff and I have given talks to various other users groups. Besides Stlruby, we have presented at St. L Linux (stllug), StLUnix (sluug) St. Charles LUG (stclug) St. Louis Web Developer's (stlweb) and the St. Louis XP users group (xpstl) Several of them and other members also taught at the all day St. Louis Code Camp.[8] David Holsclaw gave a presentation on RoR and Jeff taught a class on Extending Rails featuring MasterView (more on that below.) Cory Foy (a member at-large in outstate Missouri,) taught a program on Ruby for C#/.Net developers comparing the languages and Rails and ASP.Net. I am sure there will be more of this in 2007. Stay tuned.

Speaking of Jeff, you may not be aware of his excellent Rails project MasterView MV is an attribute language for Rails. You can use WYSIWYG editors like DreamWeaver to edit your views as regular .html files and put attributes on tags like a, input and select. MasterView will render them as ERb in .rhtml files on the fly. 2006 saw the release of version 0.3 which featured a new DSL for writing your own customized attributes. Sweet!

Sean Carley has also been very active this year in Ruby projects. He contributed the cat2rb quiz to the weekly Ruby Quiz [9] He also founded the weekly hacking night in St. Louis. Attendance was low, so it is currently on hiatus. There are a lot of monthly IT related events in St. Louis, so much so that nearly every weeknight (and quite a few weekends as well) can entertain us. Balancing that with work and family can be quite tough. Sean has contributed to ruby projects like ParseTree, checkr, and Zentest. He has also been involved in many book and other writing projects. Be sure to check out his blog [10]

Quite a few of us are active in the blogosphere (oh how I loath that particular term. Forgive me.) Besides Sean's check out Curt's writing on O'Reilly's Ruby web log. [11] Curt also has his own Blog featuring a lot of Ruby wisdom [12] Also check out Pat Eyler's (a member on our mailing list, but lives in Utah,) blog [13] Pat also writes for the O'Reilly Ruby blog. Kyle and Cory also have blogs. They are at [14,15] respectively Yippee for self-named blogs!

Some of our members have taken what they have learned and applied it to actual stuff. Steve Molitor and John Hohlen have developed a fantasy golf site using Ruby on Rails. It is just getting off the ground, but they hope to grow the league this year. Check it out at [17]

What about yours truly? Well, I have given 4 presentations on Ruby and Rails at various users groups as I mentioned before. I am presently involved as a partner in a full time Rails consultancy (WDT Solutions [16]). We just finished a rather large Rails+Masterview commercial project for a company in the health care field. I contributed one bug to RSpec and a number of suggestions and feedback to Jeff and Deb on the Masterview team.

Our group has grown so much this past year, that we have decided to actually use a bit of organization. To that end we have formed a steering committee. We meet for about an hour at Friday's before the main meeting. Our first accomplishment is to lay out the presentations for the first few months of 2007. We also migrated the mailing list from Yahoo Groups to Google Groups, which has a much nicer management and user interface.

Well, I am sure I've missed something (or many somethings.) If I didn't cover your book, project, presentation in 2006, please email me and I'll incorporate it. That's it for ruby in St. Louis in 2006. 2007 is shaping up to be another fantastic year in the wide world of Ruby. Prognostication is not usually my forte, but if I had to guess at happenings in '07, I'd say that Curt will become even more famous. Dave and Bruce, et. al. will show up at the NFJS tour and have food with us. More projects will be contributed to, more blog posts written, more presentations will be given, more conferences will be attended. Outside of Japan, Seattle, Portland and Utah, St. Louis will be the place to be for all things Ruby.

Have a Happy New Year!

Ed
[1] StlRuby http://stlruby.org/ruwiki/ruwiki.cgi/
[2] New Google Groups for us: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/stlruby
[3] OCI http://www.ociweb.com/
[4] Pictures from our dinner with dave, Bruce and folks at the Gateway Software conference
http://www.cornetdesign.com/images/DSC00476.jpg (Dave is the one imbibing You can barely see the top of my head)
http://www.cornetdesign.com/images/DSC00477.jpg (Jeff is the one at the left closest to the camera.)
[5] Up and running Ruby on Rails http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Rails-Running-Bruce-Tate/dp/0596101325/sr=1-1/qid=1167512231/ref=sr_1_1/103-6671475-6469421?ie=UTF8&s=books
[6] Ajax Hacks
http://www.amazon.com/Ajax-Hacks-Bruce-Perry/dp/0596101694/sr=8-1/qid=1167512145/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-6671475-6469421?ie=UTF8&s=books
[7] Inspired Horizons, Ruby Training http://inspiredhorizons.com/
[8] St. Louis Code Camp http://www.stlcodecamp.org
[9] cat2rfb http://rubyquiz.com/quiz77.html
[10] O'Reilly Ruby Weblog http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/
[11] Curt's Comments http://curthibbs.wordpress.com/
[13] Pat Eyler : On Ruby http://on-ruby.blogspot.com/
[14] Kyls's blog http://kylecordes.com/
[15] Cory's blog http://www.cornetdesign.com/
[16] WDT Solutions, LLC. http://www.wdtsolutions.com
[17] Fantasy Golf Site http://www.rgfgc.com

Source code search engines, Part 1

Lately, there has been an upsurge in the emergence of source code search engines. My friend Scott Granneman (see his linked blog[4]) alerted me to a new one from our pals at Google Labs. Called Code Search it features many of the familiar Google search attributes, as well as some specific to searching for source code, such as search by programming language, license and full POSIX extended regular expression search. Prior to this new entry, I have been using Krugle.com and Koders.com. I was in the beta test program for the later two so I am more familiar with them than Google's new entry. Does anyone know of any other code search engines? There is also O'Reilly's Code Search which I will profile in part 2. It only searches code examples in O'Reilly's book catalog, however. Nonetheless, a high quality database, I'm sure. And just regular Google search is an old standby.

In this article I am just going to review the general features of the three engines. I will also present some preliminary benchmarks. In part
2 I will go into more detail with my actual experience.

Basics
Search by language, license.
View the file.
Download the file.


Koders.com
225 Million LOCs
Connects directly to source code repositories, using Subversion or CVS
30 programming languages, including hot new ones such as Ruby, Lua, Matlab.
Open Source Zeitgeist (like Google's shows trends, pie charts. etc based on search term frequencies.)
Currently, the hot topic is Ruby. Natch.
Output in RSS feeds if you want.

Krugle.com (out of Beta)
??? LOCs
Obscure languages like YACC/Bison, Flex/Lex and Haskell
Searches source code repositories, using Subversion or CVS
A full AJAX experience. When you click on the code snippet, you get the full source as well as a project tree navigation on the right showing where the file is at.
Add notes (requires registration and log in.)
Search by project. Search only in function definitions, function calls, comments, only source, class definitions, etc.
Views the file in a new tab, allowing compare two or more snippets of results.
Does not highlight the search term.
Powered by Lucene (A high-quality Java based search engine)

Google's Code Search (Labs, not yet Beta)
??? LOCs
Views the file the result appears in with the result highlighted and the browser positioned at the first occurrence.
Can download the entire package the result file is in.
I like the use of google style url expressions. For instance, you can use operators like lang:ruby or license:gpl or package:hibernate. You can use these to integrate the search engine into your projects, like you can with other Google products.
And you can use these operators to search multiple packages and languages.

Benchmarks
I have attempted 3 types of search. First a search for a method/attribute within a language specific to a project. Then a more global search for a usage of an object attribute within a language. And finally a search for files related to a topic, like spam filtering.

Searching for "connection", language: Ruby, project: Rails
Krugle: 588 matches
Google : 299 matches
Koders: 459 matches. (Can't search within projects, so many of these are duplicates if the project is a Rails project, and many are irrelevant to Rails
Via a convoluted series of steps, I was able to get to the Rails project and "Search this project."
Koders: 59 matches..
Update! I pestered Koders and they got right back to me today. Here is their response:
"Ed,
A very good idea. So much so that we are releasing a site update in the next few days that will have Advanced Search and Project Search. Stay tuned! And thanks for using Koders.
Regards,
Mike"
Wonderful! Thanks Mike. That will make Koders even easier to use.



Searched for "window.location", language Javascript
Google: 4000 matches
Krugle: 1944 matches
Koders: 228 matches.

Searched for "spam" (as in recognize/filter,) language: lisp
Google: 200 matches
Koders: 35 matches
Krugle: 2 matches

As you can see, no one engine is clearly ahead of the others. Google is new, so they might not have crawled everything yet. Expect it to get better. Krugle clearly leads the pack in usability but at the expense of not being able to integrate it with external stuff.* Koders provides this with downloable search plugins for Eclipse, Netbeans, Visual Studio Mac dashboard and Firefox. You can add Koders to your site with some javascript library.

Overall, I like Krugle for the user interface, Google for the relevant results and Koders for some interesting stats about the project. Also Google and to a lesser extent, Koders for the ability to pass in search phrases in the web interface or externally.

* Update on Krugle: They have added this feature! You can now do the URL and search box things that Google uses, as well as deep links. See Chris's comments below.


Finally, in addition to code searches, programmers should have knowledge of the mailing lists and usenet groups related to projects they are interested in. If you subscribe to a mailing list, and use something like GMail to archive it, you can use GMail's superior search capabilities to find relevant topics and answers to your questions. And if you can't find them, you can ask yourself. But if you haven't (yet) subscribed, you can use the new Google Groups[5] Beta to search for topics among many groups. Most programming related mailing lists are (or will) be mirrored at
Google Groups.

[1] Koders.com http://www.koders.com
[2] Krugle.com http://krugle.com
[3] Google Code Search http://www.google.com/codesearch
[4] Scott Granneman's blog. All Scott, All the time: http://www.downloadsquad.com/bloggers/scott-granneman/
[5] Google Groups Beta http://groups-beta.google.com/

Testing XML-ish stuff in Rails

Hi fellow Railsians,

Today post is in answer to a question from Chris T on the Rails list. Chris asks:
"Probably dead obvious, but are there any assertions for easing testing
of xml output, both for builder templates (for RSS feed -- something
like a version of assert_tag) and for the new restful stuff."

I've seen this question come up several times in the past. The trouble with assert_tag and assert_no_tag is that they are hooked directly to the response object of your controllers. Which means you can only use them in functional or integration tests. You could fake out a response object, but there is a simpler solution, just recreate them. They are essentially a call to the find method of HTML::Document.

Here is what I did: Add the following to the end your test/test_helper.rb:

  # Add more helper methods to be used by all tests here...
  def assert_xml_tag(xml, conditions)
    doc = HTML::Document.new(xml)
    assert doc.find(conditions), 
      "expected tag, but no tag found matching #{conditions.inspect} in:\n#{xml.inspect}"
  end

  def assert_no_xml_tag(xml, conditions)
    doc = HTML::Document.new(xml)
    assert !doc.find(conditions), 
      "expected no tag, but found tag matching #{conditions.inspect} in:\n#{xml.inspect}"
  end

I chose to use the actual value as the first parameter rather than the expected value because it allows for nicer looking paramter hash values. To use it, use just like assert_tag and assert_no_tag:

def test_xml_correct
   assert_xml_tag "", :tag => 'z', 
     :parent => {:tag => 'y',
                :parent => {:tag => 'x'}}

I usually have a default object under test with a single method to output. This allows for a micro-DSL-ish thing to reduce typing overhead:

...
protected
    def assert_render(conditions)
       assert_xml_tag @thing.render, conditions
    end

Simplified user roles in Rails

Usually, the discussion around user authentication and authorization in Rails revolves around an authentication plugin, engine or a login generator. Next, you might get into the types of users and this is where you might see a discussion about Roles, UserRoles and Users. There is plenty of tutorials about this usually describing an example of HABTM or has_many :through. But for simple cases, you can get the effect of user roles without much effort at all, just through normal Rails associations.

In addition to your 'users' table, create tables for each type of role. These can contain attributes specific to that type of user. For instance, you can have a admin type of user with specific flags allowing different types of CRUD access. A business contact user might have additional ways to be contacted (phone extension, cell phone, mail stop, etc.) For each table, add a user_id foreign key. In the models, make sure these all 'belongs_to :user'.

Then in the User model, add a 'has_one :admin' and 'has_one :business_contact' etc. for each associated table. The has_one association adds methods to the model to make it easy to query the relation:

user = User.find 1
if user.admin
  # do admin stuff
end
...
details.save unless user.business_contact.nil?

Each user can participate in more than one role. This keeps the user login centralized and the authorization stuff very readable. Adding a new type only requires adding a new table and updating app/models/user.rb to add the has_one associtation.


This simple strategy might not be enough for your needs. It doesn't work if you anticipate adding user roles on the fly to a running system. In this case, you'd probably want to look into a permissions system tied to a HABTM based Role and UserRole model. I've only described a solution for a fixed amount of user types, more or less hard coded into the models.

Testing Helpers and Helping Testers

The Rails helper_test plugin [1] is a useful thing that provides you with more tools to better test-cover your code. View helpers that live in app/helpers should be tested in isolation from unit and functional/integration tests. This is true just on the face of it. But additionally, you get to access Rails helper methods which you are usually combining with your own stuff. Hard to do that in normal unit tests, and the setup in integration tests is a little too bloated for my taste.

There are a few tricks that can be used to make this run even smoother. The first trick is to utilize assert_tag to check your HTML generation. assert_tag wants to check the body in the @response object which is expected to be a valid XHTML string. But you are not in the request/response environment of functional/integration tests, so @response is not available. Not to worry, we can just fake it out for now. Create a class with an accessible instance variable that is an instantiated string named body:

class Response
attr_writer :body
def initialize
  @body = ""
end

def body
  "<x>" + @body + "</x>"
end
end

In your test method, assign @response = Response.new. Assign the output of your helper method to @response.body. Now assert_tag will work in all it's glory.

The next trick involves testing the image_tag helper. If my helper generates one or more img tags, they can be hard to test with assert_tag. The reason for this is due to the change in Rails to help the various asset tags work better with browser side caches. The helper
image_tag "graphic.gif"
results in something similar:
<img src="/images/graphic.gif?12345678">

where the parameter after the ? is a file based timestamp. This helps the browser to decide to get a new copy of the asset or not. But calling assert_tag :tag => 'img', :attributes => {:src => "/images/graphic.gif?12345678"} is brittle, since if you update the timestamp, (say the next time you get an update from Subversion,) your tests will break. The easy solution to this is to force the ASSET_ID to always be a fixed string. Add this line to config/environments/test.rb:

ENV['RAILS_ASSET_ID']=12345

Now this will be constant in your tests:

def test_image_asset
   @response = Response.new
   @response.body = my_helper_that_returns_an_img_tag
   assert_tag :tag => "img", :attributes => {:src => "/images/graphic.gif?12345"}
end

[1] http://nubyonrails.topfunky.com/articles/2006/04/07/test-your-helpers

StL.rb Hacking Night - Hacking the Ruby Quiz

Well, once again Craig, Sean and I met this past Tuesday for the weekly hacking night of the St. Louis Ruby Brigrade. We decided to work on the current Ruby Quiz which Sean had submitted. It was a lot of fun and a good idea for what to work on if there is no other ideas.

This week's quiz [1] concerned cat2rfb.rb which from the RubyQuiz site he says : "The goal of cat2rafb is to implement a command line utility that will allow you to submit arbitrary text to http://rafb.net/paste/ and get the URL for the text back." You have to understand what rafb.net/paste is all about. This is a site where you can post snippets of code or text then it redirects you to a page where your code is displayed and syntax colorized. But the cool thing is the URL can be shared with others to collaborate.

From their FAQ [2]: "What is a 'nopaste' site?

A 'nopaste' site allows people to paste chunks of code for others to view. This is useful for situations such as asking for programming help on IRC, where it is frowned upon to paste chunks of code to the channel or to individual. With a nopaste site, the user pastes his or her code to the site and is given a url to provide to others so they can find the code."

What Sean wanted was an easy command line way to paste the code from files, or stdin w/o having to go through the web site. Bonus points if you convert the resulting URL from rafb.net through rubyurl.com which is a Rails equivalent to tinyurl.com that converts long URLs to short ones. (Not that the resulting rafb.net code display URLs are that long anyway.)

Sean hadn't actually come up with an answer for his own quiz yet, so that made me suspect he wanted to prime the WHN attendees with some actual cool work to do. In any case, it was a fairly good learning session for me. We actually set up an IRC session on freenode/#stl.rb to share links. Eating our own dogfood, I guess.

The basic idea is becoming familiar with Net::HTTP posts and gets. Sean went for a Ruby Golf approach, while I took the opposite approach. I wanted to provide options and error checking and read from an optional config file. The fields on the nopaste form allow you to choose from different languages, choose a nickname and give it a description. This makes it easier to find in the Recent pastes screen.

The other tricky part is understanding how to follow a redirect from Net::HTTP#post. Turns out Net::HTTPResponse has a bunch of subclasses. So you can do a 'case when' around the response object and then query its 'location' key (it behaves like a hash.)

I also figured out the issues wrt using GetoptLong and ARGF together. You need to process the arguments first, then set a post argument to ARGF.readlines. Also, RDoc::usage is a seriously cool thing. It looks at the comments at the top of your file and processes them into an usage statement and then exits. How can it see the comments in a file that calls it? Very deep Ruby-fu there. But this fits nicely with the DRY rule (comments and usage decared just once.)

So, we finished up right when the meeting was supposed to end. This kind of exploration to solve the quiz was well suited to the amount of time allocated for a hacking night. Look on ruby-talk for mine, Sean's and other answers to this week's quiz.

[1] http://www.rubyquiz.com/quiz77.html
[2] http://rafb.net/paste/faq.html

Ruby w/readline on Ubuntu

Getting Ruby running on Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) can be tricky. The issue is Breezy wants Ruby 1.8.3 from apt-get, and that has known problems with Rails 1.x. I usually recommend people install ruby 1.8.4 from source to work with Rails 1.1. But the base install of Ubuntu doesn't have many source build tools and libraries. This shows up in various places. For instance, running 'script/console' barfs complaining about missing the readline require. That is because irb wasn't built with it in the 1.8.4 build tree. Another issue you may have run into is support for rubygems is lacking due to a missing zlib development library. This may have messed up your install of Rails or various plugins.

Before we start read this guide: [1] Be sure to add the extra repositories, if you haven't yet.

Here are a bunch of commands that I executed to get Ruby built.

apt-get install build-essential
apt-get install bison byacc gperf
apt-get install zlib1g-dev
apt-get install libreadline5 libreadline5-dev
apt-get install libncurses5 libncurses5-dev temcap-compat
apt-get install libssl-dev

If you have previously tried to build it, then rm -rf ruby-1.8.4 and tar zxvf ruby-1.8.4.tar.gz; cd ruby-1.8.4; ./configure; make; sudo make install

Retest in your rails app: script/console. Everything should work.

The last install is for openssl development headers and libs. This is a Rake dependency in certain cases. (Not Rails specific.)

[1] http://ubuntuguide.org/