Posted by Eric Stewart
Wed, 28 Dec 2005 19:00:00 GMT
It was less than 2 years that I was managing a team of software developers that were responsible for maintaining a slew of internal projects. This was a Java shop, and not only did my team have challenges, every development team in the company struggled with build scripts (this meant Ant), project layouts, dependency management, documentation, publishing builds, etc.
In an effort to help my group (and those we interacted with), I was pushing for a uniform solution for our projects and preferably for all company projects. At the time the most buzz was around an Apache project called Maven that was created to address just the pains we were experiencing. We never got the approval to go ahead with its adoption, and suffered the same pains till the end.
Fast forward to present day.
I have been doing Rails development for the past 7 months, and most of those pains don’t exist. Much of this is because:
- Rails projects have a standard layout and structure (again convention, where Maven would offer configuration)
- Rails’ default Rake tasks do very good things for generating documentation, running, tests, etc.
- throw in Switchtower and publishing your Rails app is a piece of cake!
Now Maven is useful for just about any Java development effort, while my examples are kind of Rails specific. If you’re doing generic Ruby development (or development in any other language) you have more work on your hands.
The point of my little tale is to point out that Maven has now been recreated as Maven 2, an effort to shed some of the warts of the original Maven implementation. An especially interesting development is the creation of a Ruby Mojo Support for Maven 2 which allows using Ruby to write Maven tasks.
The author of the Ruby Mojo plugin claims that Jelly (the xml based scripting language used for Maven 2) was no good at all, and the pure Java tasks of Maven 2 are better but often not the best way to implement build system tasks. I would agree that Ruby is probably a much better language for build system tasks.
All I can say is that this sounds like a huge step in the right direction for the right type of environment. We would have killed for this several years back in the environment we were in. I’d say this combination of Java and Ruby could by a killer project management solution for Java shops (and possibly many other platform environments).
What I want to know, though, is when a simpler more general Maven equivalent will be written in Ruby.
Technorati Tags: build systems, java, maven, ruby
Posted in Software Development, Ruby, Java, Ruby On Rails | Tags build, java, maven, ruby | 1 comment
Posted by Eric Stewart
Wed, 28 Dec 2005 17:35:00 GMT
As I mentioned previously, I have been working on a Rails plugin to help check the accessibility of pages in a Rails project.
I was inspired by Scott Raymond’s assert_valid_markup plugin for Rails and decided to whip up a similar plugin for testing the accessibility of pages in my current Rails project.
Using
You will be able to write a functional test that does something like:
def test_index
get :index
assert_accessible
end
I had really wanted to polish this some more before putting it out there for others to use, but I have been slow at finding the time so I’m making it available. It has been working well on my current project but there is much that can be done to improve it. It is still really rough around the edges and your mileage may vary.
You will probably get more mileage out of it by pairing it up with assert_valid_markup, as invalid markup usually triggers some sort of accessibility problem.
Installing
Check out the source from Subversion, or preferable use Rails own script/plugin script to help install it. All you have to do (from the root of your rails project) is:
script/plugin source http://www.eric-stewart.com/svn/rails/plugins/
script/plugin install assert_accessible
Or, for those that want to do a straight subversion checkout:
svn co http://www.eric-stewart.com/svn/rails/plugins/assert_accessible/
That’s it! Let me know how it works for you.
Update: The url’s above for subversion weren’t working externally according to an astute commenter. They have been corrected.
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Technorati Tags: accessibility, rails, ruby, testing
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Posted in Software Development, Ruby, Ruby On Rails | Tags accessibility, rails, web | 3 comments
Posted by Eric Stewart
Thu, 15 Dec 2005 16:53:00 GMT
Courtenay was pondering today how to figure out who is online in your Rails app. I’m liking his solution better thank what I thought up on this a few days back, but since he asks….
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Posted in Software Development, Ruby, Ruby On Rails | Tags rails, ruby | 2 comments
Posted by Eric Stewart
Wed, 14 Dec 2005 18:28:00 GMT
Last night I gave a presentation at the second Austin Ruby on Rails User Group meeting on ActiveRecord Migrations. We had an excellent turnout (the room was small, but it was packed) for a December meeting.
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Posted in Austin, Software Development, Ruby, Technology, Ruby On Rails | Tags austin, group, migrations, presentation, rails, ruby, user | 3 comments
Posted by Eric Stewart
Sat, 10 Dec 2005 19:08:00 GMT
As a Typo user and someone who is asthetically impaired I just want to say thank you for everyone who particpated in the Typo Theme Contest.
The winners have been announced and they deserve all the great prizes that are being handed out.
A few weeks back, before the end of the contest, I chose one of the submissions for my latest theme. I really liked the Lush theme. Marco van Hylckama Vlieg did an incredible job and deserved better than 8th place. I don’t really understand some of the higher place winners, but I’m glad not everyone shares my tastes either.
This is good for everyone! Now, if only these themes had all been made accessible as well! That’s the main change I have planned for Lush on this site.
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Technorati Tags: typo, rails
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Posted in Software Development, Typo, Ruby On Rails | Tags blogging, themes, typo | no comments
