After a mere 48 hours, Rails rumble and the app we (@mrb_bk and I) set out to build, Please Tag Your Photos is launched.

This was both of our first ‘rumble and I was really excited to participate after 2 years of sitting on the side-lines. Somehow, with not enough planning and really only about 24 hours of coding we were able to get something functional up.

What is Please Tag Your Photos? Well, a while ago I realized that I had over 1000 photos on Flickr and half of them didn’t even have real titles. Sure, I remember the moments the photos have captured now, but what about 5 years from now? I tried to do the tagging and updating in Flickr, but unfortunately, the interface made it really difficult to breeze through a lot of photos. The idea was to make an interface that would guide you and encourage you to give your photos a proper dose of data. We got pretty far in our idea, but given the time and opportunity to work on it some more in the future, I think it could actually be really useful.

What works now:

• Flickr authentication
• Some fancy background fetching and scoring of all your photos
• Updating the title, description, and tags of a photo (updates to flickr too)
• Simple ‘recent tags’ interface
• Live score updates

What we wanted to work:

• Geo-tagging interface
• Some nice flashy JS page loading to make it a single page app (Sammy, duh)

What we knew we knew we werent going to get to this weekend but would like to play with at some point:

• Image scanning (using OpenCV) to do facial recognition/tagging.
• Collaborative Photo tagging – earn ‘points’ for suggesting tags for other peoples photos

All in all, decently successful. We used MongoDB for this project and it boosted productivity in some places (not worrying about changing schemas) and was a big road block in others (getting it to work with DelayedJob). Either way it was cool to get to know it, I’ll definitely be using it for future projects. Somehow, in this exhaustive weekend of coding, I did manage to pack in: Curry Making, Two brunches, a BBQ, and some decent sleep. Not too shabby.

Officially, as of today, the work is being grouped and promoted through RailsBridge.
Thanks to everyone involved. I wont be there in person, so good luck to everyone at RailsConf!

The episode also features Rich Kilmer – whose talk about MacRuby and HotCocoa totally blew my mind.

If people are interested, I’ve posted the slides online at scribd. I’ll post an update when the video is available, too.

Also here are all the libraries I mentioned in the talk.

http://code.quirkey.com/qadmin
http://code.quirkey.com/qcontent
http://github.com/nakajima/acts_as_fu

• My article was published in The Rubyist! Thanks to Jeremy McAnally for getting it out. Buy a copy and support a burgeoning dead tree business.
• I was interviewed about Sinatra for Ruby Learning. Thanks to Satish. He’s doing a great job spreading the gospel of Ruby and Rails. If you’re interested in Sinatra – look for his seminars – I’m sure you’ll learn a ton.
• In preparation for my presentation I started adding what I consider pretty good documentation to a couple of my gems/plugins using github pages. See Restful Query, Qadmin, and Qcontent

Other insane news: Its less then a week from Scotland on Rails! My presentation is all wrapped up. I’m getting a little nervous, but looking forward to the fun times ahead of meeting great Rubyists from around the world and having a REAL vacation all over the UK. Exciting!

If you’re going to Scotland on Rails and reading this – please say hello at the conference. Theres a couple projects I’m hoping to hack on there, too.

It’s finally going to be released as Part of Rails 2.3 (exciting!).

Ryan Bates released a great Railscast with a detailed overview of templates. Ryan does a great job as usual getting to the meat of the feature.

If you’re interested, I have my own Rails template as part of my ‘halpers’. It installs jQuery and a couple of plugins and gems – including a forked version of restful-authentication that has a shoulda test suite and email of login based authentication. I hope you enjoy this feature as much as I do.

A couple of weeks ago, my good friend and team lazer partner, Mike (mrb) proposed that once I was done launching in January we should do a couple days of side by side programming on the big client project he has been working on. There’s been a lot of talk about Pair Programming in the Ruby and Rails community lately (here and here) and I can say honestly up until now, I didn’t really ‘get it’. Sure, it helps to have someone check your code but isn’t that just cutting each developers productivity in half? I couldn’t really understand how two programmers working on the same thing at the same time could produce more work then two programmers working separately. I was looking at the wrong equation.

What I thought:

1 nerd working alone = ~1000 lines of code a day
2 nerds each working alone = ~2000 lines of a code a day

2 nerds working together = ~1000 lines of code a day

What I left out:

Quality.

Sure, two programmers working separately can produce a lot more work product if work product is measured in shear volume. However, what I discovered, is the code we produced working together was cleaner, faster, and more acurate then what we could have produced in the same time apart.

When we decided to go for it we set out some initial goals: What did Mike want to achieve in two days?

• Speeding up some slow actions
• Fixing some broken pieces
• Cleaning up some repetitive code

It seemed reasonable. I came up with a plan of action:

• Get a tour of the codebase
• Find a good place to start
• Branch the codebase
• Add test coverage
• Tear things apart

And so it was coded.

In two days we managed to add a small but solid test suite to the linchpin actions, reduce the controller time in most places by 400%, and delete a ton of code. It felt really good. By doing this as a Pairing session instead of just me grabbing code and working on it alone we both gained a ton. It was the small pieces of this experience that I didn’t think initially about that made me realize how powerful pairing can be.

Lack of Distractions/Extreme Focus – Because we were sharing a single computer and both staring at the same piece of code all of the common things that would derail a work session (Email, AIM, Twitter, etc) werent even available. After the first day we stepped back and realized that besides the break for lunch and some coffee/water breaks, we worked the entire day.

Code Correction/No Shortcuts – Having someone look over your shoulder provides not only the constant spell check (something I need) but also forces you out of the habit of shortcuts or cutting corners. A physical manifestation of your conscience, your partner wont (or at least shouldn’t) allow you to write the crappy code to just ‘get it done’. In this way, after all was said and done, not only did I feel extremely productive, but I felt like I wrote great code.

Social Hacking/Learning – Working from home for the past little while and then jumping into this made me realize that constant human contact for me is a requirement. It puts me in a better mood as well as keeps me focused. I also enjoyed the give and take of this relationship.

In an ideal world, I suppose your Pair partner in coding is a rough equivilient of a Detective’s partner. They back you up when there’s heat; They make sure you’re not taking cuts under the table; They keep you on your toes.

Well, something like that.

P.S. This week I hope to post some of the better refactoring patterns/examples discovered in our sessions.

Another thing I didn't quite get/like about some of the ActionMailer setup is that even though you're putting all the email body text in a file somewhere that's not your Mailer class, you put the text of you're subject in there. Some more snooping in the source reveals setting the subject from within the template is easy - your Mailer instance is exposed to the template as 'controller':

<% controller.subject = 'Change of subject' %>
Hello <%= @user.display_name %>

Thank you for your order. 

Love <%= controller.from %>

It struck me as weird that with ActionView you can have a whole array (really Array) of view/template paths that are iteratively searched for a matching template, however, with ActionMailer (even though it uses ActionView) you can only define or override the single template_root.

Bizarre, right? I bet rails core had some good reason for this, but in this specific project I'm relying heavily on using ActionView::Base.prepend_view_path() to have the app structured with default templates that are easily replaced by dropping templates in to a different view path. So if I'm doing that for an entire site it would make sense to do the same for my 'Notification' templates as well. The rails docs were pretty unhelpful, but a quick dive into the source proved fruitful. If you drop the code below into config/initializers/action_mailer_extensions.rb:

module ActionMailer
  class Base
    class_inheritable_accessor :view_paths
    
    def self.prepend_view_path(path)
      view_paths.unshift(*path)
      ActionView::TemplateFinder.process_view_paths(path)
    end

    def self.append_view_path(path)
      view_paths.push(*path)
      ActionView::TemplateFinder.process_view_paths(path)
    end

    private
    def self.view_paths
      @@view_paths ||= [template_root]
    end
    
    def view_paths
      self.class.view_paths
    end
    
    def initialize_template_class(assigns)
      ActionView::Base.new(view_paths, assigns, self)
    end

  end
end

ActionMailer::Base.prepend_view_path('/my/other/path/to/search/first/')
# or
ActionMailer::Base.append_view_path('/my/other/path/to/search/last/')

The scenario: Its 3AM. You've been coding all day and youre just about ready to launch this sweet social networking app for steel workers who love to dance. One last thing - you need to replace all the crappy copy you stuck in to your 'flash' messages with real informative text. "sucesfil post" might make sense to you, but wont make sense to the blue collar guy doing the electric slide all over your server. You go to replace these warnings and feedback messages but theyre all over your code. You think: If Rails is so DRY and the business and display logic are all supposed to be separate, then why am I putting messages that will end up in my views all through my controllers?!

Introducing Flashdance

The get-the-view-out-of-the-controller-so-you-can-rest plugin.

Instead of all-up-in your controller files, messages are stored in a single YAML file:

# in app/views/shared/flash.yml

all_is_good: This is great
this_failed: This failed
using_erb: you are an idiot, <%= @email %>
section:
  subsection: I'm nested
my_controller:
  my_action:
    message: I'm soaking wet

Examples

At its most unobtrusive:

# in your controller
  def update
    # . . . booring part where record gets updated
    flash[:warning] = flashdance(:this_failed) #=> This failed
  end

A little nicer:

def update
    # . . .
    flash(:message => 'all_is_good') # YAML entries can be referred to by strings or symbols
    # equivalent to flash[:message] = "This is great"
  end

ERB is evaluated in the context of the controller so you can do fun things like:

  def tell_off_the_spammer
    # . . .
    @email = 'jon@example.com'
    flash(:warning => :using_erb)
    # equivalent to flash[:warning] = "you are an idiot, jon@example.com"
  end

So what if your app is huge and you use these flash thingies all over the place? Your YAML file might get big and unreadable. Well, thats why you can nest! Nested sections are refered to by arrays.

  def make_a_nest
    #  . . .
    flash(:nest => [:section,:subsection])
    # equivalent to flash[:nest] = "I'm nested"
  end

Flashdance automatically checks for entries nested in the controller/action path where you call it from. And heres where you get splashed with that big bucket of water:

class MyController < ApplicationController
  # . . . 
  
  def my_action
   # . . . where you dance your heart out
   flash(:message)
   # equivalent to flash[:message] = "I'm soaking wet"
  end
end

Install it

From subversion:

./script/plugin install -x svn://svn.quirkey.com/quirkey_tools/trunk/flashdance

or Download: flashdance.tar.gz

You can email me at aaron at this domain for bug reports/comments/suggestions - and I'm looking to set up Trac or something else soon.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tzofia/185003069/]]> http://www.quirkey.com/blog/2008/02/29/drying-up-rails-flash-with-flashdance/feed/ 0 http://www.quirkey.com/blog/2008/02/28/quirkeytools/ http://www.quirkey.com/blog/2008/02/28/quirkeytools/#comments Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:09:28 +0000 AQ http://www.quirkey.com/blog/2008/02/28/quirkeytools/

I’ve been such a Rails mooch. Relying on everyone else’s plugins, gems, and helpful blog posts. A while ago I said how I wanted to be a real part of this community. Well its time to stop coding (briefly) and start sharing. It’s time to give back.

Over the past year and a half () of doing Rails and Ruby full time, I’ve come up with a lot of code thats useful, at least to me. For a while its all been packaged as a plugin on my private SVN server called QuirkeyTools. It’s chock full of helpers, generators, extensions, macros – its bursting at the seems.

So the idea over the next couple of weeks is to start splitting out the code, cleaning up the tests, and releasing them as separate Rails plugins. I’m also going to look into packaging some gems – which sounds like fun.

All of this is made possible in part by the fact that I’ve got a new VPS from slicehost. I’m not getting paid to say this but its awesome! Super fast, haven;t had any reliability problems and its a blank slate – meaning install whatever you want. They also have some great of the best tutorials for setting up. This blog remains (for the time being) on my shared host at Site5, but I’ve set up an SVN server and repositories with public read permissions. So here comes the code . . .

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/docman/36125185/sizes/m/>