Ruby on Rails

ruby-talk
1

Very neat presentation, it kept me up way too late last night watching it.

As far as his comments about this list, I’m afraid that I’m not one of the
experts who hangs out here, I really am a newbie. Sigh.

One thought that occurred to me while I was watching the video is that I
would really LOVE to see someone put together an entire course or two on
Ruby and distribute it online. There’s just so much that I don’t have a
really solid understanding of in Ruby that I really want to know. Ok, I
haven’t been a developer in years, I do mostly sys admin these days and
Ruby is my language of choice for automation.

What do y’all think?

– Matt
The American Non-Sequiteur Society: We may not make sense, but we do like
pizza.

2

The more I think of doing weird things the more I LOVE ruby.

atleast I thank(silently…i do not want to flood ML with this message :wink: )
matz once in couple of days.

rolo

···

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Lawrence [mailto:matt@technoronin.com]
Sent: Monday, May 17, 2004 4:03 AM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Ruby on Rails

Very neat presentation, it kept me up way too late last night watching it.

As far as his comments about this list, I’m afraid that I’m not one of the
experts who hangs out here, I really am a newbie. Sigh.

One thought that occurred to me while I was watching the video is that I
would really LOVE to see someone put together an entire course or two on
Ruby and distribute it online. There’s just so much that I don’t have a
really solid understanding of in Ruby that I really want to know. Ok, I
haven’t been a developer in years, I do mostly sys admin these days and
Ruby is my language of choice for automation.

What do y’all think?

– Matt
The American Non-Sequiteur Society: We may not make sense, but we do like
pizza.

3

Hi,

One thought that occurred to me while I was watching the video is that I
would really LOVE to see someone put together an entire course or two on
Ruby and distribute it online. There’s just so much that I don’t have a
really solid understanding of in Ruby that I really want to know. Ok, I
haven’t been a developer in years, I do mostly sys admin these days and
Ruby is my language of choice for automation.

Yes, that would be a great idea. Using some kind of screen cam software
like RoboDemo (http://www.macromedia.com/software/robodemo/), but maybe
not so expensive. It would be great to have a multipart tutorial about
how to program the “pet store” in Rails, Cerise, Arrow, Borges, IOWA,
… Imagine what kind of effect this could have as presentation
material. No other language has that. Back in the day I stumbled upon
http://learnvisualstudio.net/ and I really liked the concept of actually
having these video tutorials that show you exactly what you have to do.
Think about it, this would be absolute killer presentation material for
Ruby. But I guess nobody is going to have enough time to do this,
including me :frowning:

Sascha

4

One thought that occurred to me while I was watching the video is that
I
would really LOVE to see someone put together an entire course or two
on
Ruby and distribute it online.

What do y’all think?

I think that’s a great idea and I’ve already experimented with this a
bit. There’s test on http://www.loudthinking.com/share/800x600.html
showing how 1 minute of tutorial can be compressed down to 1 MB.

My plan was to make a whole series of these for introducing all facets
of Rails in a form where it’s very easy to follow along on your own.
This is a somewhat time-consuming endevour, so I don’t know when it’ll
be, though.

Oddball Idea: What I’d really like to see is a way for the community to
hire within itself for tasks like this. Or to get the documentation
done. Or similar things. I’d love to donate cash to a variety of
projects to improve their documentation. I don’t know if there’s enough
interest in Ruby to make it worthwhile for anyone to make something of
it. Or if introducing money to open source documentation is really the
way to go anyway.

···

–
David Heinemeier Hansson,
http://www.instiki.org/ – A No-Step-Three Wiki in Ruby
http://www.basecamphq.com/ – Web-based Project Management
http://www.loudthinking.com/ – Broadcasting Brain
http://www.nextangle.com/ – Development & Consulting Services

5

I just don’t know enough about Ruby to be able to even start. Sigh.

Another interesting point: The .mov file for “Ruby On Rails to Basecamp”
is 160MB. It would easily fit on an 8cm CD. This would also be very cool
to be able to hand out pocket sized lectures.

– Matt
The American Non-Sequiteur Society: We may not make sense, but we do like
pizza.

···

On Mon, 17 May 2004, Sascha Ebach wrote:

Yes, that would be a great idea. Using some kind of screen cam software
like RoboDemo (http://www.macromedia.com/software/robodemo/), but maybe
not so expensive. It would be great to have a multipart tutorial about
how to program the “pet store” in Rails, Cerise, Arrow, Borges, IOWA,
… Imagine what kind of effect this could have as presentation
material. No other language has that. Back in the day I stumbled upon
http://learnvisualstudio.net/ and I really liked the concept of actually
having these video tutorials that show you exactly what you have to do.
Think about it, this would be absolute killer presentation material for
Ruby. But I guess nobody is going to have enough time to do this,
including me :frowning:

6

Sorry if I missed it, but what did you use to make the video?
This is a really powerfull educational tool!

···

On Saturday, 22 May 2004 at 23:15:38 +0900, David Heinemeier Hansson wrote:

One thought that occurred to me while I was watching the video is that
I
would really LOVE to see someone put together an entire course or two
on
Ruby and distribute it online.

What do y’all think?

I think that’s a great idea and I’ve already experimented with this a
bit. There’s test on http://www.loudthinking.com/share/800x600.html
showing how 1 minute of tutorial can be compressed down to 1 MB.

–
Jim Freeze
The debate rages on: Is PL/I Bachtrian or Dromedary?

7

Hi David,

David Heinemeier Hansson wrote:

One thought that occurred to me while I was watching the video is that I
would really LOVE to see someone put together an entire course or two on
Ruby and distribute it online.

What do y’all think?

I think that’s a great idea and I’ve already experimented with this a
bit. There’s test on http://www.loudthinking.com/share/800x600.html
showing how 1 minute of tutorial can be compressed down to 1 MB.

My plan was to make a whole series of these for introducing all facets
of Rails in a form where it’s very easy to follow along on your own.
This is a somewhat time-consuming endevour, so I don’t know when it’ll
be, though.

That is exactly what I meant. I think if you would do that you will have
a great advantage over other OS-Frameworks. It is, for a lot of
people, so much easier to follow such a presentation than to read
between the lines. Such video tutorials are a very powerful tool.

I don’t know if it is more work than writing the documentation. It is of
course a lot more work to do both.

I think I would be willing to contribute to such a project, making lots
a small videos showing how things are done. What is holding me back for
the moment is the hefty price of the software and the fact that I know
almost nothing about Rails. What could be done would be to make an
outline of what kinds of tutorials need to be done, a big list, and than
one could pick a couple and do some…

Good luck with your exams.

Sascha

8

David Heinemeier Hansson wrote:

Oddball Idea: What I’d really like to see is a way for the community to
hire within itself for tasks like this. Or to get the documentation
done. Or similar things. I’d love to donate cash to a variety of
projects to improve their documentation. I don’t know if there’s enough
interest in Ruby to make it worthwhile for anyone to make something of
it. Or if introducing money to open source documentation is really the
way to go anyway.

I’ve thought about this. Odder ideas have materialized IMO.

I’ve also thought about hiring people for bug fixes and enhancements to
my own software. Not something that has been practical for me, but might
be soon. Not any real money in most cases, just: “Hey, a hundred bucks
if you’ll add XYZ support to this code.”

The site rentacoder.com is interesting in the sense that it’s used by
both the software “buyer” and “seller” – and the prices may be one or
two orders of magnitude lower than they “should” be.

I once posted a little Ruby problem there – getting ActiveScriptRuby
and HomeSeer to play nicely, long a dream of mine – and got no takers.

FWIW, at the time there were over 80 people there who claimed knowledge
of Ruby IIRC.

But I’m just rambling now.

Hal

9

I've set up the PetStore project on rubyforge.org:

  rubyforge.org/projects/petstore

Indeed, it's also good to demonstrate the quality of the different data
modelling libraries (SDS, TapKit, ActiveRecords, Madeleine, pure SQL
etc.).

Everyone interested in contributing to the data-model code or the
web-application is welcome. Very nice would be to document each step
done during the development.

Regards,

  Michael

···

On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 08:53:35AM +0900, Sascha Ebach wrote:

Hi,

>One thought that occurred to me while I was watching the video is that I
>would really LOVE to see someone put together an entire course or two on
>Ruby and distribute it online. There's just so much that I don't have a
>really solid understanding of in Ruby that I really want to know. Ok, I
>haven't been a developer in years, I do mostly sys admin these days and
>Ruby is my language of choice for automation.

Yes, that would be a great idea. Using some kind of screen cam software
like RoboDemo (http://www.macromedia.com/software/robodemo/\), but maybe
not so expensive. It would be great to have a multipart tutorial about
how to program the "pet store" in Rails, Cerise, Arrow, Borges, IOWA,

10

I think that’s a great idea and I’ve already experimented with this a
bit. There’s test on http://www.loudthinking.com/share/800x600.html
showing how 1 minute of tutorial can be compressed down to 1 MB.

Sorry if I missed it, but what did you use to make the video?
This is a really powerfull educational tool!

It’s a combination of SnapProX[1] for OS X (capturing the original
input) and Camtasia[2] for Windows (converting it to Flash). Joel
Spolsky has a perfect example of how cool this can be with narration:
http://www.fogcreek.com/ppdemo/

[1] http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/
[2] Camtasia - Fast and Easy Video Editing Software | TechSmith

···

–
David Heinemeier Hansson,
http://www.instiki.org/ – A No-Step-Three Wiki in Ruby
http://www.basecamphq.com/ – Web-based Project Management
http://www.loudthinking.com/ – Broadcasting Brain
http://www.nextangle.com/ – Development & Consulting Services

11

il Sun, 23 May 2004 04:08:35 +0900, Hal Fulton

The site rentacoder.com is interesting in the sense that it’s used by
both the software “buyer” and “seller” – and the prices may be one or
two orders of magnitude lower than they “should” be.

I believe the gnome project has a ‘bounty’ project that somehow works
like this. It would be nice if rubycentral could have one too.

12

Sascha Ebach wrote:

I think I would be willing to contribute to such a project, making lots
a small videos showing how things are done. What is holding me back for
the moment is the hefty price of the software

Has anyone used vnc2swf? It looks similar to the links posted earlier
in the thread (doubt it has sound though).

and the fact that I know almost nothing about Rails.

You and me (and the rest of the world) both - looks promising
though.

This time next year we’ll be drinking beers on the beach,
watching the flaming wreck
of J2EE sink beneath the waves, mark my words :slight_smile:

13

Hi,

[1] http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/
[2] Camtasia - Fast and Easy Video Editing Software | TechSmith

Also, Macromedia’s RoboDemo, which in my opinion is the best of them
all, producing the smallest possible files, because of its integration
with Flash. Now this is something Flash is really useful for.

It is very expensive though.

Sascha

14

I’m trying to copy the entire contents of one directory to another:

source = "/var/www/html/sites/demo"
dest = “var/www/html/sites/newsite”

The source directory contains a file, index.html, and a directory
cgi-bin, which contains some scripts and such.

What I want is for the ‘dest’ to have a complete copy of everything in
’source’ with all the files in ‘source’ in ‘dest’ and any
subdirectories of ‘source’ copied to ‘dest’ with all their contents,
recursively.

When I use:

FileUtils.cp_r( source, dest )

I end up with a directory ‘/var/www/html/sites/newsite/demo’ containing
the contents of the ‘source’ directory with everything copied properly.

Looking in the fileutils.rb source code, the comments state that this
is the correct behaviour.

Unfortunately, this is not what I want.

I tried using one of the examples from the fileutils.rb source:

FileUtils.cp_r( Dir.glob(source + "/*"), dest )

and end up with the following error:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:747: No such file or directory - /var/www/html/sites/newsite/cgi-bin' (Errno::ENOENT) from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:732:ineach’
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:732:in
fu_each_src_dest0' from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:724:infu_each_src_dest’
from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:349:in `cp_r’
from /usr/local/sbin/newsite.rb:70
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:747: st2 = File.stat(b)

The way I interpret this is that FileUtils.cp_r(), when it’s given a
list of files, doesn’t create and recurse into directories that it
finds along the way.

Can anyone tell me how to get FileUtils to do what I want i.e. copy the
contents of one directory to another directory, recursively?

Or, is there another way? I’m not clear on whether FileUtils is up to
date, etc. and just want to get the job done!

Thanks!

Steve

15

You could contribute, too, to the fundme.net project. It’s early on, but
it’ll be coded in Ruby, I think.

Ari

···

On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 09:38:45AM +0900, gabriele renzi wrote:

il Sun, 23 May 2004 04:08:35 +0900, Hal Fulton

The site rentacoder.com is interesting in the sense that it’s used by
both the software “buyer” and “seller” – and the prices may be one or
two orders of magnitude lower than they “should” be.

I believe the gnome project has a ‘bounty’ project that somehow works
like this. It would be nice if rubycentral could have one too.

16

Dick Davies wrote:

Sascha Ebach wrote:

I think I would be willing to contribute to such a project, making
lots a small videos showing how things are done. What is holding me
back for the moment is the hefty price of the software

Has anyone used vnc2swf? It looks similar to the links posted earlier
in the thread (doubt it has sound though).

Great. Haven’t even heard about it before. You could always record the
audio afterwards. You will pay less money upfront, but invest more time.
It’s great that there is something like that.

and the fact that I know almost nothing about Rails.

You and me (and the rest of the world) both - looks promising
though.

This time next year we’ll be drinking beers on the beach,
watching the flaming wreck
of J2EE sink beneath the waves, mark my words :slight_smile:

Hey, I will pay for all the beer you can drink if the J2EE ship sinks.
But if it doesn’t, you have to pay. Deal?

Sascha

17

Also, Macromedia’s RoboDemo, which in my opinion is the best of them
all, producing the smallest possible files, because of its integration
with Flash. Now this is something Flash is really useful for.

Camtasia can use Flash as well. The example I linked to was Flash. But
that’s also kind of expensive. $300. Add that to the $70 that Snap Pro
X costs and it’s starting to add up. I doubt there’s much of a discount
for open source projects :wink:

···

–
David Heinemeier Hansson,
http://www.instiki.org/ – A No-Step-Three Wiki in Ruby
http://www.basecamphq.com/ – Web-based Project Management
http://www.loudthinking.com/ – Broadcasting Brain
http://www.nextangle.com/ – Development & Consulting Services

18

Sorry for the typo!

The ‘dest’ variable does contain a leading slash.

Steve

19

Sascha Ebach wrote:

Dick Davies wrote:

Sascha Ebach wrote:

I think I would be willing to contribute to such a project, making
lots a small videos showing how things are done. What is holding me
back for the moment is the hefty price of the software

Has anyone used vnc2swf? It looks similar to the links posted earlier
in the thread (doubt it has sound though).

Great. Haven’t even heard about it before. You could always record the
audio afterwards. You will pay less money upfront, but invest more
time. It’s great that there is something like that.

and the fact that I know almost nothing about Rails.

You and me (and the rest of the world) both - looks promising
though.

This time next year we’ll be drinking beers on the beach,
watching the flaming wreck
of J2EE sink beneath the waves, mark my words :slight_smile:

Hey, I will pay for all the beer you can drink if the J2EE ship sinks.
But if it doesn’t, you have to pay. Deal?

Sascha

I’ll NOT take that bet because I suppose there are and will be in the
future those companies that prefer to pay a lot of money for
applications - making a choice between accountability and rigor against
pragmatism and simplicity. Sometime back, as a development shop for the
intranet of a large co, we needed to choose between components and
scripting. We chose scripting and ran rings around other who chose
components - and especially those who were experimenting w/websphere.
Our apps were simple data in data out apps so scripting served us well.
If i were building some superduper banking app i would of course take
pause and consider more heavily ‘big software’. But, in my view, that
gap is increasingly shrinking as scripting lanuguages become…better.
So let ‘big hardware’ do the work and give developers fridays off to
drink beer.

beer, the breakfast of champions, cheers,paul

20

Hi,

At Sun, 23 May 2004 11:52:00 +0900,
Stephen Steiner wrote in [ruby-talk:101077]:

Can anyone tell me how to get FileUtils to do what I want i.e. copy the
contents of one directory to another directory, recursively?

  FileUtils.cp_r( source + "/.", dest )

···

--
Nobu Nakada