Robby on Rails

I promised that I would send a link out or something… so here goes.

Tonight at the Portland Ruby Brigade meeting, the question about having Active Record READ from one database and WRITE to another database was brought up. The discussion was going in the route of, “How can we make AR do this?”

I chimed in with my usual PostgreSQL bias. “pgpool.”

Let something else handle this. Infact, with PgPool, you don’t have to change any code in your Rails application to make this work. :-)

So, take a look at: pgpool

Enjoy!

This is what happened to the Portland Ruby Brigade today:

• Got double booked on meeting night with the PHP group
• Got asked to leave after getting threats of the lights being turned off
• Stayed almost til closing time at a brew… we heard, “Last Call!” and still continued talking…

Tonight I finally got to meet Ben, Caleb, Justin Watkins, Marcus Estes, Lennon Day-Reynolds, Jeremy Kempter (bitsweat), Aaron Johnson, and Peat Bakke-each for the first time. I also got to see Scott Laird (of Typo fame) and John Labovitz again. Scott and I met at FOSCON and John once found me when he was trying to hack people at a coffee shop and saw that I was on the wireless network. Okay, he wasn’t hacking… but found me at Urban Grind. :)

We had about ~25 people show up. I don’t think that there was a head count made. We sat around in a big circle and fired questions at both Derek Sivers and Jeremy Kemper. Topics ranged from how Derek found his way to PostgreSQL to why he thinks that he is an amazing web designer (smirk) to why Ruby and Rails was picked as the platform to move to from a PHP/MySQL system. Jeremy shared some insights into some problems with Rails that need to be worked on (boolean-stuff for example), tips on debugging, and many other things that I don’t recall off the top of my head.

It was a very relaxed and open conversation with some cool local developers who are working on getting their Rails/PostgreSQL system finished.

After we got kicked out of FreeGeek most of migrated to the Lucky Lab Pub… and then we realized that Derek and Jeremy didn’t show up. So, we found our ways to a big table and broke up into smaller conversations. I got stuck at the table with Ben, Scott, Caleb, and John. Actually, it was quite enjoyable. Scott talked about his work with Typo and Ben and I gave him some of our thoughts on things.

This is a horrible summary of the whole evening. It’s what I remember… and it’s late and I look forward to getting to hang out with this gang again in the future. I think that it was great to get to finally meet a few of the people that I have worked on some smaller projects with. If everything works out well, expect there to be some more projects coming out of the PDX.rb in the coming months. :-)

Thanks again to Derek Sivers and Jeremy Kemper for taking time out of their busy schedule to meet & greet with the Portland Ruby people. :-)

Apparently, there was a double booking at the venue tonight where the Portland Ruby Brigade is having the monthly meeting at.

Who are we double booked with? The Portland PHP user’s group. I’m not kidding!

First of all, this kind of puts a minor blow to our plan for tonight. We have Derek and Jeremy (bitsweat) coming by to discuss their work with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL. We’re not sure yet how the double-booking happened… so that remains to be figured out. However, the other group starts a hour earlier, so we can probably sneak in towards the end and then show them the Ruby way.

The funny part? The discussion with Derek from CD Baby is supposed to surround their move from PHP to Ruby. We might be able to pick up a few more PHP coders tonight. :-)

Wish us luck… it could get dirty tonight.

This is a brief addition to the post from a few days ago, Master, console, and servant.

Noradio on IRC pointed out one thing that I did not mention in my previous blog entry… that you can bind a subsession of irb to a specific object. What??

Okay, let me explain this a bit more. Instead of always setting a variable to hold an instance of an object, you can be a bit more creative with irb.

I present…

So, for example. You can perform the following in script/console.

irb Model.find(4) name

If there is an attribute/method called name in your model, then it will call it there. See my screen shot for some more details of how I used the jobs and fg # commands to switch jobs…. and I even found out what happens when you attempt to switch to the current thread. :-)

Until next time…

I love console in Rails. It is absolutely one of my favorite tools in Rails. I probably spend more time testing stuff in console than I do in a browser, which is a good thing. Right?

Today, I was reading through a part of Programming Ruby (I like to open up to a random page and read something every once in a while) and came across a section on page 189. Subsessions and Bindings I was not aware that I could do this within irb and immediately thought to myself, “can I do that with console?” Console is afterall…just irb with all the Rails features pre-configured. So, I decided that I would try this out the next time I was in console.

That time came and passed… so, does it work?

The answer: YES!

I even have proof… :-)

This should eliminate a few tabs in iterm for me and works just like the Unix jobs and fg commands do.

If you are still not using console yet, why?

Perhaps you enjoy the pain of constant browser reloads because you keep trying to figure out if that method works. Often times, you can copy and paste your code right into console. It’s beautiful and gives you a quicker response than your browser will ever. But, you already knew that. Right?

Don’t get me wrong, I can totally understand your justifications for the extra pain. Who wants to work in their terminal more than they have to? (I do… but I do it because I am at home in my terminal.) There is nothing pretty about the terminal… but I feel in control. Are you a servant of your pretty GUI IDE and browser or are you the master of your terminal? ;-)

Okay, I will end this nonsense with my new console marketing campaign. I have employeed three pigeons to help me work on this one and the end result of our hard work?

Have you ruby script/console‘d today?

Yes. Classy and Original. :-)

Back to writing…

One of our Typo blog hosting customers here at PLANET ARGON, Joe O’Brien, has signed a contract with the Pragmatic Programmers to write another much needed Rails book. He hasn’t yet announced just what the focus will be, but I am sure it will be a valuable addition to the growing collection of published and to-be-published Rails books.

I have only briefly talked with Joe, an employee of the famed ThoughtWorks (home of Martin Fowler) and from the few conversations that we have had over the phone and by email, it’s apparent that Pragmatic Programmers have made an excellent choice. (and he’s a pretty nice guy.) :-)

Joe writes, “The gravity of what I’ve just taken on is beginning to set in though. I have a ton of work cutout for me.”

Yes. It is unarguably a ton of work... but it is also quite rewarding and has been a great experience for me.

I look forward to the day when I can walk into Powell’s Technical Bookstore and find a healthy selection of both Ruby and Rails related books. :-)

Congratulations Joe!