Just an FYI…

Rails Rumble 2008 has started. I am signed up to be a judge, It would be pretty interesting to see what comes out of this 48 hour hack fest.

The Rails Rumble is a 48 hour web application development competition. As a contestant, you get one weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web property that you can, using the awesome power of Ruby on Rails

Read more about it from their latest blog post: It’s On!

I’ll try to get a list going of the open source projects that come out of this event, and post the git hub links.

Here is the first app from what someone had posted in IRC: http://gentrify.r08.railsrumble.com/ - maybe its something to follow?

**** Update

Links to watch:

http://www.trackclass.com

http://gentrify.r08.railsrumble.com/

http://li47-127.members.linode.com/

http://tweetfu.r08.railsrumble.com/

http://chores.r08.railsrumble.com/

http://laktek.r08.railsrumble.com/

http://justafinlist.r08.railsrumble.com/

http://confreader.r08.railsrumble.com/

http://sheepfit.r08.railsrumble.com/

Buying a house, whew what a mess. I never thought buying a house would be so stressful, especially when you are dealing with a builder / developer. We are in contract negotiations right now for a small raised ranch on Long Island. Going back and forth trying to get everything the builder quoted in person in the contract is essential and pain staking! He says one thing in person, yet the contract states other thing. I am sure it will be all ironed out shortly, and the building process will begin. I am just happy its a good sized lot, and we will have a nice size backyard to landscape down the road. Landscaping is a whole other issue, since its very basic when getting a new house. I guess that is something I’ll worry about once we are in and settled, and of course once we have some spare cash to do so. Any one have some thoughts or suggestions?

After playing with streamlined, I discovered ActiveScaffold. ActiveScaffold seems to be a bit more fine tuned and ready for production use then streamlined when it comes to restful development. This is just what I was looking for the speed up the dev of the backend admin area. While its not a final solution, it allows you to get things going fast and start coding the core of your app without the need to code all the minor crud features in the beginning. Its worth a look at, try the demo here: http://demo.activescaffold.com/users

ActiveScaffold also allows you to override anything you need, layouts, columns, associations, etc.
It doesn’t get more simple and clean then that.

Main features:

* An AJAXified table interface for creating, updating, and deleting objects
* Automatic handling of ActiveRecord associations
* Sorting, Search and Pagination
* Graceful JavaScript degradation
* RESTful API support (XML/YAML/JSON) baked in
* Sexy CSS styling and theming support
* More extension points than you can shake a stick at
* Guaranteed to work on Firefox 1+, IE 6+ and Safari 2+
* Released under the MIT License, the same one as Rails itself, so you can use it freely in your commercial applications.

This has always been something I was thinking of, why caint I create my project initially with edge rails?

There are always minor changes in edge rails that can effect creating your project from using the stable version. Using the way below eliminates that issue by creating your initial project with edge.

mkdir -p new_project/vendor
cd new_project
svn co http://svn.rubyonrails.org/rails/trunk vendor/rails
ruby vendor/rails/railties/bin/rails .

Now you have yourself a fresh project base to start your new edge rails app.

Why I did not notice this earlier is beyond me, however, scaffold_resource is now just scaffold in edge rails. I must have been in a recent change committed.

Scaffold resource used to be the command ( script/generate scaffold_resource modelname) to generate a rest based (restful) scaffold of a model, along with the migration.

Now its just simply scaffold, same commands are available. (script/generate scaffold_resource modelname notes:text, etc)

I couldn’t find the change log in the Rails Trac for whatever reason.

Description:
The scaffold resource generator creates a model, a controller, and a
set of templates that’s ready to use as the starting point for your
REST-like, resource-oriented application. This basically means that it
follows a set of conventions to exploit the full set of HTTP verbs
(GET/POST/PUT/DELETE) and is prepared for multi-client access (like one
view for HTML, one for an XML API, one for ATOM, etc). Everything comes
with sample unit and functional tests as well.

The generator takes the name of the model as its first argument. This
model name is then pluralized to get the controller name. So
“scaffold post” will generate a Post model and a
PostsController and will be intended for URLs like /posts and
/posts/45.

As additional parameters, the generator will take attribute pairs
described by name and type. These attributes will be used to
prepopulate the migration to create the table for the model and to give
you a set of templates for the view. For example, “scaffold
post title:string created_on:date body:text published:boolean” will
give you a model with those four attributes, forms to create and edit
those models from, and an index that’ll list them all.

You don’t have to think up all attributes up front, but it’s a good
idea of adding just the baseline of what’s needed to start really
working with the resource.

The generator also adds a declaration to your config/routes.rb file
to hook up the rules that’ll point URLs to this new resource. If you
create a resource like “scaffold post”, it will add
“map.resources :posts” (notice the plural form) in the routes file,
making your new resource accessible from /posts.

Examples:
./script/generate scaffold post # no attributes, view will be anemic
./script/generate scaffold post title:string created_on:date body:text published:boolean
./script/generate scaffold purchase order_id:integer created_at:datetime amount:decimal

I was watching some of the screencasts as well as reading the PDF file of the tutorial they gave at rails conf of Streamlined.

I was quite impressed, and thought I would give it a shot to help speed up some of the minor admin interfaces. It definally worth a look at.

I also noticed with running rails edge you need to comment out a line in the following file in the streamlined plugin dir (streamlined/lib/streamlined/controller.rb)

Comment out (line 111): require_dependencies :ui, Dir["#{RAILS_ROOT}/app/streamlined/*.rb"].collect {|f| f.gsub(“.rb”, “”)}

#require_dependencies :ui, Dir["#{RAILS_ROOT}/app/streamlined/*.rb"].collect {|f| f.gsub(".rb", "")}

Everything seems to be working OK now, I am not sure if this is the “correct” fix, but I posted on the mailing list to get some feedback.

I’ll keep you updated and see if this causes any issues or if there is another fix / patch.

I setup the project into svn and redMine everything seems to be working out well. redMine is a nice little application for project management (bug tracking, svn browser, wiki), its worth taking a look at and seems to be a viable alternative to trac.

After getting that setup, I went ahead and started working on the authentication system. Making some minor tweaks (fixed the redirect_to_url, which is not depreciated in edge rails), adding password resetting and started working on the user profile page. I also added a few other controllers and models to get things laid out. Tonight, I’ll finish the authentication and profile pages and hopefully start working on user roles, which should be interesting.

Regarding user roles, there will be three kinds. A Master admin, a company admin, then the employee’s of those companies. I am still debating how I am going to implement this. Any suggestions?

I found a few examples to read about today :

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/AccessControlListExample

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/SimpleAccessControlExample

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_on_Rails/ActiveRecord/Associations

http://reclusive-geek.blogspot.com/2006/12/pimping-controller.html

I’ll also be browsing through my many (to many) Rails books tonight to see some other possible solutions.

I figured I’d update you all on what I am doing, and will be doing over the next few weeks during my “free” time. I am currently spec’ing out a new Ruby on Rails project, and hope to begin coding right after this post. I figured this would be a good chance for me to blog a bit about rails as well as my project progress. I created a new category just for this project (Rails Ecommerce Project), so if you wish to follow it book mark this link: http://burm.net/category/rails-ecommerce-project/ or via the RSS feed http://burm.net/category/rails-ecommerce-project/feed

Also, any and all suggestions is appreciated (plugins, related links, etc). I can not give the specifics of the project, however I’ll explain the core. The project is a complete ecommerce solution where there will be a backed to control multiple websites. The back end will control all the products / prices / order processing / commissions / sales reports for all the sites from once central location.

Each site will have its own markup / pricing structure, set of products, categories, etc. The back end will also need to support multiple companies, meaning a site might be owned by Joe Blow, so when Joe or his employee’s login, they will only be able to see and access the info for their own site. In addition, there will be different roles for each person on each site. To add to the complexity, there will be also multiple order fulfillment companies that handle the orders once they are received. The choice for the fulfillment company will be made by the overall owner, not the individual site owner. However, I must keep in mind that each site owner must check the order, and process the order, then auto notifying the main owner of the new order for further processing (perhaps by adding a column in the DB flagging the order as being ready for final processing). Sorry if this is confusing, I am using this post to remind my self of the logic.

User Structure:

• Overall Owner / Main Admin
  • Site Owner/Site Admin
    • Employees

I chose to build the back end of the sites and the front ends as separate rails projects. Why? Because of the complexity and the multiple site factor. I think that building it separately will allow for more flexibility and ease of maintenance. I will also have a complete REST based API on the back end to eventually allow the building of other apps to interact with the RoR app.

Back end notes: Email notification, AIM / Gtalk notification, RSS Feeds

The front end will be resemble a someone regular shopping experience. Shopping cart, Checkout, PayPal, user registration, order status, etc. Non standard stuff: Custom order generator, order status details w/ RSS feeds, customer communication, email notification, and Instant Messaging notification.

Overall the project will be built mostly utilizing REST / RESTful dev, and will attempt to utilize plugins where it would make sense. Plugins that I will be using right off the bat:

Restful Authentication
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/restful_authentication
or (if OpenID enabled, not sure yet)
http://identity.eastmedia.com/identity/show/Restful+OpenID+Authentication
Notes: ./script/generate authenticated user

RSS Plugin
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/simple_rss
Notes: For feeds of orders, order status, etc.

Time Zone Plugin

http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/tzinfo_timezone

Notes:

Attachment_FU
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/attachment_fu
Notes: For attachements

Acts as commentable
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/acts_as_commentable
Notes: Debating this one… Not sure if I want to use this or code my own – Need to read more on the documentation.

Acts as textiled
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/acts_as_textiled
Notes:

Acts as taggable
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/acts_as_taggable
Notes: For tagging products, could be used as a “category” ?

Acts as ferret
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/acts_as_ferret
Notes: Full text site searching

Globalize
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/globalize
Notes: localization / globalization

As I was just browsing the web, found a nice little site with a few quick simple Rails cheat sheets: http://www.red91.com/archives/downloads/

Thats its for now, I’ll be sure to post the progress, updates, and my notes along the way. I have quite a challenge ahead, I better get to work.