Jeet's world

Vivek Kundra Keynote at the Cloud Computing Forum & Workshop

2010-07-05T13:39:00.000-05:00

2010-01-09T00:14:00.005-05:00

RubyNation is coming back to DC area again.

validates_uniqueness_of issue resolved

2009-12-10T11:30:00.002-05:00

Recently I had an issue when Rails validation validates_uniqueness_of did not work on one of my table columns. When I looked at the Rails logs, the query to check if the value supplied in form exists was using empty string in the where clause. Then I looked at the validation code in ActiveRecord and it turned out that the column had type of text in the database and this validation skips columns of type text. Actually I never meant this column to be type text and even the migration showed it of type string (not sure why this happened) which should have mapped this column to varchar. But once I changed the type of column to varchar(255), everything worked fine. I was using JRuby, Rails 2.3.2 and Sqlite3 database on windows XP. Hope it helps somebody else.

Product review of Balsamiq Mockups

2009-09-12T22:20:00.005-05:00

Balsamic Review

Recently I came across Balsamiq Mockup which is a Adobe AIR based application to create mockups. I recently used it to create multiple mockups for a website that I am working on. Here is a brief review of that effort.

Here are some of the features that I really like about this tool.

Alignment

left - top to bottom (e.g. all labels/input fields in a form
middle - useful for adding multiple items at the same level horizontally (e.g. a label and input textbox in a form)

Variety of elements

Amazing number of UI elements that can be added to mockups. They are nicely grouped into logical categories like containers, buttons, layout etc.

Customization of elements

Each element provides all possible kind of customization that might be needed for it.
I really liked the customization to move elements forward or backwards when they overlap. Very useful when using containers.

Grouping of elements

It is very easy to group a number of elements by just clicking the mouse and dragging it to cover multiple elements. They can now be easily moved around as a group. This makes it very easy to change their positioning

Overall it is a great tool to rapidly develop a User Interface prototype. I am in the process using it in conjuction with Napkee which builds upon Balsamiq bmml (xml output of balsamiq mockup) and generates stylized html or Adobe flex output. I think the two of them combined make a compelling case for a web developer with limited UI skills to reapidly develop UI mockups. But in itself Balsamiq is great to develop quick prototypes in an agile manner.

Bridging the gap to Rails

2009-05-07T21:10:00.003-05:00

There has been a new initiative in the Rails world "To create an inclusive and friendly Ruby on Rails community". Check out http://railsbridge.org/. I may contribute to it in coming times.

RubyNation coming up

2009-03-28T14:22:00.004-05:00

RubyNation, the DC area Ruby related conference is coming up again this summer from June12 to June 13, 2009. Check out http://www.rubynation.org for more details.

Deploying Rails app as war with warbler to Tomcat

2008-08-07T13:53:00.003-05:00

If you are deploying your Rails app to Tomcat using warbler and the Tomcat install directory has spaces in then you must escape the slashes and also add a starting and ending quote properly escaped as shown below in config/warbler.rb:

config.autodeploy_dir = "\"C:\\Program Files\\Apache Software Foundation\\Tomcat 6.0.18\\webapps\""

Ruby Conference in Northern Virginia

2008-06-16T21:36:00.002-05:00

RubyNation is an annual Ruby conference serving the Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC areas. This year's RubyNation will happen on August 1 & 2, 2008 in Herndon, VA. Please visit the RubyNation site for more details.

Railing on JBoss

2007-09-21T21:41:00.000-05:00

I recently successfully deployed a Ruby on Rails app running on jruby that uses ActiveRecord-JDBC adapter to talk to Oracle 10g database to run on JBoss 4.2.1. I used warbler plugin from Nick Seiger to convert the rails app to war file. I basically followed the instructions at this article about warbler (http://blog.nicksieger.com/articles/2007/09/04/warbler-a-little-birdie-to-introduce-your-rails-app-to-java) and this one on using warbler with JBoss http://www.advogato.org/person/johnnyb/. Warbler makes it very easy to convert a rails app into a war file.

There were a few quirks during this process which are listed below and hopefully these will be helpful to those trying to do the same. Theoretically this should work on any J2EE compliant app server or even Servlet containers.

I had to uncomment the following line in warble.rb (warbler config file)

#config.gems = ["ActiveRecord-JDBC", "jruby-openssl"]

and change it to

config.gems = ["rails", "ActiveRecord-JDBC"]

This packages rails and ActiveRecord-JDBC gems in the war file.

To use ActiveRecord-JDBC adapter you need to add the following code to environment.rb file

if RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /java/
require 'rubygems'
gem 'ActiveRecord-JDBC
require 'jdbc_adapter'
end
You need to be careful about where in that file you add these lines. They must be added before the line

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|

This one should be obvious but you need to add the jdbc driver jar to JBoss lib folder. Since I used the default configuration in Jboss I added it to C:\opt\jboss-4.2.1.GA\server\default\lib folder.

Accessing MySql from remote machine in my network

2007-06-21T00:44:00.000-05:00

Just got my Ubuntu box up and running with Fiesty Fawn and installed MySQL server (5.x). The default server does not allow, the MySQL server to be accessed remotely. Besides adding the user to user's table in MySQL database, I had to additionally edit my.cnf file in /etc/mysql and change the following setting:

from
bind-address = 127.0.0.1

to

bind-address = 0.0.0.0

The IP of 0.0.0.0 allows incoming connection from any host and of course you need to make sure there is not firewall in between blocking the port 3306. Since all this setup sits behind my Linux firewall it is pretty secure and allows me to develop my ROR apps from the windows box by accessing MySQL databases on another machine.

Ruby and Rails Cheat Sheets

2007-02-10T12:23:00.000-05:00

It is hard to remember all the useful Ruby and Rails utilities that one uses on a regular basis. But then you don't have to, there are some very commonly used Ruby and Rails related cheat sheets here and more can be easily added and shared.

Rails Plugins Presentation

2006-10-26T22:50:00.000-05:00

Yesterday at our local Northern Virginia Ruby User group meeting I gave a presentation on Rails Plugins. The presentation can be accessed here. In this presentation I discuss some general info about Rails plugins followed by the installation, configuration and usage of four useful plugins tabnav, acts_as_authenticated, file_column and acts_as_state_machine.

On Ruby: New JRuby Interview (part 1)

2006-09-30T00:40:00.000-05:00

On Ruby: New JRuby Interview (part 1)

Upgrade Engines to work with Rails 1.1.6

2006-09-02T13:36:00.000-05:00

My Rails app at www.saraibooking.com just broke as Textdrive have upgraded Rails to 1.1.6 and the version of Engines, Log Engine and User Engine I had was not compatible with Rails 1.1.6. I removed the folder engines, login_engine and user_engine under RAILS_ROOT/vendor/plugins and installed engines, login_engine and user_engine using script/plugin, restarted rails and everything was nice and dandy again. Using engines with Rails is slightly risky in this regard as almost every new version of Rails seems to break them. DHH did not had any good words to say about Engines at RailsConf in Chicago.

Tabs in Ruby on Rails

2006-08-17T19:37:00.000-05:00

I am starting to prepare for a presentation for my local Ruby users group Novarug and the topic is cool Ruby on Rails plugins. In this presentation I will demoing some very useful plugins and in this quest I found a very nifty plugin that provides tabs functionality to RoR applications. It is so easy to setup (isn't that true for all ROR plugins) and in minutes I had the tab functionality added to my RoR application. Check it out here.

Trying openbox on gentoo

2005-04-15T18:05:00.000-05:00

Since Gnome is pretty resource intensive desktop environment, I decided to install openbox Widows Manager on my latest gentoo installation. It is certainly very fast to get loaded but there is not much to see. Of course I had to use right click of mouse to see the menu's. Also tried pypanel which is supposed to help create panels in openbox but still trying to figure out how. If anybody has used pypanel drop me an email to give me some pointers.