You can fork the project here: http://github.com/pjdavis/roart

/opt/ruby-enterprise/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ZenTest-4.1.3/lib/unit_diff.rb:70:in `gets': No such file or directory - -u (Errno::ENOENT)
from /opt/ruby-enterprise/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ZenTest-4.1.3/lib/unit_diff.rb:70:in `parse_input'
from /opt/ruby-enterprise/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ZenTest-4.1.3/lib/unit_diff.rb:182:in `unit_diff'
from /opt/ruby-enterprise/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ZenTest-4.1.3/lib/unit_diff.rb:56:in `unit_diff'
from /opt/ruby-enterprise/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/ZenTest-4.1.3/bin/unit_diff:37
from /opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/unit_diff:19:in `load'
from /opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/unit_diff:19

It turns out that the autotest file in rubygems/bin/autotest wasn’t using the -s flag in the shebang line and that was causing the -u in the unit_diff program to be interpreted as a filename. To fix, i simply added -s to the end of the shebang line so it looks something like this:

#!/opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/ruby -ws

…custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require’: no such file to load — iconv (LoadError)

If you ever have to install Ruby Enterprise Edition on FreeBSD, you may run into the same problem. What I had to do was.

 cd ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090421/source/ext/iconv
/opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/ruby extconf.rb --prefix=/opt/ruby-enterprise --with-iconv-dir=/usr/local/
cp iconv.so /opt/ruby-enterprise/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-freebsdx.x/

That should get you running without having to reinstall Ruby Enterprise Edition. Why does this happen though? I found this on a mailing list from Hongli Lai at Phusion.

The problem is that FreeBSD doesn’t add /usr/local/lib to GCC’s linker search path for some reason. libiconv.so is in /usr/local/lib, and so libiconv.so is not detected while installing REE. I had to manually hack iconv’s extconf.rb to work around this.

RSpec conveniently gives us a way to say that a method will raise an exception when it is called. and_raise(ExceptionClass). Trying this out myself, I kept getting back

wrong number of arguments (0 for 1)

and I didn’t understand why. I came across a posting to the rspec-users mailing list that said that what i was doing (

agent.stub(:get).with(some_url).and_raise(WWW::Mechanize::ResponseCodeError)

wasn’t quite right. Many exception classes, it turns out, take an argument when they are raised. So I tried

agent.stub(:get).with(some_url).and_raise(WWW::Mechanize::ResponseCodeError(agent))

and that still didn’t work, as agent didn’t respond to :code. A little bit of stubbing later, and agent responds to code (returned a “400″) and now it works like a charm.

First off, I agree with the sentiment of the post, Rails is not the best way in all situations, just like PHP, Sinatra, Merb, Grails and whatever that busted C++ web framework is called are not the best way for every situation. However, Rails is a pretty good way.

I believe that Rails is sufficiently versatile that most web-based applications could be written successfully in Rails. Partly because of the limited domain in which web applications are created, and partly because of the sheer amount of mental power behind Rails development right now.

Many of the Rails Consultancies springing up (Hashrocket, ENTP, etc…) are using rails almost exclusively. Does this mean they are treating rails as the destination? Well, not exactly. Rails just happens to be the tool they’re most comfortable with.

A lot of what is heard from the Rails super-evangelists is just that, someone pumping religion as the end-all be-all of whatever domain they’re in. However, I would venture to say that the vast majority of the the top Rails developers would say that Rails is not the best suite of tools for every situation.

It seems that the lash-back against Rails in the latter part of 2008 was less about the technology itself, and more about a) the hype building up around rails since 2005 b) the high profile outages of Twitter, c) spreading of FUD about something new by a minority that didn’t like Rails for various (not necessarily invalid) reasons.

It happens all the time. A very vocal minority will try something new, decided they don’t like it, and let everyone else know they don’t like it and why you shouldn’t either. They share their opinions as fact, over-generalize and spin information, and use community rivalries as reasons to dismiss whatever it is they hate. I think it’s less a technology issue than a human nature issue.

That said. Rails IS NOT the be-all end-all of web development. You should devote time to exploring new tools, ideas, and technologies. That’s how you grow, however when you find something you like, you tend to stick with it. Nobody pays the bills by jumping to every new flavor of the month; eventually you have to produce something.

def validate_presence_of(klass, fields)
  fields.each do |field|
    it "should include #{field}" do
      lambda do
        instance = klass.create(field.to_sym => nil)
        instance.errors.on(field.to_sym).should_not be_nil
      end.should_not change(klass, :count)
    end
  end
end

Stick that in your spec helper file, and now you can just add

validate_presence_of(SomeClass, %w(afield another_field field3 ))

to your model specs, and you’ve just saved yourself alot of typing, and it’s still pretty clear what you’re trying to test.

ERROR:  could not find gem svn2git locally or in a repository

and James Coglan doesn’t have github gems enabled on the repository. So I had to clone the repository and install the gem manually.

% git clone git://github.com/jcoglan/svn2git.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/pjdavis/ruby/svn2git/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 46, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (28/28), done.
remote: Total 46 (delta 14), reused 46 (delta 14)
Receiving objects: 100% (46/46), 6.79 KiB, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (14/14), done.

% rake gem
(in /Users/pjdavis/ruby/svn2git)
/opt/ruby-enterprise/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rake-0.8.3/lib/rake/gempackagetask.rb:13:Warning: Gem::manage_gems is deprecated and will be removed on or after March 2009.
mkdir -p pkg
WARNING:  no rubyforge_project specified
WARNING:  deprecated autorequire specified
Successfully built RubyGem
Name: svn2git
Version: 1.0.0
File: svn2git-1.0.0.gem
mv svn2git-1.0.0.gem pkg/svn2git-1.0.0.gem

% sudo gem install pkg/svn2git-1.0.0.gem
Successfully installed svn2git-1.0.0
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for svn2git-1.0.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for svn2git-1.0.0...

Sweet. So let’s try this thing out. Following the README file, I try

% svn2git http://svn.myserver.com/app
git: 'svn' is not a git-command. See 'git --help'.
git: 'svn' is not a git-command. See 'git --help'.
fatal: Not a git repository
fatal: Not a git repository

Well. Crap.

I do a bit more digging, and try to convert it the normal way, with git svn clone -s but get the same thing. As it turns out, according to Fat Penguin, when I installed git-core from MacPorts i didn’t use the +svn flag, so git-svn wasn’t installed with the rest of git. So here I go back MacPorts and

% sudo port deactivate git-core @1.6.0.2_2+doc
--->  Deactivating git-core @1.6.0.2_2+docs
% sudo port install git-core +svn
....bunch o' install crap....
--->  Activating git-core @1.6.0.5_0+doc+svn
--->  Cleaning git-core

and finally…

% svn2git http://svn.myserver.com/app

and BOOM! my svn repo is cloned into my current directory. Unfourtnatlly my current directory happend to be my projects directory. so i had app, config, db, etc… in the same folder as the rest of my projects. But after a little cleanup I had a git repository ready to work in, with my subversion logs still intact.

It turns out that StackOverflows content is licensed under Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic, basically meaning that you can Distribute freely, and derive content(remix) from the work.

Anyway, I saw at the bottom there was an upgrade for the license (what can’t be upgraded these days) and was reading through the different verbiage on the 3.0 license. The only real change on the dumbed down page was adding ‘or a compatible’ to the list of derivative works licensing requirements. Seems innocuous enough, however, in the legaleeze (e.g. Legal Code) …

You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under the terms of: (i) this License; (ii) a later version of this License with the same License Elements as this License; (iii) a Creative Commons jurisdiction license (either this or a later license version) that contains the same License Elements as this License (e.g., Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 US)); (iv) a Creative Commons Compatible License.

Part (iv) looks kind of cool. It means if I found another license that was kinda like this that I liked better, I could license my derivative work under that. That’s very neat of Creative Commons, letting me change licenses. HOWEVER.

“Creative Commons Compatible License” means a license that is listed at http://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses that has been approved by Creative Commons as being essentially equivalent to this License, including, at a minimum, because that license: (i) contains terms that have the same purpose, meaning and effect as the License Elements of this License; and, (ii) explicitly permits the relicensing of adaptations of works made available under that license under this License or a Creative Commons jurisdiction license with the same License Elements as this License.

So let’s check out http://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses and tell me how many licenses you see there. Yeah, none. So, if you use a Creative Commons license, your content is, for the foreseeable future, trapped in a Creative Commons License.

sudo gem update --system

However, there is a problem with updating rubygems this way when you don’t have rubygems-update installed. You can get around this by using

sudo gem install rubygems-update
sudo update_rubygems

After updating rubygems, install rails 2.2 with

sudo gem install rails

and you should have the new version of rails.

If you have an existing project, cd to that project directory and

rake rails:update 

to update your javascript, scripts, and configs. This should get you running on the new version of Ruby on Rails.

Another thing to remember is using option forwardfor, which passes the domain along with the request, so it will go to the right virtual host.

Also, check out this video by 37signals about how they use HAProxy and maxconn 1 to get around mongrel’s blocking requests.

Nuts and Bolts: HAProxy

listen mysite 0.0.0.0:80
        mode http
        option forwardfor
        balance roundrobin
        option httpchk http://full.domain.name/check.htm
        server app1 192.168.1.1:80 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 5 maxconn 1
        server app2 192.168.1.2:80 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 5 maxconn 1