Download it here!

Just found this little tidbit about returning a boolean from a tinyint column tonight on the rails wiki...

Columns which are either boolean or tinyint(1) are recognised as booleans by ActiveRecord. So, if you have a table “people” and a column “rocks tinyint(1)”, you can say:

person = People.find(1)
person.rocks = true

However, person.rocks will return an integer, and Ruby thinks that 0 is true. If you want to test for truth, use person.rocks?, like this view example:

<% if person.rocks? %>
  You rock, dude!
<% end %>

I did not know that. Pretty dang cool.

Ryan Wood is a web developer and owner of Sourcescape, a small web development company in beautiful Greenville, South Carolina, where he specializes in building web pplications using Ruby on Rails and other open source tools.

He also heads up Upstate on Rails, the Ruby & Rails user group for Upstate SC.

During the day, he can be found parading as a Senior Software Architect at ClearCheck Payment Solutions where he architects and builds web applications using ColdFusion.

The Rails Way is off with their first code review. It is really great to see into the coding process of top notch hackers. Their first review deals with “acts_as” code modules and “premature extraction”. Koz keeps it simple.

These both illustrate a common anti-pattern I see with rails programmers: premature extraction. Just because rails has a bunch of meta programming magic with names like acts_as_list, doesn’t mean you need it.

The process is all about keeping it simple and extracting only when you need to. I’ve been learning more and more about that in a Ruby application I’ve been working on lately. It is a challenge, especially coming from .NET, to not overly abstract early.

Most who know me, know that I am a big fan of Ruby and Rails. I simply enjoy using the language far more than others I’ve used. The biggest reason is the community. I my previous post about the importance of choosing a community, I note the differences that I’ve experienced. Here’s another…

Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski have introduced The Rails Way, a site where you can upload code and they will analyze it according to best practices (a.k.a. the rails way). This is not for-profit, it is for the community—a way to help others grow in their coding skills. I really do enjoy being a part of this community.

You can read the intro on Jamis’ blog.

The site is up and the countdown is on. RailsConf is in Portland this year from May 17-20. Better plan to buy tickets early as they sold out in a few days last year. (They haven’t annouced when tickets will be available yet.)

I’ve used TextDrive for web hosting for the past year. Overall I’ve been very happy. The server control is unparalleled in a shared hosting environment. My only knock is that their response time can sometimes be a little slow (1-3 days) for support questions. Thankfully I haven’t had very may.

I just found out that they are increase their service (and their price).

I’ll say it another way: $15 per month gets you web hosting (5gb, 5 databases, 5 domains, 5gb of bandwidth), online storage (5 users and 5gb), and email, calendar, address book, files and all the other applications in the pipeline (5 users and 5gb).

Seems like a pretty good deal. I’m especially excited about giving StrongSpace a try. Read more on their blog.

So I’m out here in Chicago at RailsConf. It’s pretty exciting being here with the ‘cream of the crop.’ Yesterday Chris Johnson and I went to the Rail Guidebook put on by Dave & Mike of Pragmatic Studio fame. It was really well done. I’ll add some more details later.

Funny story though. We had to donate to charity to get in. I happened to be on e of the highest donaters so I got a front row seat, a free lunch with Dave, Mike and some fot he Rails Core team, and an invite to a VIP party last night where I met the man himself. Good times.

Sometimes, well almost all the time, I really wish I had better design skills. Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin put together a great (and nicely designed) site for wine aficionados called Cork’d. Looks like lot of fun.

I can get frustrating working in the MS world especially after falling in love with RoR. Nevertheless, reality is reality—at least for now. So here are a couple gems for those of us trapped behind the window.

Brian Hogan offers some great write-ups on Deployment Strategies for Rails on Windows servers.

A fellow .NET guy also send me a pretty interesting Visual Studio Plug-in for Ruby. Thanks Jason.

What’s next?

I’m happy to announce that I (and a few other brave souls) will be starting a Ruby/Rails user group for the upstate of South Carolina. We are tentatively planning to meet the 2nd Tuesday of each month starting in May.

Please join the mailing list for more details.

I continue to be dumbfounded by the intelligence, ingenuity, and speed of the Rails core team. They have been busy at work. Here’s a comprehensive list of the new features found in the upcoming Rails 1.1 release.

[And I still haven’t found the time to write up reviews on my favorite 1.0 features!]

The first ever Rails Conference is now open for registration. Keynotes are by Martin Fowler, Paul Graham, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Dave Thomas. Don’t know who they are? You should!

UPDATE: The conference sold out (400 spots) in less than a week. Whew!

UPDATE: They opened up another 150 spots. They sold out in less than 24 hours. This should be great!

There’s a lot of hype about Rails these days. Most of the chatter compares Rails to .NET, Java, PHP, etc. Though those are valid and often interesting discussions, I think they often miss the most unique difference.

That difference is what the average programmer spends much of their time doing: upgrading and deploying applications. Let’s face it. You only launch an application once, but you (or someone else) will be maintaining and upgrading it forever (... well, at least for longer than you expect to). I don’t see any communities addressing this nearly as aggressively and ambitiously as Rails.

It is very evident that Rails was built by developers in the trenches, by those living and breathing in the real world of maintaining applications. Microsoft just released ASP.NET 2.0 and VS2005. With all the new bells & whistles, they still don’t offer a solid solution for deployment and data migrations.

Side Note: I also love the fact that Microsoft only offers unit testing tools in the Enterpri$e version. Brilliant! Take a excellent open source tool, nAnt, integrate it into your product and then charge through the nose for it. Now that’s business model!

Enter Rails answer to these two issues: seemless database upgrades with Migrations and simply yet powerful deployments using SwitchTower. Keep on the lookout for follow-up posts on each of these killer tools.

It’s finally here. Ruby on Rails is now offically on the 1.0 release and they have a redesigned web site as well.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, now is a great time to give Rails a test drive.