Though I'm fairly weened from intellisense from my .NET days, I still find myself always needing some type of reference when writing Ruby or Rails projects. There's always a browser tab with the Rails API, noobkit, or some other cheatsheet . While cheatsheets are pretty and all, they are sometimes just a hassle to find and go it when you just need that little syntax helper. So what do I do, I cheat.

This little command line tool provides a wealth of help at the tip of your fingertips.

gem install cheat

Then see what cheats are available.

cheat sheets

Or just run one (I use this one a lot)

cheat strftime

There are just hundreds out there. And you can edit (fix) one or add your own. The app is just a command line front end to a wiki. Pretty sweet.

So one of the hardest things to do in a highly dynamic language is to debug code. If you feel the same way, check out the ruby-debug gem. Rails 2.0 now has full support for it and it’s a real “step forward, into, and out” debugger.

Here’s a great screencast to get you started. If you use cheat (which I highly recommend), simply type cheat rubydebug in the console to see all the options.

Back at Datastream we used Vault as a replacement for for Visual SourceSafe. It was a great tool. (Not living (completely) in Microsoft land anymore, I now use Subversion for all source control.) Bundled with Vault was a diff tool. It's apparently grown up into an nice little app.

SourceGear just released it's diff and merging tool, aptly named DiffMerge for free. It's available for windows, Mac, and Linux. In fact, depending on the API, I may try to integrate it with TextMate's Subversion bundle to finally get a good visual diff engine on the Mac.

Download it now.

I’ve been using Bloglines for a couple of years as my primary blog aggregator. I have looked at a ton of them and, though desktop aggregators offer more features, I really prefer a web-based reader. It’s just easier to maintain what Ive read across multiple machines. Bloglines has simply dominated the web aggregator market.

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Just got back from Disney tonight. Man, that mouse will take it out of you. Four parks in four days. It was a lot of fun though. I haven’t checked email but once this past week. It was nice to be unplugged for a while.

I spent most of the night before I left for Disney migrating my “sometimes active” blog from Typo to Mephisto. Why? Not just because I’m a glutton for punishment. I’ve had my eye on Mephisto when I found out that Rick Olsen a.k.a. technoweenie started working on it. I had lunch with he and some other Rails core team members at RailsConf. I have a lot of respect for the guy and the code he churns out. His plugins are some of the best around.

Overall, I like it much better. It’s not 100% stable, but then again isn’t even a 1.0 release yet. It has a clean and attractive design for the admin area. I like that it’s not just for blogs, but can be used for other web publishing sites.

The asset “bucket” is a great idea. You can upload assets, then add them to your bucket to carry them around and use them in various posts.

When I was at Rails Conf in June, I stumbled upon a great little service for monitoring the status of your servers, Montastic. This is a very lightweight, free service where you simply add URLs. The service pings each of your servers every 10 minutes and sends you an email if one of them is down.

I was searching for some examples of DSL Ruby development and stumbled upn this little GEM. Backup is a DSL focusing on backups. It looks very well done, cut from the same mold (even using some of the same code) as capistrano.

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?

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.