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Freezing Gems

What is a gem and why would you want to freeze it? In Ruby, there are times when you want to access pieces of functionality that other people of written (3rd party libraries) and you normally have 2 options. You can install a plug in or install a gem. Normally the method you use is determined by which ever is made available by the author. Gems are installed on the host machine and are pretty handy when you want to run things in the command line or else across lots of projects, but their downside is that if you use a gem in a Rails project there is no automatic publishing mechanism when you deploy your site. You will need to log onto the remote host machine and install the gem manually. Plugins are specific to Rails and are similar to gems in that they are also 3rd party libraries. However they are associated with your Rails project as opposed to your machine so they will get posted to the server on a regular deploy. Freezing a gem is the process of transforming a gem into a plug in. Es...

Elixir - destructuring, function overloading and pattern matching

Why am I covering 3 Elixir topics at once? Well, perhaps it is to show you how the three are used together. Individually, any of these 3 are interesting, but combined, they provide you with a means of essentially getting rid of conditionals and spaghetti logic. Consider the following function. def greet_beatle(person) do case person.first_name do "John" -> "Hello John." "Paul" -> "Good day Paul." "George" -> "Georgie boy, how you doing?" "Ringo" -> "What a drummer!" _-> "You are not a Beatle, #{person.first_name}" end end Yeah, it basically works, but there is a big old case statement in there. If you wanted to do something more as well depending on the person, you could easily end up with some spaghetti logic. Let's see how we can simplify this a little. def greet_beatle(%{first_name: first_name}) do case first_name d...

Unit/Functional Testing RubyAMF

One of my current projects is using RubyAMF to communicate with Flash (http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyamf/). On the whole this is really nice because it allows you to transfer Ruby objects directly to ActionScript ones (as opposed to translating the object into XML, sending the XML and then recreating the object in ActionScript). However, Rails does not provide a built in transport mechanism for AMF, so we cannot run functional testing directly on the data call (as we could for an XML or HTML transport layer). This is a show stopper for a lot of people (Rails w/o Unit testing = a big mess of trouble when something goes wrong). We can though serve both the HTML and the AMF formats depending on the request format. This means that we can test the object instantiation logic and make sure there are no errors in the controllers (though we cannot check the actual format of the data being served). In the controller, instead of rendering AMF alone, do the following respond_to do |format| ...

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