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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...
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Master of my domain

Hi All, I just got myself a new domain ( http://www.skuunk.com ). The reason is that Blogspot.com is offering cheap domain via GoDaddy.com and I thought after having this nickname for nigh on 10 years it was time to buy the domain before someone else did (also I read somewhere that using blogspot.com in your domain is the equivalent of an aol.com or hotmail.com email address...shudder...). Of course I forgot that I would have to re-register my blog everywhere (which is taking ages) not to mention set up all my stats stuff again. *sigh*. It's a blogger's life... In any case, don't forget to bookmark the new address and to vote me up on Technorati !
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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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