Hobo Screencast
October 31, 2010 by dave@kiwiluv.com · Leave a Comment
Hobo Screencast – Introduction from Tom Locke on Vimeo.
I hadn’t been to visit the Hobo site in a while so after posting about our article, I swung by and they had done a more detailed screencast which is very informative.
Rails Magazine Article on Hobo
October 31, 2010 by dave@kiwiluv.com · Leave a Comment
We submitted an article to Rails Magazine recently which was published in Issue 7. It’s the first of a tutorial on Hobo. I had been exploring Hobo and posted on it here in the distant past. I also posted here on how easy it was to deploy on Heroku. Hobo is an application development framework on top of rails. It’s half framework, half starter-app and worth a look.
Cool Tutorial Concept – aRailsDemo
October 15, 2010 by dave@kiwiluv.com · Leave a Comment
This is a cool idea. I heard about this on the Ruby5 podcast. Someone (who is apparently too modest to advertise his secret identity on the site) created a RoR site which contains detailed and well written posts on how he created the site in Rails 3. I learn by example and love things that walk me through how to put things together. This is a cool and creative idea and would be a big help to someone trying to figure out how to build something in Rails. The site is aRailsDemo and well worth a look.
Vlad the Deployer
October 13, 2010 by dave@kiwiluv.com · Leave a Comment
Best name ever. I’ve finally gotten around at looking at all the deployment options and digging a little deeper. I’d definitely heard of Vlad the Deployer, but this was my first visit to the site and it definitely made my day. Thanks to the Ruby Hit Squad for putting a smile on my face…even though you guys do look a bit evil.
If you don’t sell T-Shirts…you should. Immediately.
Rails 3 Released Into the Water Supply
September 1, 2010 by dave@kiwiluv.com · 1 Comment
Wow. Seriously? The Rails 3 release was published on Reuters? God save us.
Yep, I love Rails and am delighted to see Rails 3 out. Still, a little humility please. Stay tuned for the release of Rails 3.0.1 later today…
Teach Me To Code – Charles Max Wood
August 22, 2010 by dave@kiwiluv.com · Leave a Comment
I’ve long been a fan of Ryan Bate’s Railscasts. He covers a wide variety of Rails topics so you can find almost anything you need there. Recently, I went through a multi-part screencast on Teach Me To Code on creating a Twitter clone. I really enjoyed the experience. While Railscast’s seem polished and rehearsed, the Teach Me To Code screencasts have a much more real-world “life of a developer” vibe. In the screencasts I watched, Charles Max Wood went down all of the false paths that we all do in trying to get things to work, but quickly recouped. There’s a lot of value in seeing how all of the various obstacles in doing web development present themselves in a real world situation. I’ve started listening to the Teach Me To Code podcasts as well. Now that I know that Mr. Wood is a fellow TI-85 user, like me and my partner are, I’ll be sure to stay tuned for more podcasts and screencasts. Keeup up the good work!
Learn Rails by Example – Book by Michael Hartl
August 5, 2010 by dave@kiwiluv.com · 1 Comment
I learn things, particularly programming, almost entirely by example and digging through other people’s code. I stumbled upon this site looking for some examples and had a look. Michael Hartl has two complete books (one for Rails 2.3, the other for Rails 3.0) on learning Rails by example. I had a quick look, but it seems he’s covered all the bases including adding navigation and structure to your site. It looks like he’s planning to put up some other content as well, such as screencasts, etc. so I’m looking forward to seeing more.
The books are available online for free and for $39 you can get the PDF. I hear a print version is on it’s way too. Check it out.
Rails 3 Release Candidate
August 2, 2010 by dave@kiwiluv.com · Leave a Comment
Check out DHH’s post on Rails 3 going RC! Big news, but is anyone else worried about the refactoring necessary for “…making sure we get performance of Active Record back to at least 2.3 levels before release…”? Is it really a release candidate if you’re planning semi-major changes? I think some better configuration management hygiene is in order.
DHH at RailsConf 2010 – Rails 3
July 14, 2010 by dave@kiwiluv.com · Leave a Comment
RailsConf was right in our back yard this year (Baltimore, MD) and not one of us made it…:(. We can live vicariously through YouTube though. Here’s DHH’s talk on Rails 3. I’ve been using Rails 3 RC lately because I can’t for the life of me get Devise (which is awesome by the way) to integrate with Rails 2. I’m not sure why and I’m sure it’s my fault, but I have a low threshold for trying to get stuff to work so Rails 3 it is. Rails is finally getting even more polish and is starting to feel mature. I guess it’s time for something new!
Deploying a Hobo Rails App on Heroku
June 11, 2010 by dave@kiwiluv.com · 2 Comments
In my previous post I created my first Hobo application. I wanted to show off the fruits of the 5 minutes of hard labor to my partner, so I decided to push it to Heroku. I ran into some problems because I’m using Rails 2.3.8, which Heroku hasn’t deployed for general use. It is available on their bamboo stack.
After much fumbling and my inability to get the .gems file right (because of gem dependencies of Hobo) I decided to give Gem Bundler a try and it magically solved all my problems.
Here’s what I did…
Install Gem Bundler (gem install bundler).
Create a Gemfile with the following:
source :gemcutter
gem 'rails', '2.3.8'
gem 'hobo', '1.0.1'
Then to bundle your gems, run bundle install from your app directory. When Gem Bundler is done crunching, the next thing to do is get it up to Heroku. Since I needed to run this on their Bamboo stack, I had to create an app specifically for that stack.
First things first, add everything you need to your git repository (Heroku explains how to do this).
To create a Bamboo stack application, just run
heroku create --stack bamboo-ree-1.8.7 --remote appname
…then push your git up to Heroku…
git push appname master
…you’ll notice a lot of activity while Heroku installs gems. Hobo is a pretty complete framework so it uses a ton of them. Grab a snack while you wait.
Finally, just migrate your database…
heroku rake db:migrate --app heroku-app-name
Make sure you use the app name Heroku uses.
That’s it! I had my Hobo app running in just a few minutes. If you’re using a Rails version that doesn’t require the Bamboo stack, it should be even easier using the normal Heroku deployment tricks. I’m glad to see Gem Bundler will be the default gem management tool for Rails 3. It definitely made my life a lot easier.