Multi-platform Ruby development with bundler

I know it does not always work like this. But I always find myself in situations where I have different people on different operating systems working on the same project. This has been the case for me several times. I am always open for the idea of developing on different platforms, maybe I’m a bit of a free-choice nut… Anyways! There have always been issues with gems that can only be used for specific platforms. How do you solve this problem!?

railsconf2011: JavaScript the newest first class citizen

This is actually from a combined set of sessions. One of the larger problems in Rails has always been how to deal with JavaScript in a proper way. There are the .js.erb files but they are not really a proper solution to the problem.

In many ways Rails has always treated JavaScript as a second class citizen. As it wasn’t a real programming language… This while in the current state of the web standards is embracing JavaScript more and more. Rails is not running far behind actually. From Rails 3.1 CoffeeScript and Sass are both introduced as first class citizens to the Rails community with the introduction of the asset pipeline. But is it really becoming that first class citizen?

railsconf2011: Fat model aren’t enough

Jeff Casimir talked about skinny controllers, fat models and beyond. His first statement was that it was a best practices talk but he did not like that title. Best is not a good word. It should be ‘a practice’ as there are others that are just as valid. Going from there the basic idea of skinny controllers and fat models was explained. That is just for the back-end of the app, what about the front-end? That is an issue, while we should make it look like a bento box we mostly shove all the crap over there. Stating that views should actually just be HTML with some data.

Jeff had several ideas on how to make views more beautiful!

railsconf2011: building bulletproof views

In rails we have the idea skinny controller as fat models. On the other side we have the wild west views… not always a good thing. This is why I wanted to attend the “building bulletproof views” during the afternoon at railsconf.

Speakers:

• John Athayde
• Bruce Williams

railsconf2011: tutorial day HTML5 beyind the buzzword

Although I have worked with html5 before this. But picking between rails for zombies (done), legacy updating (done) and a free form FOSS work… I choose the HTML5 tut just for the fun of it.

ruby and rails 2010 report

The 21st and 22nd of October the Ruby and Rails 2010 conference took place in Amsterdam. About 250+ tech geeks, 15 speakers, 14o liters of coffee and a bunch of weird stuff that ended in a dance… All together a fun conference about the Ruby language and the Rails framework. Personally I had a great time in following the sessions. Listening to peoples ideas and crazy discoveries. And of course the networking with all the folks that came to the conference.

I would like to write a bit of a recap on the event. Write down some of the ideas I took from the sessions and the people I talked to and maybe go a little bit further with these ideas. First of all I would like to thank the organizers of the event. Great job!

Sass revisited

About half a year ago I talked about how you could use sass do create stylesheets dynamically with different color. I was asked to go further into detail on how to do this. I’ll also illuminate on some of the thing I learned since last time and how I incorporated the new insights.

I have also done a lot of discovering on how to make css more efficient with sass. I have also needed to do some alternative work with colors to have it working for me. Going through an existing css code base there are a lot of issues with optimization of your code. These issues are not new and are quite common in css but sass can solve these common issues.

Dynamic coloring with Sass

When building a web-application you’ll need to do some sort of styling to get it looking a kind of decent. To enhance your web app you would probably like to do some more advanced styling with lots of css, images and other stuff… But what if you needed a styling system that dynamically changes the colors of your style?

I’ve designed and implemented an application that uses Sass to created dynamically colored styling for such a system!

Fosdem 2010: the aftermath

One campus, 2 days + some nights, about 250 sessions and +5000 geeks. The European meet-up for the open-source people!

What was my part? Following sessions, supporting in one session and talking a lot to all the people I know and don’t know within the community.

What I took away from it? 4 t-shirts, 5 buttons, loads of stickers, new knowledge/information, new ideas and lots of new cont(r)acts.

The short story is: arrive Friday around 5pm, get to the Renaissance Brussels hotel, get something to eat before going to Delirium, finding people to talk/drink with, get to bed, wake up and get myself to campus, follow some sessions, support on the CBAC session, get myself to the joostians (former Joost Technologies employees) dinner, have some drinks with the joostians, get to bed, wake up and check out of the hotel, get myself to campus and plant myself in the back of the mozilla room, follow some other sessions afterwards!? and get my ass back on the train home.

Wanna know more?

CBAC: The Rails Barrier

Today I created the ALPHA stying for CBAC (Context Based Access Control). CBAC is a security gem for Ruby on Rails and adds an extra abstraction layer to the well known RBAC (Role Based Access Control). With CBAC you can add context based security to your Rails app in just a few simple steps. I’m proud to be the first to blog about this new security system for rails!