NAPCS was a proud sponsor of the first Chippewa Valley Ruby Camp, a day-long Ruby training camp where 23 students learned how to build and deploy their first Rails application. I taught two of the three sessions and had a great time helping other developers get their hands on what I believe to be the best way to develop scalable, maintainable, and stable web applications today. That’s a pretty bold statement, but I believe in it, and it’s why NAPCS uses Rails on all new client projects. (In fact, every project since 2006 has been a Rails project.)

Rails projects are quick to launch

With Rails, we can build and launch a prototype application in an extremely short time. On average, we can have something simple in front of the client in less than a couple of days, which is much faster than our previous projects where we used ASP or PHP. And that project isn’t usually a throwaway project; we can tweak it and move forward, from prototype to production.

Rails applications are easily testable

Professionals write tests that prove the code works as it should, and since testing is built right in to the Rails framework. testing is an easy natural part of the process. Testing has always been possible regardless of the language used, but with Rails, it’s so easy to produce well-tested code that you’d be foolish not to test. For my customers, that means much better products, and less support calls.

It’s a standard framework

I occasionally pick up projects from other developers, and while I can’t always ensure that the quality of the code will be good, I at least already know my way around the project because, in a Rails application, conventions dictate where things go. This means the learning curve is lower when we transition an application, and the customer doesn’t get billed extra time for me to figure out what’s going on.

The community is incredible

We rely heavily on open-source projects to get stuff done, and Rails has an amazing community that is always pushing the limits of what Rails applications can do. There is a new solution to a new problem almost every day, and that keeps us all on our toes. Plus, we’re very proud to be sponsoring the Rails Mentors project, which helps other developers get better at Rails development. We’re always giving back to open source, too.

It gets out of the way.

This is the most important point of all; Rails lets me deliver features. Instead of spending hours wiring up database tables to web pages, I can do that in five minutes and spend more time focusing on user experience and new features. And since it isn’t difficult to build things incrementally, I don’t get boxed in. I can make changes without feeling that I’ll lose days of work. It allows me to respond flexibly to new feature requests.

Rails gives us a competitive advantage. We cannot always compete on price alone, but we can provide better-quality solutions than others because we embrace an open, agile framework that lets us deliver stable, scalable, well-tested, and maintainable web applications.

Want to learn how you can take advantage of Ruby on Rails?

Contact us for information on customized training and mentoring services. We offer affordable hourly rates for remote mentoring, as well as custom training classes upon request.

I had the honor of presenting two talks this year at the second annual Chippewa Valley Code Camp. Code camps are free events where programmers of any skill level come together for a day of sessions and talks that are centered around code. I’ve only recently become involved with these events and am extremely happy I have. The opportunity to learn from so many experienced developers is incredible.

We held the event at UW-Stout this year, and had a great turnout. I gave two talks, the first on Ruby, and the second on Cucumber. I had wonderful audiences both times, and met some great people that I hope I get to work with in the future. Here are the slides for my talks.

See the end of the slide decks for links to the demo source code.

On Saturday, I had the honor of giving a talk on the Ruby programming language to an exceptional audience. I talked about the simple syntax and powerful libraries available, and then showed how we can use Ruby to maintain static web sites, build web applications, and test web sites.

During the talk, I showed how to use Sinatra to create a very simple wiki. I wrote two versions. During the talk, I used SQLite3 and ActiveRecord, but I wrote a version that uses MongoDB. You can grab the source for those at Github.

Here are the slides from my talk. You can view the notes too by viewing the slides on Slideshare.

Participating at code camps is something I really enjoy. It gives me a chance to talk about what I love, but it also gives me a chance to learn from other speakers. These events are usually free, and an awful lot of fun.

lazy_developer is a Ruby on Rails plugin I use on a lot of my projects to make my life easier as a developer. It’s a collection of Rake tasks that automate some common operations. Some of the more interesting features it provides are

• the ability to dump a database to YAML format and then pull it back in again
• a simple way to obliterate models, controllers, views, helpers, and related files easily (in the case of a refactor or a fat-fingered typo
• a method to compact your migrations into a single migration file
• and of course, automatically clone your test database whenever you migrate

Today, Kevin Gisi and I gave this plugin some much-needed love and attention after we discovered a few problems. Here’s what’s new:

Data exporting works with Rails versions prior to 2.0

Got an old database you’d like to pull in? This now works in Rails 1.2.3!

Data dumping works much better now!

We noticed some duplicate records sneaking into the output files, and it was due to a mistake I made when I implemented my own version of record pagination. It wasn’t limiting correctly, and Kevin quickly spotted the reason why. It also wasn’t storing records in the YAML file properly either, which I also resolved.

This is tested on Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and SQLite3.

Migration compacting works now

This was patched a few days ago and merged in, but I flip-flopped a couple of lines during a merge and it made it into the master branch that way. Kevin decided he’d like support for Subversion for this, so he added it. I’ll add in Git support very soon.

Interested in using this on your projects? Go get lazy_developer right now!

As promised, here’s the slide deck from my talk “Learning To Walk In Shoes” from April’s Twin Cities Code Camp. After the slides, we went over some demo applications, and you can get those from Github so you can play around with them yourself.

Learning To Walk In Shoes

Here are the slides from my RailsConf 2009 talk. You can watch the slides below, download the PDF.

Rails and Legacy Databases (PDF slides)

David Chelimsky gave a great presentation on mocking and stubbing. I liked the fact that he talked about a lot of the fears that people have when they do rely on mocks and stubs. It was also nice to see someone clearly state that one of the problems we have in the Rails community when it comes to testing frameworks (and most other libraries) is that people tend to promote their own projects while trashing other libraries. He challenged an audience member to create a site where we could write up comparisons.

Highlights of the talk:

• Stubs vs. mocks
• “Ravioli” code where everything is clumped up in nice separate concerns
• “Calzone” code, like Rails, which is harder to test in isolation.
• Stubble, a wonderful-sounding library that can completely stub out an ActiveRecord object, which will be usable in every testing framework.

The Rails Config Model gem makes it extremely easy to create a “settings” table in your application. It creates a configuration controller and model that can be used to quickly create configuration table for your system so you can store system-wide variables that you’d like the site administrator to be able to set.

You can see instructions on usage or contribute to the project.

For those unfamiliar, LazyDeveloper is a Rails plugin that provides tasks to simplify some cumbersome development tasks. I find it to be an indispensable tool. The latest version (1.1.4) fixes a couple of bugs related to running tests, and introduces a couple of new features which you can read about at the project page.

This is the last release of the plugin. I’ve decided to move this to a gem instead.

If you’re interested in contributing, feel free to fork the project and send pull requests!

I had a great time talking about building applications with Shoes, which is an amazing Ruby-based GUI framework originally aimed at kids but awesome for grownups too. The source code for the examples covered in the talk is available at http://github.com/napcs/shoes_demo_apps/.

Slides coming very soon.