Eric's Ruby on Rails Blog

Using SproutCore: Demo App

Eric Methot — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:37:15 +0000

Though sproutcore has been around for some time, there is not much going around as far as examples source code is concerned. This might change soon as a couple of guys are setting themselves out to produce a complete demo with source code, screen cast and all.

In the mean time though, I wanted to look at sample code to get going. Looking around on google I didn't find anything. I found what I was looking for in an unexpected place: the sproutcore gem!

It turns out that the sproutcore documentation is also a sproutcore application and makes use of many of the common cocoa/sproutcore idioms. In my opinion, it's as good a place to start as another and is available today. Just take a look at the code within the sproutcore gem.

SproutCore is Cocoa for Javascript

Eric Methot — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:09:52 +0000

It's been too long since I've posted anything and now that I'm back from vacation well rested I think it's time that start posting more regularly. As I was reading through my accumulated RSS feeds, there were a couple of nice "suprises":

iPhone 3G has been officially announced. I saw the keynote and though I don't have any experience developing on mobile platforms, it seems to me that Apple is making it really easy, compared to other mobile platforms, to devolop software for their mobile platform. Can't wait to see if Delicious Library get ported to the iPhone.
MobileMe look nice but what really interests me here is the related SproutCore. It's a new Javascript framework that supossedly brings Cocoa to Javascript. I will be looking into this soon. At first glance it seems to blast other frameworks away. Maybe an nice Rails integration will come along soon.

I look forward to playing around with SproutCore...

Screen Overlays made Easy

Eric Methot — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:19:26 +0000

Modal-overlay is a tiny Rails plugin to make screen overlays really simple to do. The helper gives you two new methods: link_to_show_overlay and link_to_hide_overlay. Here is an example:

<%= link_to_show_overlay 'Open Form', new_user %>

If you want the details please see the page dedicated to the modal-overlay plugin.

Oh! And I've even managed to finish my first screencast. It's still rough on the edges but I think it's not so bad for a first attempt.

Gorgeous Timelines

Eric Methot — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 08:26:57 +0000

Duncan Beevers has just released a plugin to integrate Smile Timelines into your rails apps. I didn't know anything about these timelines but after I saw them I just thought "Gorgeous!". I know that I'll be using them in my projects sooner than later. Just in case you are wondering, the timelines make use of DHTML and Ajax to create their effect.

There is also another project by the same MIT group thats worth looking at. It's called Timeplot and can be used to draw really nice time series.

Strongspace Look & Feel

Eric Methot — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:38:05 +0000

Today I've decided to change the look of my blog. As you can see, it's a rather simple look with bright colors and classic tabs for the main site sections. There is a more detailed per-section navigation menu on the right of the page. I still need to show/hide some of these menu item based on the current page but that's going to be done rather quickly.

At the moment, the style is a bit graphics intensive and I will eventually work on that to make the pages load a little faster but what's slowing these pages down are all the Javascript that need to be loaded. I should also combine the lot into a single "compressed" file to improve the page load time.

Please tell me what you think about this new look.

Flex & Rails: Impedance Mismatch

Eric Methot — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:49:36 +0000

To Flex or not to Flex that is the question. Well not really but I woke up one morning and decided that I wanted to learn a little bit more about Flex, the rich application framework by Adobe. So I bought this recently published book called Flexible Rails. Though I don’t like the style of the book (it’s like one big code walk-through) it did manage to give me a good feel for what Flex programming is. Though I find Flex to be a nice piece of technology, to me it lacks a simple feature to make it really usable with Rails...

Yet Another CAPtcha Helper

Eric Methot — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:46:03 +0000

I wanted to use the name "Yach" but it's seems to be reserved by Rails! So I present to you Yacaph (pronounced Yakaf). It's a captcha helper like many out there I guess with one simple difference: it's lite on resources.

That's right. Images are generated offline and no session data is required. It's all in the form! As an added bonus, the captcha images look quite nice too even on different background colors when they are not too dark.

Check it out!

If your interested, there is also a Forum section where bugs and feature requests may be discussed.

DevThatWeb

Eric Methot — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:44:37 +0000

Just discovered this blog about modern web development and I like the way the guy thinks. Lot's of Rails and Javascript stuff. I'll be adding him to my links section.

Plugins Have a New Home

Eric Methot — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 16:11:35 +0000

I've added a section the site with a permanent page for the datebalks and the multi-query-statement plugins. Since I intend to host more than one blog here I have also changed the default domain. But rest assured that the original URL should still work.

Home of the Datebalks plugin
Home of the Multi-Statement-Query plugin

Datebalks supports multiple date fields

Eric Methot — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:40:24 +0000

Following a few suggestions from Aditya, here are the changes:

Support multiple date fields
Fixed a bug where an existing date values was not copied to the hidden field
Fixed a typo

Same installation procedure:

script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/svn/datebalks/trunk

Try it today!