So there is this really cool Rack middleware written by Simon Jefford which allows you to send arbitrary messages from your Rails controllers & views directly to Firebug’s (or Web Inspector’s) console. It is great for quick debugging. If that possibility excites you, head over to my recently published article on Fuel Your Coding to read all about it.
You may be wondering, what’s up with this Fuel Your Coding stuff? Well, I’ll tell you what’s up.
I’m very happy to announce that I’ve joined the Fuel Network as co-editor of FYC! I’m excited to help improve upon an already awesome blog by cultivating more content on the technologies that I use and love. I won’t be authoring articles there too often, but will be actively seeking and promoting quality contributions (If you’d like an opportunity to write for FYC, please contact me).
What does this mean for my blog? Not too much. Like before, I’ll be writing here as inspiration hits. Which is rarely, hah!
If you enjoy my blog, I highly encourage you to subscribe to FYC’s RSS feed as I’m sure you’ll find future content there very interesting.
One of my favorite GitHub features is the ability to find and track the progress of projects that interest me. I’ve decided to post the new projects I find each month on this blog since there is a high likelihood that you and I have common interests (Hey, I’m curating something on the internet!).
So I wrote a little script using the GitHub API to track which new projects I watch during each month. I watched 17 new projects in January. They are linked below along with their authors’ descriptions and some commentary of my own: Read the rest of this entry »
I’m happy to announce the release of CappuccinoResource (CR), a library dedicated to interfacing between a Cappuccino front-end and a Rails back-end.
CR should feel very familiar to Rails developers. Its interface is akin to ActiveResource and it borrows heavily from the (very good) ObjectiveResource library for the iPhone.
All basic CRUD operations are supported, and you can perform advanced finds with arbitrary parameters. A brief example of fetching a record, modifying it, and saving it:
var post =[Post find:@"42"];[post setTitle:@"Why X is Better than Y"];[post save];
Check out the README on the project’s page on GitHub for more details and usage examples.
Live Demo
I also created a demo application which is a simplified clone of OS X’s Address Book. The demo is live on Heroku. Check it out. The source for the demo is also on GitHub.
If you’re a Rails developer waiting for a good opportunity to try out Cappuccino, there’s no better time than now.
If you’re a Cappuccino developer looking for an easy-to-use, powerful back-end for your applications, Rails might be the answer for you.
CR is a young project, but it drives one of my client applications that is production-ready (albeit not deployed), so I believe it is ready for prime time. Please try it and let me know how it goes.
Writing a web app using Cappuccino has a lot of benefits, one of which is a really nice message passing system wherein certain objects can register to observe events and take action when other objects post notifications of those events.
Here is a very basic way to test if your app is posting event notifications as you expect it to. First, create an Observer class inside a test helper file, which will be included into your tests: Read the rest of this entry »
