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.
I often use WordPress as a CMS and have a couple of sites with many users contributing. I rarely go a week without an email or phone call from a user who needs help posting. When it comes to remote support there is no substitute for seeing what they’re seeing.
However, if you want to login to the site with their user account you have to either ask for their password (tacky & insecure) or reset their password temporarily (amateurish & annoying).
I just launched CappuccinoFlow: a community driven link blog for the Cappuccino framework. If you’re at all interested in this amazing new technology out of 280north, make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed, follow along on Twitter, and post cool Cappuccino-related links to the flow!
In Detail:
It has been a little quiet around these parts lately. I blame Cappuccino.
For the uninitiated, Cappuccino is a framework for writing web applications (for example). It is built on Objective-J, which is an Objective-C-esque superset of JavaScript. It is completely rad. Also, it’s all client-side so I still get to use Rails on the back-end. I believe the apt word is: woot.
I wanted a link blog to support the small, but growing, Cappuccino community. I’m a big fan of RubyFlow so I contacted its creator, Peter Cooper, and asked him if I could set one up for Cappuccino. He was gracious enough to say yes, and he had conveniently open-sourced an old version of his site awhile back. I forked it on GitHub and the result is CappuccinoFlow.
I’ll probably have to modify my blog’s headline soon, because once I become proficient in Objective-J & Cappuccino you’ll probably see some posts about it.
It’s been awhile since I posted about my open-source WordPress Console (WPC) plugin, and enough has happened since I released it that I thought it deserved a little mention.
What’s New
Basic Security
Thanks to Apokalyptik, the back-end PHP scripts now require a shared secret from the console before executing any code. As he so eloquently described it:
As is the plugin is negligently insecure (but outstandingly cool and useful and I want this plugin to be installable, thus the patch)
Even though the increased security is a huge improvement from what we had before, I still wouldn’t run the plugin on production servers.
Tab-Completion
This is the biggest functional improvement to WPC by far. It was a feature that I wanted to release the plugin with initially, but it didn’t make the cut because I wanted to release early. The best thing about tab-completion is that it allows you to explore the PHP & WP environments in a very fulfilling way. If you haven’t tried the plugin with this feature, please give it a go.
Small Things
WPC now handles command history with more grace. Using the up-arrow puts the cursor at the end of input, you can’t walk off the end of the history buffer, and a few other improvements to the code quality.
I’ve considered adding in-console documentation for PHP & WP functions, but not sure if people would use it much. I also have a command-line version of the console which I could spit shine and include with the plugin, but that might not be too attractive either. Maybe the plugin is as good as done. Any ideas or suggestions?
One killer feature of Ruby on Rails (for me) is script/console. Being able to interact with your code and data inside the full Rails environment is a powerful tool for development. Some days I practically live there, and if I get carried away, I do a lot of my testing there too (bad, I know).
I love Ruby and Rails, but being a contract developer means I go where the money is and recently that has been in WordPress plugin development. I enjoy developing for WordPress, but I’ve been spoiled by Rails and I often long for an interactive console for WordPress.
As a result, I’ve been developing (and using) a Wordpress plugin built for Wordpress developers. It provides an in-browser console where you can “play” with the code you’re working on.
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, this screencast will be worth at least a bazillion of ‘em: Read the rest of this entry »
