Beckshome.com: Thomas Beck's Blog

I’ve posted about how impressed I was with NetBeans as a Java IDE and the incredible progress this product has made in the last couple of years. I knew for a while that Ruby on Rails and JRuby support was coming for the next major Netbeans release (v 6.0), but I hesitated moving from RadRails to NetBeans until the feature set had stabilized. Last week, the Netbeans 6.0 beta was released and, with RadRails stagnating somewhat under the Aptana brand, I caved in and made the switch.

I was performing functional tests on my models that employed Attachment_Fu this morning and thought it would be worthwhile to share the code since it was a bit of a hassle pulling it together. Kudos to Mike Subelsky for his introduction to functional testing Attachment_Fu. It got me going in the right direction. What proved difficult once again was the multi-model controller. Once I got over that hump, I was on my way. As you can see from all the detail in the HTTP POST below, that was not an entirely easy task.

Continuing my Rails on Windows thread, I’m going to spend a bit of time on something that’s brought me both some substantial gains and some minor woes lately, running the Attachment_Fu plugin on Windows. I’ll start off with some general Attachment_Fu information and then get into some of the quirks, which are, as expected, mostly specific to the Windows environment.

First, for those not in the know, Attachment_Fu is a Rails plugin that allows you to store binary data (e.g. images, video, documents) and associate it with other models in your Rails application. Metadata (content type, size, height, width) about the attachment is stored in a separate model. Attachment_Fu’s sweet spot is handling images. It can handle automatic image conversion and thumbnailing using a number of popular image processors such as ImageScience, RMagick, or minmagick. Although not provided, you can imagine that Attachment_Fu might be extended to handle other types of binary processing utilities such as PDF converters or audio/video transcoding software. The other very cool thing about Attachment_Fu is that it provides support for pluggable persistence mechanisms. Out of the box, it allows for storage on the file system, as binary information in a database or on Amazon’s S3 storage service.

I’ve been putting a good deal of time recently into converting GeoGlue from .NET to Rails. One of the things that I’m looking to get into the alpha release is the dynamic creation of podcasts. This is really nothing special since a podcast is little more than a special case of an RSS feed that points at external media files (i.e. audio or video).

I plan on covering the audio/video entry in an upcoming post about the nuances of the Attachment_Fu plugin on Windows. In this post, I’m going to just lay out the code for the podcast creation, since this is nothing more that a simple rxml file. I’ve sprinkled in comments liberally but most of the code should be fairly self explanatory to those familiar with Ruby and RSS feeds.

As soon as you’ve spent some time dealing with Rails, you’re bound to hear the fact quoted that the entire Core Rails Team does their work on Macs. There are likely several reasons for this: (1) these folks really like Macs (you can’t fault them for that); (2) they’re getting kickbacks to use Powerbooks (could be; not likely though); or (3) Rails is fun, and using Windows puts a bit of damper on that fun. I think the last answer is the most likely even though I’d like to think that Steve Jobs has some skin in the Rails game.