#RubyOnRails and partial forms

I'm working on some exercises in the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book. I noticed a lot of duplication in my new and edit views, so I thought I'd try and make it more DRY. I knew I'd need a partial, but I hadn't written one for a view yet.

I'd heard good things about the #RubyOnRails IRC channel, so now was a good time to try it out. I had to download an IRC client for my MacBook, and chose Colloquy. In almost no time, I got enough help to implement my partial. (If you aren't familiar with it in Rails 3, you can see my solution here.) I don't know why it tripped me up so much. I finally got the second argument right in the form_for correct and used it as a local variable in the submit line so that the button has the right text. And all my rspec tests pass.

gist vs pastie

I started another post (which I'll finish at another time) about using the RoR channel on IRC to get help with creating a form partial to eliminate duplication in my new and edit forms. I started writing about gist, saying it was like Pastie, and then I started looking at the difference between the two. There are enough similarities and differences to be worth an entire post, so here it is.

Gist is associated with your github account. Gist allows public and private pastes. Other gist users can clone or fork your code using a url that is created for each paste.

Pastie doesn't require a login, so it's nice for quick-and-dirty. Pastie claims to have a bot that you are supposed to be able to access right inside IRC. You send it a public message, it private messages you a link, you click the link, paste your code, click OK and the bot is supposed to announce the link to your paste to the channel. Unfortunately, I'm told it's never worked.

Pastie does have a nice feature for Rails developers that gist does not: Ruby on Rails syntax highlighting. Apparently it has C# syntax highlighting too, but it's only mentioned in the blog.

I plan to stick with gist for now, because of its connection to guthub.

EDIT: I didn't realize that gist not-only has syntax highlighting for lots of languages, it will auto-detect based on the filename extension that you give your paste (for example, this partial that I will discuss in my next post.) Now I'll stay with gist for sure.