#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.

I'm hot on Rails, git, and CodeRetreat

Now that I'm back from CodeMash, where I attended an overview session called "Rails 3 from A to Z", I'm excited about taking a deeper dive into Rails. My first exposure to Ruby was the excellent Ruby Koans PreCompiler session at CodeMash 2010. I didn't complete all the koans at that session, and I didn't follow up and finish them afterward (although I was bitten again by the koan bug when I helped Dianne work on her Scala Koans PreCompiler session during Six Weeks of Scala), but now that I've completed Rails for Zombies, I'm totally going to go back and finish the ruby koans. Maybe before that, I'll finish another Ruby tutorial I started, TryRuby.org. It leads you through lessons and has you enter your answers at a command prompt. After that, I will probably go on to RailsTutorial.org (as recommended at the end of Rails for Zombies.) They have a free tutorial book online and they sell a pdf version and tutorial screencasts.

And after that, I've found a series of interesting articles on programming Rails on Apple's website:

- Using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OS X

- Customizing Rails Applications on Mac OS X

- Deploying Rails Applications on Mac OS X

And somewhere among all that, I'll want to learn the Twitter API, as I have an idea for a site related to Twitter.

Another CodeMash 2011 session that I've taken to heart is the awesome Git Immersion. While my department at work uses Subversion, I've started keeping my experiments in a git repository. And since so Ruby (and other projects) use git and/or github, it will be good to be familiar with git.

And finally, I'll be attending the 2nd Anniversary CodeRetreat in Ann Arbor this Saturday, Jan 29. This will be number 5 for me. Come join us!