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I prefer GemTools over config.gem

So I know I’m obviously biased, but I prefer to use GemTools over the gem management feature in Rails. and here’s why.

I can deploy an app to a new server instance and not even need to have rails installed. All I have to do is cap production deploy:setup && cap production deploy and my cap tasks will install the full stack, including Rails.

I can also use GemTools without Rails.

I know that I will get the version of my gems that my app expects.

I’ve seen issues with using vendored gems (hpricot I’m looking at you) where even with a frozen gem it will try and include the newest version of the gem installed locally.

Don’t get me wrong, any compiled gems are going to fail in a vendored cross platform environment if the person that vendoerd it was on a different platform.

These are just a couple of the reasons that I prefer to use gemtools install over config.gem

I’m sure I’m in the minority, but that’s ok.

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Why Fluid for Mac Rocks

So I tend to work on different projects for different people and it’s nice to be able to sandbox things in their own world.

I know Fluid was created as an SSB (Site Specific Browser) and it’s nice for that but for me it’s more of a CSB (Client Specific Browser), I create a Fluid instance for each “client” then I can keep their wiki, issue tracker, time keeping and whatever else I need in a single app.

I find it saves me time and clutter.

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Clearance Crypto

So in my foray into the rails templates world I’ve stumbled onto a couple of authentication options that I wasn’t previously aware of.

Authlogic which is nice in that it moves all the actual authentication logic into a gem to make updates dead simple. The one thing I didn’t like was that you have to generate all of your own MVC code. Though honestly this isn’t such an issue now that I have it all rolled in to a Rails 2.3 template

Clearance is also nice in that it generates the MVC code yet still keeps all the authentication logic in a gem for easy updates. The only thing I didn’t really care for, though I do understand why they did it, is the inability to choose the hash algorithm.

Along comes ClearanceCrypto this provides a very similar way to choose the hashing algorithm like you can in Authlogic. The code was picked and tweaked from the Authlogic code to match the way Clearance checks the authentication.

It’s very new and may have issues. Feel free to let me know if you find anything.

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Rails templates - Round 3

And yet another big change to Strappy there is a new branch that allows you to choose the authentication method you want to use (Authlogic, Clearance or restful_authentication) it’s currently located in a branch called choosy but will probably be moving to master soon.

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Rails templates - Round 2

So of course as soon as I finished adding in the coverage to restful_authentication I found Authlogic...

So I went and revamped Strappy to use Authlogic and bootstrap a ready to roll app with user logins and password resets. The original version using restful_authentication is still there in a branch.

Enjoy

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Latest comments

Reena on FCKeditor on Rails on Apr 13, 2009 at 04:17 AM

Hi,

I am new to this rails application, trying to create a blog application, where i have used fckeditor, till now i am able to get the fckeditor on to the browser, but i really do not know how to save the contents typed over there to the database. can some one explain me.

Thank You

Reena

micahel on Hpricot Scrub on Apr 07, 2009 at 10:11 AM

@chick – was the gem for version 0.3.5 broken for you?

gem install hpricot_scrub

sounds like you may have gotten the old hpricot-scrub gem, which should have been removed from rubyforge, but appears it was still there.

micahel

chick on Hpricot Scrub on Mar 26, 2009 at 02:44 PM

forgot to say thanks

chick

chick on Hpricot Scrub on Mar 26, 2009 at 02:43 PM

Seems close but
1 ) gem did not seem to have the lib/hpricot_scrub/hpricot_scrub.rb
2 ) hpricot_scrub.rb, which I grabbed from post did not extend classes Comment and BogusETag with remove, strip etc. methods
3 ) Line 73 did not deal with children that do not respond_to? :name
After fixing up those things locally it seems to work ok

chick

UnderpantsGnome on TextMate mini-Bundle on Feb 12, 2009 at 10:31 PM

@Christoffer glad it works for you. I just wish there was a way to get the same feature without adding the strip to the undo history. It can be a bit annoying to have to undo twice to undo one step.

UnderpantsGnome