Using ruby on rails with Oracle Legacy.

Great slide on SlideShare.
introduces the ruby-plsql gem, which makes it easier to preform database functions and stored procedures from ruby/rails applications (and supports bind variables).
i personally wrote a module of my own to handle this need (which supports bind variables as well).
Check out the slide and pay attention to the oracle_enhanced_adapter now available.
The slide is over here at SlideShare.

Tip: Installing Mysql Gem on Leopard

First, i want to make it clear that i am totally for using Oracle Express Edition, and not in Mysql, although you may need a real DBA, it is something you will want anyway, even with Mysql for my opinion.

Working with the Ruby-Based Mysql libraries is not recommended, it freezes with no prior warning in the middle of a transaction and not very stable at all for my opinion (i will update important notes from the comments if you have any other enlightenment about it).

anyway, since Leopard is running on the Intel based Macs, you'll need to specify the ARCH flag in the gem install command.

first, make sure you installed Mysql from the official package at mysql.com

then,


sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config


Imporatant!!!! make sure you update your XCode libraries from the Leopard CDs.

Rails Tip: AR eager loading and :select

The AR::Base.find support the options of :include (for adding associations as JOINs in the select) and :select (which pinpoints the columns you wish to select.
For some reason, it is impossible to do them both toghther for example

Article.find(:all, :include => :author, :select => 'authors.name')

This line will raise an exception.
Luckily, there is the select_with_include gem which enables this feature!

first, install the gem

gem install select_with_include

next, require it in your environment configuration file (or in environment.rb)

require 'include_with_select'

Now, you can use the :select option, remembering to use the table name even if a column name is not unique.
There is a single fault back, in case you want to select all the table columns, you need to write them all, one by one. yeah, it sucks.

Restful Web services gem

i recently read at John Nunemaker's blog about a gem he wrote for simplifying the consumption of REST web services.

Read more about the HTTParty Gem

ruby-debug User guide

Hi,
i am using ruby-debug for some time, it's a great tool but i didn't know how much until i bumped this great 30 seconds guide to ruby-debug which is filled with useful information.
a must, for a ruby developer

Add custom operators in Ruby

Jay Phillips developed the 'superators' gem, which enables the use of custom operators in Ruby. for example.

1. require 'rubygems'  
2. require 'superators'  
3.   
4. class Array  
5.   superator "<---" do |operand|  
6.     self << operand.reverse  
7.   end  
8. end  
9.   
10. ["jay"] <--- "spillihp"  

The Chronic files

Although 20.days.ago is a very nice syntax and caused so many non-rails programmers to pass out almost naturally after seeing it work, it still ain't enough.

The Chronic gem enables parsing for date-description strings.
such "yesterday morning" or "sunday next month", Chronic will parse these strings into actual Time objects.

Read more...