rails

Why it is just lazy to bad-mouth Ruby on Rails

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It’s inevitable these days: we will see an article proclaiming the demise of Ruby on Rails every once in a while. It’s the easiest click bait, like this one from TNW.Now, you may say “another Ruby fanboy.” That’s fair, but a terrible argument, as it’s a poor and common argumentum ad hominem. And on the subject of fallacies, the click-bait article above is wrong exactly because it falls for a blatantly Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy plus some more confirmation bias which we are all guilty of falling for all the time.
I’m not saying that the author wrote fallacies on purpose. Unfortunately, it’s just too easy to fall for fallacies. Especially when everybody has an intrinsic desire to confirm one’s biases. Even trying to be careful, I end up doing that as well…

Fabio Akita

Rails is f*cking boring! I love it.

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Together with a friend I recently built Dropshare Cloud. We offer online storage for the file and screenshot sharing app Dropshare for macOS/iOS. After trying out Django for getting started (we both had some experience using Django) I decided to rewrite the codebase in Rails. My past experience developing in Rails made the process quick — and boring…

Tim Buchwaldt

Too Ruby

Ruby, a programming language of which I’m quite fond, is well-known for it’s readability and ease of comprehension, among about thirty-seven other wonderful features.

I rediscovered quite how readable the language is when I genuinely ended up writing the following method last week:

# On saving, updates the #Shift counters if the #ExperienceLevel of this
# #Volunteer has been changed
def update_counters_if_experience_level_changed
  update_counters if experience_level_changed?
end

For the benefit of those of you who aren’t programmers, I’ll point out that which is obvious to those of us who are: the body of the method (that’s the line that’s indented) is almost identical to the method name (the line that starts with “def”).

This is the equivalent of going to WikiHow and looking up the article on, say, How to Make a Tie Dyed Cake, only to discover that the text of the article simply says, “Choose what colours you want, and then make a cake in those colours”… and you understand perfectly and go and make the cake, because you’ve got that good an understanding. In this metaphor, you’re the Ruby interpreter, by the way. And the cake is delicious.

Okay, I cheated a little: the experience_level_changed? method was provided for me by the Rails framework. And I had to write the update_counters method myself (although it, too, contains only one line of code in its body). But the point is still the same: writing Ruby, and thinking in a Rubyish way, produces beautifully readable, logical code.

HttpOnly Session Cookies using ActiveRecordStore in Rails 2.2

If you’re using CookieStore to manage sessions in your Ruby on Rails application, Rails 2.2 provides the great feature that you’re now able to use HTTPOnly cookies. These are a great benefit because, for compatible web browsers, they dramatically reduce the risk of a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attack being able to be used to hijack your users’ sessions, which is particularly important on sites displaying user-generated content. You simply have to adjust your environment.rb file with something like:

config.action_controller.session = {
:session_key => ‘_session_id’,
:session_http_only => true,
:secret => ‘your-secret’
}
config.action_controller.session_store = :cookie_store

Unfortunately, the Rails developers didn’t see fit to extend HTTPOnly cookies to those of us using ActiveRecordStore, where the XSS risk is still just as real. To fill this gap, I’ve produced a very simple and only slightly-hackish plugin which overrides the functionality of Rails’ CGI::Cookie to force all cookies produced by Rails to be HTTPOnly, regardless of the session store being used.

To use it, download this file and extract it into your application’s vendor/plugins directory, and restart your application server. You can test that it’s working using Tamper Data, FireCookie, or whatever your favourite cookie sniffing tool is.

SSL Client Certificate Authentication In Ruby On Rails

I’ve been playing with using client-side SSL certificates (installed into your web browser) as a means to authenticate against a Ruby on Rails-powered application. This subject is geeky and of limited interest even to the people who read this blog (with the possible exception of Ruth, who may find herself doing exactly this as part of her Masters dissertation), so rather than write about it all here, I’ve written a howto/article: SSL Client Certificate Authentication In Ruby On Rails. If you’re at all interested in the topic, you’re welcome to have a read and give me any feedback.

Rails Reference

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Bookmarked via del.icio.us: Rails Reference.

Writing A Calendar App In Rails Vs. PHP

Some time ago, I wrote a web-based calendar application in PHP, one of my favourite programming languages. This tool would produce a HTML tabular calendar for a four week period, Monday to Sunday, in which the current date (or a user-specified date) fell in the second week (so you’re looking at this week, last week, and two weeks in the future). The user-specified date, for various reasons, would be provided as the number of seconds since the epoch (1970). In addition, the user must be able to flick forwards and backwards through the calendar, “shifting” by one or four weeks each time.

Part of this algorithm, of course, was responsible for finding the timestamp (seconds since the epoch) of the beginning of “a week last Monday”, GMT. It went something like this (pseudocode):

1. Get a handle on the beginning of "today" with [specified time] modulus [number of seconds in day] 2. Go back in time a week by deducting [number of seconds in day] multiplied by [number of days in week] (you can see I'm a real programmer, because I set "number of days in week" as a constant, in case it ever gets changed) 3. Find the previous Monday by determining what day of the week this date is on (clever functions in PHP do this for me), then take [number of seconds in day] multiplied by [number of days after Monday we are] from this to get "a week last Monday" 4. Jump forwards or backwards a number of weeks specified by the user, if necessary. Easy. 5. Of course, this isn't perfect, because this "shift backwards a week and a few days" might have put us in to "last month", in which case the calendar needs to know to deduct one month and add [number of days in last month] 6. And if we just went "back in time" beyond January, we also need to deduct a year and add 11 months. Joy.

So; not the nicest bit of code in the world.

I’ve recently been learning to program in Ruby On Rails. Ruby is a comparatively young language which has become quite popular in Japan but has only had reasonable amounts of Westernised documentation for the last four years or so. I started looking into it early this year after reading an article that compared it to Python. Rails is a web application development framework that sits on top of Ruby and promises to be “quick and structured”, becoming the “best of both worlds” between web engineering in PHP (quick and sloppy) and in Java (slow and structured). Ruby is a properly object-oriented language – even your literals are objects – and Rails takes full advantage of this.

For example, here’s my interpretation in Rails of the same bit of code as above:

@week_last_monday = 7.days.ago.gmtime.monday + params[:weeks].to_i.weeks

An explanation:

@week_last_monday is just a variable in which I’m keeping the result of my operation.
7.days might fool you. Yes, what I’m doing there is instantiating an Integer (7, actually a Fixint, but who cares), then calling the “days” function on it, which returns me an instance of Time which represents 7 days of time.
Calling the ago method on my Time object, which returns me another Time object, this time one which is equal to Time.now (the time right now) minus the amount of Time I already had (7 days). Basically, I now have a handle on “7 days ago”.
The only thing PHP had up on me here is that it’s gmdate() function had ensured I already had my date/time in GMT; here, I have to explicitly call gmtime to do the same thing.
And then I simply call monday on my resulting Time object to get a handle on the beginning of the previous Monday. That simple. 24 characters of fun.
+ params[:weeks].to_i.weeks simply increments (or decrements) the Time I have by a number of weeks specified by the user (params[:weeks] gets the number of weeks specified, to_i converts it to an integer, and weeks, like days, creates a Time object from this. In Ruby, object definitions can even override operators like +, -, <, >, etc., as if they were methods (because they are), and so the author of the Time class made it simple to perform arithmetic upon times and dates.

This was the very point at which I feel in love with Ruby on Rails.

Ruby Active Record Associations [PNG]

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Bookmarked via del.icio.us: Ruby Active Record Associations [PNG].

Understanding has_one, has_many, belongs_to, etc.