The 2 projects launch week.

Before starting a new project, take a look.

If you’re planning to start a new project, from scratch, Jim Neath, from Fudge, had the good idea to create Bort, your application skeleton to start without pain.

What is Bort ?

      Ruby on Rails popularity brings to it a lot of very good plugins. And it’s that, on 98 % case, when you start a new project from scratch, you’re going to do every times the same thing.

      From starting your test with Rspec to install the lastest version of RESTFUL Authentication, we do all the same thing every time.

      So Bort is just an easy to use starting point, like the scaffolds sometimes.

How can I play with it ?

      Open a terminal and clone Bort git repository : clone git://github.com/fudgestudios/bort.git  (or download it directly from the GitHub )

      Then a Rake db:migrate will do the magic.

What’s inside ?

      At this time, a Bort fresh installation come with :

1. RESTful Authentication and params
2. User Roles
3. Open ID Authentication
4. Will Paginate
5. Rspec & Rspec-rails
6. Exception Notifier
7. Asset Packager
8. Capistrano recipes

       A rake:bort:[plugin name] will help you to an easy install of some useful plugins.

How can you help ?

        On his blog, Jim Neath calls for developers ideas, so give a look and report bugs/ideas here

Rails Rumble 2008, I’ll participate

After long hesitation, I finally took a place for the Rails Rumble 2008.

What’s the Rails Rumble :

Basically, you have 48 Hours long to build from scratch a deployable Ruby on Rails web application.

Every team will have a virtual seat. The rumble starts on October 18th 2008 at 00:00 GMT and stops on October 19Th 2008 at 23:59 GMT.

Every team can have between 1 and 4 persons.

You’re not allowed to start coding/design before or after the 48 hours.

Your application will be judge during 10 days after the competition.

Who can participate :

Any Ruby on Rails developer with an idea to develop, all levels.

My Project :

I’ll try to have a complete Online Cv builder working.

My Rails Rumble project page is online, with the Sheep’n Geek team name.

If you have some reasonable ideas for it, I’ll take them to consideration

Sponsors and prizes :

You can find on the Rails Rumble blog all the sponsors names, with their contributions.

And now :

I have my day job, my travel planner project, and this contest … Ho, and our anniversary with my peanut. I’m going to be very busy.

Goog luck to all contestants.

Please, use a version control system, even if your work alone.

Currently, in my team, we are looking for a new junior web developer.

Each time it is the same process.

   1. Read the CV.
   2. First call to see if the person will be ok FOR the role.
   3. Second call with technical questions.

In these technical questions, one is : “Have your ever used a source versioning control system ?”

Easy, isn’t it ?

You’d be surprised with the responses we had :

   1. No never used before.
   2. Yes I’ve used Eclipse/Tortoise
   3. What is it ?
   4. No, never because I worked alone or because we were a small team

Come on, how can you imagine working on a project, even small and own project, without a version control system ?

Saving your code, diff capabilities, branches, tags, reverts, history …. can you code without this ?

To hard or you don’t have any server for that ?

Have a look at GitHub

You don’t need one, you work alone ?

So, you never make mistake, you’ve never modified a file and seen a hidden bug 1 week later, never copied and pasted a part of code in a text editor just in case it doesn’t work, never renamed a folder with the word ‘works/ok/test’ ?

If you can say yes to one or more of the behaviours above, you should take half a day to put your project under a version control system and learn how to use it.

If you want to learn more about version control system, smashing magazine made a presentation of 7 version control systems, just take a look.

At work, migration is in progress from CVS to SVN, and for my personal projects, I use Git on GitHub, very easy and very cheap.

What about you ? Do you use one ? Which one and why ?

How to be productive on spare time

Last Sunday I was working on my current personal project, when, during a tea break, I thought about “how to be productive on your personal projects”.

The pros :

Using this organisation let me have some time with my peanut for discovering England, cooking, watching films, whatever we want, because I can keep 2 or 3 nigths a week and 1 week end day with her.

Even if this organization seems to work quite well, there are some cons :

1. If you make the addition of all the working hours, you’ll have up to 25 hours dedicated to your application, with ‘only’ 15 hours a week for the real development.
2. When you have a coding problem, you know this
   kind of little bugs that can take hours to be solved, it’s like if
   you’ve lost a week of work.
3. You need to have a solid idea of what you have
   to do every day, and be well organised in your development process
   between test, development and design.
4. You need to wake up in the morning after the night work day …

What about you ? What’s your organization method to work on personnal project ?

Google chrome should be launched today

This will be the buzz of the day, announced on the Google Blog, Google is launching their Open Source web browser today, based on Webkit (as Safari).

As every Google products, the idea is to have a product with lots of innovations, but, we can assume a lot of interactions with the existing Google Apps, and the ‘in development’ android applications.

To me, it looks likes a loop. In the first time, you win the battle of search engines to become an incontrovertible actor on the ads market, then you win the online application battle, which is the future of desktop applications, and now you just want to control the enter point to all these stuff, the web browser, the real lastest desktop application.

For the moment, I’ll just give a try to this new Open Source browser, as another software, but you need to be aware off who is doing the application, and why.

And you what about you ? What do you think about the Google dominance in the web industry ?

Edit : As usual, Linux and OsX users will have to wait, only Windows will be supported for the moment.

how to install Passenger for Ruby on Rails on an Apache2 / Linux box

I was preparing the future of this blog, and for that I need to have a sandbox ready for the development and the production.

I decided to give a test to Passenger (aka modRails) for the apache2 Ruby on Rails integration. It’s amazing how simple it is to have a Rails application working now …

What’s Passenger ?

Passenger is a server side module, which enables to have a rails application working without any configuration. People use to say that, with Passenger, you’ll be able to deploy Rails application like PHP application.

Also, and because it made the creation of virtual host very easy, Passenger is looking as the solution for more Rails shared host providers.

How to install Passenger (on an Ubuntu Server Box) :

I assume that you have your Rails and Apache2 installed.

First we need to install the apache2-dev libs

• sudo apt-get install apache2-prefork-dev

Then we are going to install the gem for passenger and passenger apache himself.

• sudo gem install passenger
• sudo passenger-install-apache2-module

For me the version of passenger was 2.0.3, I just follow what the installer said :

copy in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.3/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.3
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8

Be sure that the rewrite mode is enabled :

• sudo a2emod rewrite

Create a vhost file in /etc/apaches/sites-available/myRailsApp.com

and put inside something like

ServerName myRailsApp.com
DocumentRoot /path/to/myRailsApp/public/

And restart now apache (sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart), and you should have a passenger box working.

And now ?

Now you just have to upload the new files to have your application working with Passenger.

I’ll use it for my sandbox, and have some test on the performance before using it on my future web application.

The next step will be to have capistrano 2 working with this configuration. It should be easy, we’ll see that this week

Because we (sometime) need help, dashboard are here !

I’ve just found the ultimate web designer/developer dashboard via the excellent French Babozor’s blog.

I used to visit the ForWebDesigner dashboard but the presentation of the Agencytool’s one is just gorgeous.

Bookmarked immediately and let’s give him a chance.

Edit : After a better view, the presentation of the Agencytool is gorgeous but :

• No as many links as the ForWebDesigner
• No RSS for the new entries

I’ll keep them both, but, even if the FWD presentation is not so pretty, it seems to be better.