Rails Summer of Code, Week 5, July 22, 2010 from Cindy Royal on Vimeo.

Right now the default heroku server doesn’t support rails3, so we will need to do some minor modifications, the direct documentation can be found here:  http://docs.heroku.com/rails3#serving-static-assets ,  http://docs.heroku.com/bamboo ,  and  http://docs.heroku.com/quickstart

For a play by play of how to do it follow these directions, and post to the list if you have any questions:

1) Get your application working

2) Add this line of code to : config/environments/production.rb

config.serve_static_assets = true

3) Then you need to install git On a Mac, Windows, or UNIX/Linux
4) In terminal (or command prompt) navigate to your application then execute:

git init
git add .
git commit -m "new app"

5) Sign up through heroku then install the heroku gem:

sudo gem install heroku
heroku keys:add
  Enter your Heroku credentials.
  Email: joe@example.com
  Password:
  Uploading ssh public key /Users/joe/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

6) Deploy your app (still in terminal)

heroku create --stack bamboo-ree-1.8.7 --remote trybamboo
git push trybamboo master

7) Confirm the application is still working by going to the url listed in the output of your terminal. Like:  http://glowing-wind-35.heroku.com/ you will also want to migrate the database:

heroku rake db:migrate --stack bamboo-ree-1.8.7 --remote trybamboo

8) Once you have any errors ironed out, then migrate your heroku install to the main server:

heroku stack:migrate bamboo-ree-1.8.7
git push heroku master
heroku rake db:migrate

9) If you got an error in (8) then you may need to force a rebuild if you didn’t make changes to your code:

heroku stack:migrate bamboo-ree-1.8.7
echo >> Rakefile && git commit -a -m "migrating to bamboo stack"
git push heroku master

10) Now when you make any changes to your application and want to re-deploy you can:

git add .
git commit -m "summary of my changes here"
git push heroku master

Give that a shot, and let me or the group know if you have any problems.  I expect to see an application online per-student by Wednesday evening. That means I expect lat minute questions on the mailing-list by Tuesday. (hint: try it right now, seriously quit watching cartoons, take 10 minutes and deploy an app…its fun! )

Good luck and happy heroku-ing.

Rails Summer of Code, Week 3, July 8, 2010 from Cindy Royal on Vimeo.

This week I cover functional testing, has_many, belongs_to, HABTM, has many :through, and the association database structure. I finish up the section with some impromptu hacking to demonstrate how you can move controller logic to the model, to create re-usable code chunks.

Rails Summer of Code, Week 2, July 1, 2010 from Cindy Royal on Vimeo.

Welcome to Rails Summer of Code.  I’m leading at University of Texas in Austin class through the excellent Agile Web Development with Rails (beta version for Rails 3). This second week I focused on ruby data structures, and the difference between class and instance methods. I then talked about migrations, scaffolding, generators, validation, and unit tests. Recommended Reading: Chapters 3, 4 & 5

Rails Summer of Code – Week 1, June 24, 2010 from Cindy Royal on Vimeo.

Rails Summer of Code – Week 1, June 24, 2010 from Cindy Royal on Vimeo.

This is a first run class, so if you have some constructive criticisms, let me know!

Get your your book, watch the video, and get your Rails on!

So this:

reload!

Acts as if you just did this:

exit
script/console

So not only does it require one less command, but you can still use all previously defined variables. Awesome!

Not bad…but could use a little pizazz. So I decided to take a crack at jQuery UI. A great javascript and style framework that promised to be easy to use and provides theme-able styles.

Once you’ve got jQuery UI integrated nicely into your rails project (note i had to change my url paths in the stylesheet), you can style your submit button easily by adding some classes just like this:

<%= f.submit "Generate Secure Email", :class => "ui-corner-all ui-state-default " %>

Though, this isn’t 100% what I was looking for, it’s a good start. When we hover over the button, it changes color, and when we press it, our rails form submits. Though you’ll notice that the cursor doesn’t change when you hover over the button and we haven’t put an icon in it yet. To get the correct behavior i hard coded in a button:

<button id="user_submit" class = "ui-corner-all  ui-state-default"  type="submit" name="commit">Generate Secure Email</button>

This solved the button styling and behavior, but we still don’t have our icon. After browsing the inter webs i found a nice page of jQuery-UI button demos and I managed to modify my code to include a nice icon:

<button id="user_submit" class = "ui-corner-all fg-button ui-state-default fg-button-icon-left" type="submit" name="commit"><span></span>Generate Secure Email</button>

Perfect! It works like a dream, but it’s not very rails-esq. Lets turn this into a reusable chunk of code by making a helper method to extend form builder. In app/helpers/application_helper.rb

class ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder
    def button_with_icon(text , icon)
     object_name = self.object_name
     return "<button id='#{object_name}_submit' class = 'ui-corner-all fg-button ui-state-default fg-button-icon-left' type='submit' name='commit'><span class='ui-icon ui-icon-#{icon}'></span>#{text}</button>"
    end
end

Now In my View I can put:

<%=  f.button_with_icon("Generate Secure Email", "mail-closed") %>

And I get my perfectly formatted button complete with an Icon!

Note:

<% form_for :person, @person, :url => { :action => "create" } do |f| %>
    <%= f.object_name %>
<% end %>

will print out “person”, thats why in the helper we call  self.object_name on the form_builder class. Pretty cool huh?