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So a couple of days ago, after seeing a post over at Softies on Rails, I downloaded and installed RIDE-ME. RIDE-ME is the latest entry into the Rails IDE space, following the likes of RadRails, Locomotive, and (in some aspects) Sapphire In Steel.

RIDE-ME looks and functions a lot like Visual Studio (which I know might not appeal to everyone), but unlike VS, it’s very light weight, has great syntax highlighting support, and is fast (which are all must haves for me when it comes to editors). After playing around with the application for a while, I wasn’t quite set to leave my current editor, but I was very excited about its future. I decided to keep my eye on the project’s weblog and continue to re-evaluate the application as features were added.

What happened next is still a bit of a blur, but the other day Michael posted that he had a new build that included initial support for editing code snippets, and asked for people interested in testing it to leave a comment. Little did I know that my interest in this new feature (and my comments with regard to implementation) would lead to me becoming a contributor, but it did! Thanks to my big commenting mouth, I’ve been given the task of implementing the code snippet support for RIDE-ME. Now, I haven’t worked with C# in a long time, so I was initially a little worried that I might actually slow the project down a bit while I knock off the rust, or, even worse, totally screw something up. Thankfully, Michael has done an excellent job in organizing the code base, so I should be able to hop in and make things happen without causing too many problems. ;-)

So, keep an eye out on the RIDE-ME Blog for updates from me as well as the others involved. The planned features, when finished, will most certainly make this the must-use IDE to use for Rails development on Windows.

I was able to get around to updating the Rails CHM Documentation this morning. It’s taken me a bit longer than I would have liked to get this out, so I apologize. There really is a good reason for the long wait!

I had previous made some modifications to the RDOC CHM generator file to get the previous version working the way I liked, and while upgrading Ruby to 1.8.4, I accidentally overwrote the file (oops). Because of this, I had to go back and make the modifications again, and I really hadn’t been motivated to do this since I was busy with other projects. This morning, I sat down and decided to get the file out. I made backup copies of these files this time, so this shouldn’t happen again.

For those wondering, I am still planning on getting an article out detailing exactly what I do to generate this CHM file (including the RAKE task). Until that happens though, you’ll just have to live with the file I’ve got. :-)

Here’s the url: http://delynnberry.com/pages/rails-chm-documentation.

I saw a post on Monday morning written by courtney over at http://habtm.com called “Handy Select Functions”. I had recently begun building this type of functionality into some of the models in my current application, but when I saw this, I immediately thought “Wow, that’s much better!”

After adding these methods to a library file and trying it out in my application, I began wondering if the implementation might not be even better if the whole thing were in a plugin. Within a few hours acts_as_dropdown was born, allowing you to create dropdowns very easily by just doing the following in your model:

class State < ActiveRecord::Base
acts_as_dropdown
end

and then using the to_dropdown method in the view along with the select form helper:

<%= select(“person”, “state_id”, State.to_dropdown) %>

<select name=”person[state_id]”>
<option value=”1”>Alabama</option>
<option value=”2”>Alaska</option>
<option value=”3”>Arizona</option>
…
</select>

Feel free to check out all the nitty gritty information on the acts_as_dropdown product page, or by checking out the plugin from my SVN repository at http://www.delynnberry.com/svn/code/rails/plugins/acts_as_dropdown/.

So, check it out in your own project and let me know what you think!

Update - The latest version of the CHM documentation for Rails version 1.1.2 has been released and can be found here.

Back in August there was a Rails developer who released a CHM version of the Rails 0.13.0 documentation for those that have to develop on the Windows platform. I have been using that help file for the past few months even though there are several alternate ways of getting at the Rails documentation. For some reason, I always found myself using the CHM because of the index and quick search capabilities that it provides.

However, over the past couple of weeks I found myself no longer using the CHM file, but the Rails API website instead. The reason for this was simple: Rails moved to version 1.0 a couple of months ago and introduced several new features that the CHM file just didn’t cover.

I remember seeing a Wiki article that explained how to generate the CHM manually, so yesterday morning I set out to do just that with the Rails 1.0 source. Unfortunately, I ran into several problems (just like others have). What I thought was going to be a simple little RDoc task, ended becoming a debuging task that took most of the day to get everything just right.

Download the file from here!

In the next couple of days, I plan on releasing a RAKEFILE that will allow one to easily create the CHM file from the Rails source. I also will be making the CHM file available for any future version of Rails as soon after the release as possible so as to avoid the black-out type situation that we had during the past seven months.

So, let me know if you have any suggestions or have problems with the file and enjoy!

I was recently creating a new Rails application for work, and needed to track who was creating and updating certain objects. I remember seeing a post on the Rails Wiki a while ago entitled “Extending ActiveRecord Example”, so this is where I started when looking to implement my needed functionality. After reading that article I started thinking that instead of creating a library and including it into every model that needed this functionality, it would be neat if there was a plugin available that took care of this for you. After looking at the Plugins Wiki page, I was suprised to see that no one had yet created a plugin.

Using the ActiveRecord::Timestamp module as reference, I set out creating the plugin myself. After about thirty minutes of hacking around, I had a fully working plugin. I’ve been using this plugin in my application for the last few weeks and after seeing this post to the mailing list, I decided it might be good for me to release the plugin to the world. During the last couple of days, I’ve spent time adding a full battery of tests and RDoc comments to the code.

So, without further ado, I’m pleased to announce the Userstamp Plugin.