Ruby Zone

A visitor to Ruby Zone asked in a comment about my post "Rails is cool":

I was wondering how you could accomplish this with a different controller. For ex:
in the users view I have:
<%= text_field_with_auto_complete :state, :name %>

where would I put the controller code, in the user or state controller. so far both havent worked for me. Thanks

Here is a step by step how I do it:

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The version 0.3 of ROROX is released. ( 8.7M ). ROROX is a package providing Ruby, Rails plus dependencies and other gems, rails_scgi, and Apache SCGI module, to be installed over a XAMPP (XAMPP = an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl) installation. The aim is to get close to a "one-click" installer for Linux (a la Locomotive or Instant Rails).

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In PHP or other languages to get the content of a directory and all its subdirectories, you have to write some lines of code, but in Ruby it takes 2 lines:

require 'find'
Find.find('./') do |f| p f end

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Blaine Kendall has compiled from numerous sources a handbook (PDF format: 105K) that covers all you need to know. The PDF file contains 14 pages 25 tips.

I’ve been studying Ruby On Rails over the past few weeks and taking notes as I go. This is a result of my amassed noteset from reading books, tutorials and websites. I also find writing notes helps you to remember so this was also a memorization exercise for myself.

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The script.aculo.us has some cool demos of the Ruby on Rails AJAX helpers, which use drag-and-drop and autocompletion features.

What makes Rails great is that with 2 lines of code you get a full application, in our case a cool text input box with autocompetion. Here is the basic example at script.aculo.us:

# view
<%= text_field_with_auto_complete :contact, :name %>

# controller
auto_complete_for :contact, :name

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The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has published a paper by David Plans Casal, Director of Research at Luminas entitled "Internet Applications Advanced Software Development for Web Applications (PDF file: 23 pages)". In this paper David tells how the Web has moved far from a simple text and image distribution system to modern sophisticated Web applications.The introduction of Web frameworks somewhat helped by providing coding skeletons upon which systems could be built. The paper has outlined two such frameworks, Apache Cocoon and Ruby On Rails, which, it is argued, offer considerable advantages to developers.

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If you want to start with Rails but want a real life example of Rails application, Doug Pfeffer has released the code for his site PointFingers.

Recently a visitor to PointFingers.com suggested I make the Ruby on Rails source code public, as a resource for other people interested in the framework. I thought that was a nice idea, so I cleaned up the code, added some comments, and uploaded it here. I'm also interested in any feedback you might have on my code, such as style tips or other improvements. I'll post any input I receive here. Anyway, on to the code.

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I came across this question in "Rails Weenie" site and because there is no good answer for it there, here is my 2cents:

I have an application that will have multi-language views spanish, english, etc. What i want to do is the next thing, on the views folder i want to create a folder named “spanish”, another one named “english”, etc. These folders will contain all the rhtml files of each language. But, the problem is...

When i want to acces the main page i will be redirected to the view of the language selected. For example, in PHP i will do something like this:

$language=”spanish”;
$url_to_show=”$language/index.php”;

On rails i have a controller with a function named index, and it shows the view “index.rhtml”... but i want to show the index.rhtml that is inside of the selected language folder

Is it possible?

Yes it is. And exactly the way you described with php:

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Wade Winningham in his article tries to answer "Questions Ruby on Rails skeptics ask"

If you decide to recommend using Rails with a team that doesn’t know much about it, you may run into some questions. If you don’t have some ready answers, the idea will most likely be shot down quickly and left in the dust.

The questions he tries to answer are:

• Using ‘id’ as the primary key name ?


• Using the Rails naming scheme ?


• Rails generates too much database server traffic ?


• It’s difficult to find hosting ?


• What about performance ?

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I found the tip "Alternative Default Routes" from "Rails Code Snippets" very helpful. I wanted to customize the look of URLs in a Rails application and this helped me although it wasn't exactly what I wanted.

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Brian Hogan has wrote a good article at "New Auburn" site about "Setting up a Rails Development Environment on Windows Using Eclipse". It's a kind of how-to and step by step guide for windows users on how to set up an easy to use IDE for Ruby On Rails.

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In Ruby there are 3 classes dedicated to windows users. The WIN32OLE class which is a client interface to windows 32 ole automation server, the WIN32OLE_EVENT class which is used in conjunction with the WIN32OLE class to add callbacks for Windows 32 events and the Win32API class that allows access to any arbitrary Windows 32 function.

I'll take only the Win32API class here. May be in other posts I'll cover the 2 others.

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I come across the "Move to Iceland" blog. The guy out there hates RubyOnRails, but he explains very well why he hates RoR. In his post "I hate Ruby on Rails", he says:

Coding in RoR is like talking to a intelligent, beautiful woman. Coding in PHP is like talking to a pretty but stupid girl. Coding in ASP.NET is like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a miserable failure.

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IndexedSearchEngine is a simple, pluggable engine for rails applications which can be used to enable full text indexed searches within an application.

The author of the Engine says that Ferret (a port of the Apache-Lucene java project and one of the most requested libraries for ruby) is almost certainly faster but he believes that IndexedSearchEngine is easier to use, however.

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I read today at Michael Gaffney's Web 2.0 Tech Blog that

Sixth & Red River is thinking about developing a Ruby Plugin for IntelliJ but they want to know if anyone will buy it before they commit.

I think that most Java developers will find it a great idea, but I doubt it would sell without support for rails because it's Rails that made the huge impact and not Ruby on its own.

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David in his post: Street Easy: Look at all the New York places you can't afford! in the RubyOnRail Weblog say:

Street Easy is a sweet new mash-up of Google Maps that’s running Ruby on Rails to mock you for all the places in New York you can’t afford to buy.

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Try Ruby is a place to play with Ruby within your browser. You can type commands and get results without having Ruby installed on your local machine. Of course you cannot do all you want with the "Try Ruby". It is just for trying and not for hacking.

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