MARTYHAUGHT

Active Warehouse slides

Here are my slides (as a pdf) from my Active Warehouse talk last night. It was a great meeting with thought-provoking discussions about the Rails community during Mike Clark’s presentation. I was also pleased to see both Chad Fowler and David Black join us for the meeting. Next up is the Mountain West Ruby Conference which I’m very much looking forward to.

Builder and escaping values

I’ve been working a bit more with Builder in my Calendar extension that I hope to have the first alpha release on. I really like builder but I’ve run into a snag. I’m trying to generate a url such as this:

<a href="?date=2008-04-01" title="April">&#187;</a>

My first shot at creating this in builder was with this:

html.a("»", :href => "?date=2008-04-01", :title => "April")

Inclusions in Advanced Rails Recipes

The last couple weeks has been a bit hectic for me as one of my submissions to the Advanced Rails Recipes book was undergoing some changes. Mike Clark has been on a whirlwind just finishing up this book in the last several months. We’ve been discussing my dataset recipe and getting some final touches on it these last couple weeks. I posted about this recipe back in the summer but some things have changed since that point.

The Rails Way

I finally picked up a copy of Obie’s new book, The Rails Way, have started to read it. It’s been out for several months now so it’s not new news but I wanted to mention that I’m thoroughly enjoying reading it. I like Obie’s targeted audience as well as his writing style. While so far I’ve known most everything I’ve read, I do suspect I’ll pick up some new ideas before I’m done. Regardless, it will be nice validation on how to do certain things in Rails.

On a side note, I’m also putting together a talk on Active Warehouse for the March Boulder Ruby meeting coming up on the 19th. I’m part-way done with it but still have to get it all together. The timing isn’t great as I will be skiing with my family for the next three days. I guess I’ll have to cut short my jacuzzi time to finish the slides!

YUI 2.5 integration

Today I checked the YUI 2.5 resources into the YUI 4 Rails plugin’s trunk. This isn’t an official release of the plugin though. So far the plugin has simply been Andy and I as we extract reusable code from our current project to share it with the rest of the world. There has been growing interest from others to add other components to the plugin. Our next release will include at least a few of these components. We have a mailing list at RubyForge that you should join if you want to keep up-to-date on what is happening.

Both the datatable and charts helpers have been updated and work fine in our local application. I will be posting more details on this integration and what you will have to do if you’re using these components through our plugin.