I like Rails. A lot. And you should too - it makes build web stuff fun, and faster. It’s poetry when compared to PHP. Not to mention there is some smart nerds doing work on it, and it has one of the most vibrant and passionate communities around. Unfortunately, the learning curve can be significant, especially if you are learning Ruby at the same time. Me to the rescue!
The guys behind Sitepoint have just launched a new site: Learnable, which is an online training centre, where people not only go to learn stuff, but they can teach stuff too! They ask me to create a Ruby on Rails 3 course for their launch, and it just went live today!
The course is 12 lessons, and covers enough stuff to build a real app - a code snippet library (A bit like pastie or github gists). I’ll be maning the course forums and answering any questions you have, and will appear online via video link up for some live Q&A sessions in the next couple of weeks.
If you are still using PHP, or have been meaning to learn Rails for a while, then go and sign up - it’s only $19.95 (Bargin!).
The only real pre-requisite is a basic grasp of programming - if you understand if statements, for loops and variables, you should be fine. Serious. Go now. It’s awesome. But don’t just believe me, listen to this talking headshot video of me:
Due to a scheduling clash with us and the State government (There was a public holiday we forgot about), the start of Rails Training 1 has been pushed back a week. It now starts on Monday 8th and Thursday 11th respectively.
Alex Pooley (from Brown Beagle Software, and fellow 220er and Rails guy) are running some Ruby on Rails training sessions in March.
It will be an intensive primer designed to get web developers who work in PHP, or .Net up-to-speed in Rails in about four classes. We will cover Ruby, Rails and unit testing as well as deployment.
The classes cost $220, with one stream running on Monday 1st-22nd March 2010 and the other Thursday 4th-25th March 2010. So if you have been meaning to look at Rails, but haven’t had the time, then this could be perfect for you!
I’ve been pretty busy lately, and haven’t had anytime for some good old fashioned hacking. I’ve also been copping some flack for letting my ruby-fu lapse (it seems a lot can happen in three months. Actually a lot happens in three minutes), so I decided to clear a couple of hours last weekend to have a play with GitHub, haml and sass, and just to generally get friendly with ruby again.
I recently read a couple of articles about the doom and gloom around URL shorteners and how if a couple of the big ones collapsed the entire intergoop would fall on it’s face. Whilst that is a little bit of an over exaggeration, there is some food for thought in that statement. I was also reading about the collapse of magnolia (I know - old news. Sue me). Many an innocent bystander lost many months or years of bookmarking just because one site went down. Whilst I’m a fan of the cloud, I’m also a bit of a control freak, so this was a little scary.
I’ve been using del.icio.us for a while, but only for the bookmarking facilities, not the social part. And even though Yahoo probably won’t go broke any time soon, I was wondering what would happen if they decided to close the big bookmarker in the sky down. So meftos.com was born.
meftos.com is a personal bookmarker and url shortener built in Rails. It only has one user (you), and you host it yourself. From a URL shortening point of view, there is no one point of failure - sure if a number of individuals remove their servers, you will have some broken links, but that if far less impact than one mega site bombing.
If you have a server that can run Rails, you too can install your own copy - feel free to skin it, and change it’s same. All of the source code is on GitHub, and I’m told you can nearly use it out of the box on Heroku. Play around, feel free to kick the tyres. There is still some stuff to do - namely search, better user management (There is no simple user management gems in Ruby any more - I’ll probably have to write my own) and some other bits and pieces, but it seems to work ok.
More importantly, I got a little glimpse again of why coding makes me happy. That should keep me warm on those cold, winter nights…
If you are an Australian Rails developer and have had to deal with online payments, chances are you’ve dealt with Eway. ActiveMerchant has supported Eway for single transactions for a while, but if you have had to deal with rebilling, you may have been at a loss.
I’ve just forked ActiveMerchant and added support for the new Eway Rebill and Managed Payments SOAP API (Obviously, you’ll need soap4r). It’s on github. Very sparse instructions are here. The Rebill API might still need some work, as I ended up concentrating on the Managed Payments API, as that is actually more flexible.
Some background: When using the Rebill API, you tell Eway who you are billing, and when to bill them, and it takes care of the rest. The Managed Payments API on the other hand has Eway storing the users credit card details, and when you need to charge the client, you send a request via the API.
The problem I see with the Rebill API is there is no easy way to check if a payment has failed, other than pulling out ALL the past transactions and checking, where as Managed Payments will give you an immediate response, at the expense of having to maintain your own scheduled task/cron job.
