A first time gem creator's addendum

I recently started researching how to create Ruby Gems because I was working on on a Ruby application that is a reference application for accessing our production system at work, and I wanted to make the specific access code for our production system a Gem in Ruby so that I could just hand it off to future clients who want to integrate with Ruby. Further to that end, I read about the Newgem gem, and so I decided to use it, since it had recently hit 1.0.1. You can read the documentation there, so I won't repeat it here, but there's a couple of things you should do, prior to following their instructions.

1. Set a 'HOME' environment variable if you're using Windows (as I am)


2. gem install cucumber newgem


3. rake config_hoe

The first step is to install newgem, but to also ensure that cucumber is installed as well because it's an unlisted dependency. The second step is to ensure that there's a basic .hoerc file created in your home directory that's ready to go whenever you want to run any tasks on your gem while testing / packaging it. I'm guessing it's automatically created in Linux, but I had to manually set the 'HOME' environment variable and run the configuration task myself in order to have the proper configuration file generated for me to run the tasks for creating and testing my gem.

A quick note on ActiveResource in Ruby on Rails

I've learned a bunch of new things about Ruby on Rails in the past few days, specifically when it comes to RESTful web services.

• ActiveResource uses the built in Ruby XML::Mapping library for its OXM (Object to XML mapping) layer


• Apparently, no Ruby library out there properly handles namespaces. Not a one : REXML, ROXML, XML::Mapping


• ActiveResource can be highly customized to adjust to other RESTful web service schemes, just not when it comes to the generated XML.

Unfortunately this makes it very hard to integrate (in ruby) with the RESTful web service that I've written for our company's production web site. Ironically, I wanted to make the service very Ruby friendly. I really wish there was more in depth documentation out there for Ruby APIs. It would have made things so much easier when I was designing our API, which runs in Java, using JAXB.

Reflection in Ruby

I've recently gotten started going on a Ruby on Rails project for my company, that's meant to be a simple app that we'll throw up and let run for any prospective customers. But I ran into a problem with copying property values between objects, since I'm not as familiar with the language as I'd like to be. The Object type defines a method called 'send' which lets you invoke a method with given arguments. However, I wanted to be able to assign property values via this method, and just sending the name of the property as the name of the method to invoke wasn't working. (Works just fine if you want to get the property). As it turns out, the method for invoking the setter of a property is brain-dead simple : use the name of the method as you'd define it if you were overriding the setter for the property. For example, if you have a property called 'name', you'd define the setter for it as follows :

def name= (name)
  @name = name
end

So if you wanted to set the value of this property reflectively, you'd do something like :

 @person_instance.send "name=", "John Smith"

Software developers are arrogant assholes

Like the title of this post says, software developers are arrogant assholes. I can say that because I am one. The reason I say this is that I've been Googling like a mofo for articles related to RESTful development and RESTful web services servers using Ruby on Rails, and I must say that it's a real pain in the ass. The vast majority of the articles I'm able to find are in blog format, and are (as is typical with blog-style articles / tutorials) very vague, and don't provide enough detail for a learner to get going. Essentially, they make the assumption that you already know something about Ruby on Rails, and it's a rather hypocritical assumption for a tutorial / article to make. I will admit that I've been somewhat guilty of doing this same thing in my own blog whenever I've provided code examples, so it stops now. Any future "tutorials" on this blog are going to be as complete as possible, time constraints at work be damned. Vagueness cannot be allowed to continue.

Today's karmic balance

It's pretty rare that I have something to blog about within a couple days of each other, never mind on the same day, so I suppose that this post is the karmic balance of the other for today. I just found out yesterday that because one of our processing partners had their douchebag of a contractor ditch on them, I now have to maintain two systems and integrate them both together. That in and of itself is kinda stupid. But at least this'll be my first production interaction with Ruby on Rails, and I'm actually really looking forward to the experience. I've been meaning to get myself up to speed with Rails, but between feeling tired after I get home and working so damn much that I don't have the time when I get home, I haven't really had the chance. It's going to be an interesting coming couple of weeks.