10.04.07 - 08:07pm
I’ve been working with Ruby on Rails intensively for several months, and I’ve finally found a place where Rails can’t readily be extended to do what I want. It’s ActiveRecord, which is probably the most controversial part of Rails.
I’m reminded of a James Gosling quote disparaging Microsoft tools, particularly Visual Basic: “The easy stuff is [...]
09.23.07 - 02:36pm
Derek Sivers of CDBaby kicks ass. He got a sophisticated and very very user-friendly, efficient, straightforward e-commerce system (including the back-end systems) written in PHP. Based on what I’ve read, he’s up there with Phil Greenspun in my opinion; that is, he’s among those who understand strategy and customer service and low-level technology and are [...]
09.22.07 - 11:47pm
acts-as-tsearch is pretty cool, except for the fact that it uses Ruby (app layer) instead of PL/pgSQL (DB layer) to update the tsvectors that are indexed for full text search. That means that fixture data gets inserted without being full text indexed. D’oh!
Here’s some code that changes that.
09.22.07 - 05:18pm
Let’s say you’re using Rails with PostgreSQL and the TSearch2 built-in full text search engine.
Did you notice that every time you run rake test, that depends on db:test:prepare, which depends on db:test:clone, which depends on db:test:purge, which drops the database and creates it again?
Along with your dropped database goes the TSearch2 functions that wrap the [...]
08.02.07 - 08:37pm
From what I’ve seen, Rails’ weakest features lie in the way it prepares the test database and test data, and Ruby’s Test::Unit isn’t much better than the awful but ubuiquitous JUnit that Java developers are accustomed to. I set out this week to impose my preferences on Rails in this area, and that took some [...]