Daniel Negri danielnegri

My issues with Modules

In researching topics for RailsCasts I often read code in Rails and other gems. This is a great exercise to do. Not only will you pick up some coding tips, but it can help you better understand what makes code readable.

A common practice to organize code in gems is to divide it into modules. When this is done extensively I find it becomes very difficult to read. Before I explain further, a quick detour on instance_eval.

You can find instance_eval used in many DSLs: from routes to state machines. Here's an example from Thinking Sphinx.

class Article &lt; ActiveRecord::Base

Launch Sublime Text 2 from the Mac OS X Terminal

Sublime Text 2 ships with a CLI called subl (why not "sublime", go figure). This utility is hidden in the following folder (assuming you installed Sublime in /Applications like normal folk. If this following line opens Sublime Text for you, then bingo, you're ready.

open /Applications/Sublime\ Text\ 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl

You can find more (official) details about subl here: http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/osx_command_line.html

Installation

Make it real

Ideas are cheap. Make a prototype, sketch a CLI session, draw a wireframe. Discussions around concrete examples, not handy-waving abstractions. Don't say you did something, provide a URL that proves it.

Ship it

Nothing is real until it's being used by a real user. This doesn't mean you make a prototype in the morning and blog about it in the evening. It means you find one person you believe your product will help and try to get them to use it.

	require 'rubygems'
	require 'bundler'

	Bundler.require
	require './application'

	namespace :assets do
	desc 'compile assets'
	task :compile => [:compile_js, :compile_css] do
	end

	cd ~
	sudo apt-get update
	sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre-headless -y


	### Check http://www.elasticsearch.org/download/ for latest version of ElasticSearch and replace wget link below

	# NEW WAY / EASY WAY
	wget https://download.elasticsearch.org/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-0.90.0.deb
	sudo dpkg -i elasticsearch-0.90.0.deb

	#!/usr/bin/env ruby

	require 'bundler'

	gems = ARGV

	if gems.empty?
	puts "Updating all gems"

	Bundler.definition(true)

	#!/usr/bin/env ruby

	# Aside from removing Ruby on Rails specific code this is taken verbatim from
	# mislav's git-deploy (http://github.com/mislav/git-deploy) and it's awesome
	# - Ryan Florence (http://ryanflorence.com)
	#
	# Install this hook to a remote repository with a working tree, when you push
	# to it, this hook will reset the head so the files are updated

	if ENV['GIT_DIR'] == '.'

	import dispatch._
	import Http._
	import scala.xml._

	var http = new Http()
	var tweets = XML.loadString(http("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=tommorris" as_str))

	(tweets \\ "status" \ "text").toList.foreach(x => println(x.text))

	/**
	*
	*
	* Copyright 2011 Aaron K. Saunders, Clearly Innovative Inc
	*
	* Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
	* you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
	* You may obtain a copy of the License at
	*
	* <a href="http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0">http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0</a>