Camping with Ruby

2012-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

I mentioned in my previous post, that I built my first Ruby project using the Camping framework. I wanted to give some follow up information about that because I think there are somethings about Camping specifically that people new to Ruby or Camping would greatly benefit from.

Here is how to get up to speed with Camping:

Read the examples included with Camping
Don’t be afraid to read the source to Camping. It’s quite friendly, and the best resource for how things are accomplished.
Markaby is the templating library
ActiveRecord is your ORM

Camping is an amazingly brief amount code. In fact from what I can tell, this is a main source of pride for the Camping devs. The uncommented version is only 55 lines of code long. And even the commented version is only 764 lines of code. There are two important points to draw from this. First, if you want to know something about Camping the best reference is the unabridged source. The comments are extensive, and the code is very easy to follow.

Secondly, Camping lets some other Ruby gems do the heavy lifting, which means the documentation about templating(markaby) or ORM(ActiveRecord) is very thin on the Camping site, but each have their own sites with more useful documentation. ActiveRecord is great because it is used in many other Ruby frameworks. Markaby is less used but once you get the hang of overall idea, it is pretty much dead easy to use. Both of these gems are popular enough that it is easy finding information on them if you search for them specifically.

Finally, now that I’ve had some time to think about this a bit. I really like this framework. I will definitely consider using it again. There were times in this project I thought I had made a bad choice on frameworks due to popularity and ease of finding answers for other ones, but this forced me to rely more on reading the Camping source code. Which in turn, was a great thing to be forced into since I was using Luggage as a way to learn Ruby.

Bonus Round: Camping apps work great with Unicorn. Just remove the ActiveRecord dis/connection in the before_fork and after_fork functions from the example file and you’re good to go!

Luggage, a simple way to share files

2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A while ago I got pointed to CloudApp. It is a pretty cool service that makes it easy to share files in the cloud. They have a large number of handlers for different types of files so that when you post images it looks good or if you post a source file it gets syntax highlighted. It even renders markdown. The free service is somewhat limited, but for my low usage it was more than adequate.

As much as I like CloudApp, I wanted something I could put on my own domain. CloudApp does have a paid service that lets you use your own domain, but the more I thought about it, this seemed like a perfect chance to learn something new and create my own thing. So enter Luggage. It is a small ruby script that lets you drag and drop files on to the page which then can be shared with anyone. Right now it has custom viewers for source code and images, everything else will get a download page (I’m sure I’ll add more as needed).

For this project I went with Ruby using the Camping framework. It’s small, simple, and more or less does the trick. One of the great things about CloudApp is how easy it is to share files. You just drag and drop files to the icon in your menu bar, or if you take a screenshot it will automatically upload it for you. While I wasn’t able to go that far with Luggage, I do use the File API in browsers that support it. This means you can drag files from Explorer or Finder (or w/e you linux kids use) and have them uploaded right away (with a progress bar and everything!).

The other things I used in Luggage were jQuery and Twitter Bootstrap (for this project I didn’t want to spend time styling it, at least not initially). I also added in google-code-prettify after fidling around with Albino/pygments for too long.

The name, by the way, comes from a character in Discworld: The Luggage, and I wrote this app so I could more easily share this.

Good Robot!

Camping with Ruby

Luggage, a simple way to share files