Watt's Up Musings of an original geek

I’ll probably be continuing this ‘depot’ application a number of times since there are many chapters in the book that I’m following. So I’ve just finished Chapter 7 – Task B: Validation and Unit Testing. This included Validating and Unit Testing of Models. This also included the extras at the end of chapter, which included committing the changes to GIT and some additional validations. All of which were quite straight forward since I got GIT working during the last chapter. Doing the GIT work through Eclipse I had to do a separate “add” and then a “commit”. I couldn’t do a combined one, that is, git commit -a, or at least it wasn’t obvious through the Eclipse GIT interface.

Next completed Chapter 8 – Task C: Catalog Display and Chapter 9 – Task D: Cart Creation. After each I saved it in GIT. Not much more to say other than I’m getting full of technology, so this is the last chapter for this weekend. I’ll need to go back and review these chapters next weekend.

I read chapter 5 and then worked through the first part of the ‘depot’ sample in chapter 6. Everything went smoothly until the extra exercises at the end of chapter 6 called “Playtime”. The first extra was easy, but the second required me to use git to save my work. Here I tried to use Eclipse and its EGit, but when I tried to create a new repository my Eclipse session would hang. Ugh! After searching and searching I found out that using cygwin and putting c:\cygwin\bin in the path was a source of problem. It seems like all the tutorials out there start with an existing repository which was not my situation. I knew I didn’t have the “git” command installed under cygwin so I installed it with the hope that would fix things. Yup it did. And I was finally able to create a repository. Whew!

Today using the book, I followed along in chapter 2 and got the first ‘demo’ application working. I even did all of the extras at the end of the chapter – woohoo. To start I created an empty Eclipse Ruby project named ‘demo’ (this was not in the book, but was a good guess). Next I used the command line for the generation of the basic application ‘cd <my-workspace>; rails new demo’. Note: my first generation attempt was in the demo directory which created a sub-directory named demo – oops, needed to move up one directory. My second attempt was in the workspace directory and that worked and didn’t clobber any of the other Eclipse projects in the workspace. Then, as requested, I started the internal server on the command line: ‘rails server’. Finally I used Eclipse for the navigation and editing of the files (again this was not in the book, but worked quite well for me) and I used my browser to access the web application (as directed). All seemed to go smoothly which was encouraging. I ended by reading chapters 3 and 4 about the architecture of Rails application, and an introduction to the Ruby language. The former was obvious stuff for me, but the latter was a bit of detail that I’ll probably have to refer back to. So I’m doing it. Slow, but sure. Now on to their meatier application or so they say.

I recently bought Agile Web Development with Rails by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, and David Heinemeier Hansson, et al.

So this morning I followed their Chapter 1 installation instructions using the RubyInstaller on Windows. This included installing SQLite and then using gem to install the SQLite bindings. Finally I used gem to install Rails. All very straight forward.

Next I downloaded from http://eclipse.org the latest Eclipse Java IDE (3.6 Helios) for MS 32-bit Windows. My current Java is 1.6.0_24 so that should be OK. I renamed my old 3.2 Eclipse directory to C:\eclipse_OLD_3.2 and I installed the new one by unzipping it into my C: drive on Windows as the C:\eclipse directory. When I started it up I pointed it to my old workspace C:\EclipseWorkspace. Then I updated it to include both the C/C++ and Ruby development support. I know that the Agile book doesn’t use an IDE, but I just wanted to try it.

I also made a small donation to Eclipse.org to become a Friends of Eclipse which I feel I am. Even though it enables me to get an early copy of the next release, Indigo, I did it because I’ve been a user for years and it’s really helped me write both Java, and C/C++. Basically I’m an Eclipse junkie.

It’s been a long time since I last posted. I don’t know if I’ll continue, but for the time being I’m going to start writing about some technical (non-business) stuff. For most everyone, my family included, it will be boring, and not about me. Naturally my efforts may falter so I might just stop again. However, this blog is already here and I thought I’d use it for something…