Ahoy

• robert
• May 22nd, 2008
• 03:22:26 PM
• 3 Comments

So, it would appear as though I am the other coder on this Feisty Piranha Project! We are about one week into the project, which has been quite interesting (Muaha, I know what the project is, and you do not!).

I am new to Ruby on Rails (I worked on Java more in the past - my previous project was revamping a Minesweeper solver for the Constraint Systems Laboratory at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln).

In April Dusty and Kevin sent me 3 books (The Ruby Programming Language, Agile Web Development with Rails, and The Pragmatic Programmer). Although these books where helpful, you can only get so much from reading. So my friend Michael Gubbels (I know you are reading) suggested I code something to jump right into it!

The initial plan was to make two versions of my website. A “PHP” version and a “Ruby on Rails” version (Much like how you see “HTML” and “Flash” versions of some websites).

Although this “Ruby on Rails” version of the site is not on my public web-space (My host has Ruby on Rails issues), it is there on my localhost!

Though, that was only to prepare for the Ruby on Rails that is now my internship.

The Ruby on Rails Rant:

Working with Ruby on Rails all day can only get me one thing; ANGRY. So this section of (hopefully) each blog post of mine will be dedicated to ranting about something related to Ruby on Rails.

Yesterday, I was creating a mailer. I figured queuing mail would be a good idea. You know, so it does not crash the server. So I decided to look into mail_queue, though the readme is horrible!

“I, Robert Woodward, officially nominate mail_queue for the worst readme in the world.”

Why? I’ll tell you why: it does not say how to use it. Sure, it tells you how to setup the database, process the queue, deliver_something, blah blah blah.

But, it is completely misleading! It says, “Want to send out your mail asynchronously without having to touch any code that uses the Action Mailer?”, so I think to myself, “So, I do not have to use the Action Mailer, great! I don’t know how to use Action Mailer.”

Well, guess what? You need to use Action Mailer! Yes, that’s right. You do not have to touch any code that uses the Action Mailer, yet you have to create a model that extends ActionMailer::Base!

“Looky ma’, I’m touchin’ ActionMailer!” Yes, that’s right, mail_queue just overwrites the deliver methods, so if you wrote all your code to use ActionMailer, you can switch to mail_queue very easily. Well, that’s great! Just let us know in the readme!

</End Rant>

So, if you made it this far, thanks for reading. I’m going to go back to coding on the project you, still know nothing about

One Week Down

• kevin
• May 21st, 2008
• 04:27:43 PM
• 2 Comments

..hi.

• allyn
• May 20th, 2008
• 08:26:59 AM
• 2 Comments

Welcome to the Feisty Piranha Project!

• dusty
• May 15th, 2008
• 08:12:02 PM
• 1 Comment