Oh what a week!

• robert
• June 20th, 2008
• 09:45:25 AM

It’s been an exciting week for us on the Feisty Piranha Project! Monday concluded Phase One of our operation! Around 3:00, we demoed everything we completed to people from the scary outside world, which was an interesting way to start out the week. The demo was very successful; the project is really shaping up. We spent the rest of this week cleaning up the bits and pieces that didn’t quite make it into Phase One, and we’ll be start Phase Two this coming Monday.

Because of the successful conclusion of Phase One, all of us at BrightMix are going BOWLING TODAY! AND YOU ARE INVITED!

All are welcome to join us! As a little incentive, the people that come will get… Oh, why am I talking? You should just come and find out!

Anyways, as I was saying, we spent the rest of this week cleaning and polishing all the little bells and whistles of Phase One. (Special thanks to Ian Selby for helping me out with one of the polishings.)

Although a lot of the features are looking, feeling, and behaving better, it is a bit depressing when you spend a few hours addressing a single problem only to change 7 lines of code. But, fact of the matter is, at this point, small tweaks and changes can make a huge difference in the functionality and usability of the app.

All of these little tweaks have brought some of Ruby on Rail’s quirks out of the woodwork. The quirk that’s made me the angriest occurred I was tried to save an ActiveRecord model object to the database in YAML format. So, I converted the model object to a YAML string and stored it into a “string” column in the database. However, ruby wasn’t able to convert the YAML string back into the correct model object; it would, instead, create an object of type “YAML::Object” rather than the model object’s class.

As it turns out, this was happening because the model object’s class wasn’t loaded, so it could not create it properly. Drrr….

I drummed up a few solutions for this (like here, and a few other home-brewed solutions that I came up with), but they didn’t wind up working for me.

In the end, I decided that the best fix was to just approach the problem differently, which, in turn, actually cut out a bunch of the code’s complexity… and gave me a better overall solution.