Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

Ruby and Zero

Sunday, October 7th, 2007

Out of the box, Project Zero supports PHP and Groovy as scripting languages but, as this developerWorks article demonstrates, extending Zero to support other languages is pretty trivial. In this instance, they show how adding support for Ruby (specifically JRuby) can be achieved with one simple class. Now Rails developers have no excuse not to take a look at Zero!

Rails Overview: View

Friday, July 20th, 2007

Having covered the Model and Controller aspects of Rails in previous posts, that really means it has to be View next. I’ve already touched on the basics: the controller method renders a template, either explicitly or simply by exiting and allowing the default template for the action to rendered, and the attributes of the controller class setup by the action method are then available to the template.
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Gallery rewrites are back

Monday, July 16th, 2007

Many thanks to Ilya Azarov who answered my plea for assistance and supplied his nginx rewrite rules for Gallery2. I won’t claim to understand why his work and mine didn’t (although previously I wasn’t aware that you could nest location directives so that was something I hadn’t tried). They still can’t cope with spaces in file names but I can live with that.

Changing servers

Friday, July 13th, 2007

So, it’s been a little bit quiet on this blog for the past few days. The main reason is that it’s been on the move from the hosting provided by our ISP (PlusNet) to my SliceHost slice. Things would have been much quicker had I not decided to switch Apache for the increasingly popular (due to its low memory usage) nginx.
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Rails Overview: Controller

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

In the previous entry of this series I covered the model part of the MVC support in Rails. The view and controller support is very tightly linked (more so than in, say, Struts) but I’ll start with the controller just to be contrary.
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Project Zero

Saturday, June 30th, 2007

I was ever so slightly nervous about posting this given the lack of fanfare on any IBM website but Andy has at least saved me from being the first to stick my head above the parapet. As Andy says, one of the items that was creating a buzz at the WebSphere Services Technical Conference that we couldn’t talk about was something named Project Zero. Project Zero aims to provide a simple framework for developing Web 2.0 style applications through the creation of RESTful services, rich user interfaces and mashups. A scripting based approach is used with Groovy for the Java developers but also a subset of PHP. I shan’t go in to lots of technical details, you can read all about those on the Project Zero website.
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Google Apps

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

Just to show that I do listen to you dear reader, I’ve followed up on Oliver’s suggestion and moved our e-mail over to Google Apps. The process was pretty painless: sign up for an admin account, verify ownership of the domains, setup users, modify the MX records and then configure our e-mail clients. A day or so delay whilst the DNS records replicate and everything is now working smoothly. POP3 and SMTP access is via SSL which is a bonus and means I no longer need to rely on my FastMail account to send when away from home. The spam filtering is excellent – I’ve even got a 12 year old e-mail address (a spam trap if ever there were one) coming back in to my main inbox again. Other than that, the only noticeable effect is that my incoming messages are no longer tarnished by a “Virus checked by PlusNet” footer. Oh, and of course there is the GMail web interface should I ever feel the urge…

Wedding list mayhem

Wednesday, June 27th, 2007

A school friend who now lives out in the US is getting married next month and on Sunday we were attempting to buy a couple of gifts from their online Macy’s wedding list. When it came to paying we tried a few different credit cards but each came back with an error message so we gave up and decided we would phone them later in the week. As we left the site I noticed that the items we had been trying to buy were now marked as taken which I thought was a little annoying. Then, in my inbox, I discovered three separate order confirmations, all for the same items!
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