pastbedti.me

Introducing Lego

For a while now Mathias and I have been hacking away on our very own web framework called Lego.
But why? I hear you cry, why yet another one, what’s wrong with Rails, Merb, Ramaze, Sinatra, Camping, Rango, Waves, Mack, and so on and so on.
Well, they’re all great but we believe they aren’t dumb enough!
Lego however is about as dumb as it gets, all it knows is how to handle the request/response cycle and leaves the rest up to plugins.
The downside of this approach is that it takes a little bit more work to get it up and running the upside is that you get exactly what you want, nothing more, nothing less.

I’m intrigued, tell me more

So at it’s core there’s lego-core which contains only the bare essentials, a way to set up a controller that rack can run, and a way to extend the various parts of lego.

Future plans include a lego-more gem already setup with commonly used plugins so you easily can get up and running quickly and a central repository of available lego plugins.

A simple application

Provided that you have lego-core installed (gem install lego-core) put the following in a config.ru file:

Run it with rackup and point your browser to http://localhost:9292/ and you should be met by a plain old ‘404 – Not found’, not terribly exiting right? But that’s pretty much all lego-core gives you

So what about those plugins?

The lego extension system allows you to hook into various parts of the execution chain, namely:

View – For action and view related stuff
Controller – For defining controller dsl’s
Router – Rules for how lego should match routes, must have a self.match_route method which takes a route and an env parameter and return either a two element array containing the env and a hash of match data (or an empty hash if no match data is available) or false

At it’s core, a plugin is a module that responds to register who’s responsibility is to register with lego, following is a simple plugin example:

It’s about time for a real example!

As we showed you earlier, lego-core gives you a way to set up an application but it don’t know how to map routes to action so let’s expand on the previous application with our newly gained knowledge of lego’s extension system:

As before, run it with rackup and point your browser to http://localhost:9292/ and this time you should be greeted by “Hello from /”.

Don’t repeat yourself

If you have a plugin you want to use in every application, then consider defining it globally:

Configuration options

Lego also comes with a very simple configuration handler, it basically provides two methods, set and options, lets look at them in action:

As with plugins you can use set globally:

Wrapping up

In conclusion Lego is a ‘Use what you want’ framework that tries to stay out of your way as much as possible and thank’s to it’s modular design, you are free to use your favourite technologies and tools.

Please note that it’s still in a highly experimental stage!

So in order to save your fingers the pain I updated the ffmpeg gem today. You see, previously you had to do this:

Doesn’t look to bad, right? Well, maybe not, but if you pay attention you would notice some repetition here, since the only thing different about the filenames is the extension. So, to keep things nice and dry you can now do this instead:

The old way still works if you really want a different filename all together or if you just really like to type

FFmpeg is a great tool for recording, converting and streaming audio and video. It can, however, be quite cumbersome to use. For example consider the following command:

Now, even though this is a simple example, it’s still kind of hard to know exactly what it does, so you can imagine what it will look like once you need to accomplish more complex tasks. By contrast, here is the same example using my ffmpeg gem (gem install polly-ffmpeg):

This is in my opinion much easier to understand and use.

For more information checkout the documentation and the source code

In my last post I showed how you can install my suppress_validations gem on a per-project basis but that’s a bit cumbersome. Wouldn’t it be nicer if it always was available in the console on every project?
I think it would, so here’s how you can accomplish just that:

Edit your ~/.irbrc (or create it if you don’t already have one):

And thats it, you can now fire up script/console and start suppressing validations

Validations on ActiveRecord models can really get in the way while trying things out in the console sometimes so the other day when I stumbled over this railscast episode: http://railscasts.com/episodes/62-hacking-activerecord I thought, hey, with some modification that could easily be turned into a plugin.

Install it with:

then add this to your config/environment.rb file:

and then unpack it with:

or just install it as a plugin:

Now say we have a model like this:

Now lets enter script/console and include the SuppressValidations module

However, trying to create a new post without the required attributes still fails as this example shows:

To suppress validations just wrap the call to post.save in a suppress_validations block, like so:

Just released a new version of capistrano_colors. This is a total rewrite from the last version. This post show some of the bigger changes.
Read More…

I got so tired of all the messy capistrano output so today I released my first public gem.

The name of the gem is capistrano_colors and the aim of the gem is to put some nice and shiny colors on capistrano output. The gem has only been tested with rails but should work wherever capistrano works.

Keep on reading to see some screenshots!
Read More…

I’ve just released v0.5 of keyFinder. keyFinder is the simpliest frontend for OSX’s keychain that you can think of. Its basicly a little window that filters your passwords (live) as you type your keywords. Select the one you want and hit enter. The password then gets copied to your clipboard. 

More information can be found on the keyFinder page under my projects.

Cheers!