Doing things the right way with Rails and Heroku

Tools used:

Ruby 1.9.2

• Beautiful, easy-to-read syntax
• Vast standard library
• RubyGems, the easiest and best way to manage add-on libraries

Rails 3.1

• Emphasis on rapid prototyping and development cycle
• Separation of logic using the Model-View-Controller pattern
• "Convention over Configuration"
• Test Driven Development using RSpec
• Uses git, not subversion as a standard

Heroku

• http://heroku.com
• Ease of deployment
• Easily create and manage staging and production data
• Handy command line interface on Heroku's Cedar stack
• Rock-solid hosting via Amazon cloud
• Scales nicely based on server load

Git

• distributed version control
• repository on Github
• http://help.github.com/

Generic git workflow:

git checkout -b name_of_my_branch
# make changes here
git status (see changes)
git add <name_of_file> (or "git add ." for everything)
git commit -m "Detailed message about the changes"
git checkout master
git merge name_of_my_branch
git push origin master

Sass

• http://sass-lang.com
• gem install sass
• Run the observer script in the background. Use sass --watch myfile.scss:myfile.css

RefineryCMS and EventBooking

• http://refinerycms.com
• easy CMS to learn
• extendible and customizable using "engines"
• stacks on top of a normal Rails app without being obtrusive, adheres to "The Rails Way"
• see http://refinerycms.com/guides for tutorials on adding engines to your app

The Events Engine

The events engine is just begging to be hacked. Here's what I did for Montego Bay:

1. Add a migration to the Events table that adds a unique_event_id field. It might look like this:

    class AddUniqueEventIdToEvents < ActiveRecord::Migration
      def self.up
        add_column :events, :unique_event_id, :integer
        add_index :events, :unique_event_id, :unique => true
      end
      
      def self.down
        remove_column :events, :unique_event_id
      end
    end
   

2. run rake db:migrate to update your table

3. run rake refinery:override model=Event and add the line validates_uniqueness_of :unique_event_id to app/models/event.rb

4. Here's where the fun begins. Set up a Cron add-on in your Heroku app. Then write a script to pull in data from the Eventbooking XML streams and write it to the Events table. Save it to lib/tasks/cron.rake and run it manually with rake cron (or heroku run rake cron to test it). This was my first draft

    desc 'this task populates our event table from eb-xml streams'
    task :cron => :environment do
      require 'nokogiri'
      require 'open-uri'
      # make this the url of your EventListXML stream
      url = "http://go-xml.smgbooking.com/EventListXml.ashx?wl=3.7FEDB662"
      Nokogiri::XML(open(url)).xpath("//event").each do |e|
        
        puts "Creating " + (e>"event_name").text + "..."
   
        # get the date (for readability)
        date_range = e>"date_range"
        start_date = DateTime.parse( (date_range>"start_date").text + 
                                     (date_range>"start_time").text )
        end_date = DateTime.parse( (date_range>"end_date").text +
                                   (date_range>"end_time").text )
   
   
        Event.create(
          :title => (e>"event_name").text,
          :unique_event_id => (e>"unique_event_id").text.to_i,
          :description => (e>"description").text ,
          :start_at => start_date,
          :end_at => end_date )
      end
    end
   

The CopyWriting Engine

Adding the copywriting engine to your app will let users control snippets of text in your page. Here's an example of copywriting code I embedded in the footer, which was scanned and added to the backend admin automatically.

<li>
  Phone: <%= copywriting('phone number', { :scope => 'footer', :default => '1.800.867.5309' }) %>
</li>

Pretty easy huh!?

An aside

My favorite editor is vi, but vi kinda sucks on windows so I instead use Sublime Text 2. Coupled with Git Bash and Command Prompt, it is possible to develop Rails applications on Windows and still have a nice envrionment.