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Installing PostgreSQL on Leopard using MacPorts
Posted in Database at March 21st, 2008 / 12 Comments »
I have always used MySQL, but I wanted to give PostgreSQL a whirl. This is what I did.
I have always used MySQL, but I wanted to give PostgreSQL a whirl. This is what I did.
Maybe someone may have told you to use ruby and CGI together, but I think that person has a screw loose. I mean, come on. Everyone knows that what you really need to use is Rack
Rails is great and all, but sometimes it can be just a little too much and you just need to set up a few pages, not the next big app. Fear not, there is still tool in the ruby tool box at your disposal: the CGI library. CGI is fast and lean and still can be used will all of your favorite friends, like HAML
Blocks rock and I couldn’t agree more. The functional programming aspect of ruby has started to interest me more and more. Blocks are used all over the place, with respond_to, collect, returning, and ActionView::Helpers::FormHelper#form_for.
Sometimes, a design requires a little extra markup, perhaps something to get that rounded corner to work or whathave you. Now let’s say this piece of code requires certain classes, a certain kind of structure, including a tile, and has to be used in many places, something like a sidebar piece. Instead of copying and pasting this structure over and over, you can use a helper to make you life easier, and if you combine it with a block, it will just feel even more painless.
So today I had an interesting problem. For whatever the reason, I wanted to have a class automagically be created. It was going to be a helper model, and I didn’t feel like having umteen classes that all did the same thing, just had different names for different tables. My solution: use the power of ruby and metaprogramming.
def create_new_active_record_model(class_name)
klass = Class.new(ActiveRecord::Base) do
belongs_to :old, :class_name => class_name
def some_method_you_want
"something"
end
end
Object.const_set "#{class_name}Target", klass
end
I know that some of this could have been encapsulated in a polymorphic association, but this allows you to do something beyond just keeping everything in one table, like with polymorphic associations.
A couple of months ago, I was shown the article that DHH wrote after he gave his presentation at RailsConf 2006. I looked at it then and kind of shrugged it off, mainly because I really didn’t know what the presentation was really about.
Tonight I found video of that presentation and I got excited about CRUD. It pointed out that I’ve been making some controllers a little bloated. I have coupled much functionality into one controller; when looking back, I clearly could have separated out some functionality.