Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Handling asset caching nicely in Rails 2.0

update: fix some incorrect paths that did not have the public in front. (thanks Jon)
From your rails root:
mkdir public/javascripts/cache
mkdir public/stylesheets/cache
svn add public/javascripts/cache/
svn add public/stylesheets/cache/
svn propset svn:ignore ‘*’ public/javascripts/cache/
svn propset svn:ignore ‘*’ public/stylesheets/cache/
svn ci -m “add cache directories for combined assets, but ignore their contents”
Then wherever you are doing the js and css includes:
< %= [...]

Making CrossCheck work with Prototype 1.6

We are using Crosscheck for javascript unit tests lately. Crosscheck has fake DOM implementations for Firefox 1.0, 1.5 and IE6 (!!), so it runs headless and it runs fast. This is a tool I’ve wanted for a long time, but writing a fake browser is no small task so there are still quite […]

Five Ruby Blogs to Feed Your Head (and Soul)

I subscribe to far too many feeds. I never catch up, and recently somehow blew away my entire “non-ruby programming blogs” folder in NetNewsWire, and didn’t really notice (or care).
That said, I think its important to keep up with the Ruby “blogs”, as kids call them these days, if only because things […]

Browser bugs - onblur and onfocus with IFrames

Getting onblur and onfocus to attach to Iframes in IE and Firefox/Mozilla/Gecko…

Google Calendar?

Maybe its for real this time. Paul Stone did the original snooping in the Gmail code which turned up links with the mysterious “calendar for you and the world”. Lets up this is more like gmail or maps and less like google reader or pages.

Presenting at Waterfall 2006

Waterfall 2006 looks like its shaping up to be a great conference. I can’t wait for Dion’s talk, and I’ll also be joining him for a couple new Ajax talks:
Ajax: Why Its Impossible to Test, and Why You Shouldn’t Even Try
Ajax Effects: […]

So if WebWork uses DWR & Dojo, and Struts is becoming WebWork…

So, WebWork 2.2 was just released, which makes heavy use of DWR and Dojo javascript framework. Struts is going to be merging with WebWork as Struts Action Framework. So does that mean that in a couple years everyone running Struts 2.0 will be using (or at least be able to use) Dojo + […]

Prototype and extending javascript’s Object or Array

James McParlane wrote a entry detailing why he won’t use the Prototype library, as extending Object or Array’s builtin prototype is bad.
However, Sam heard the complaints about how Prototype 1.3.1 was breaking existing code and other libraries, and the newer relases all use Object.extend() for safe extensions and do not change Array’s prototype. […]

Devboi: essential extension for web developers

Click for larger screenshot
Finally, Devboi has been updated for Firefox 1.5. If you aren’t familiar with it, its a sidebar extension that has full API docs for the following (from the homepage):

HTML 4.01 elements, attributes, and entity tables
CSS 2 properties, compatibility chart (IE 5 Mac, IE 5, IE 5.5, IE 6, Mozilla, Opera 5, […]

When do you NOT want to use a library for XmlHttpRequest?

Simple question - assuming we are talking about an app that is at least moderately sized (not a one-off or prototype), when would you not want to use a library or some sort of wrapper around the XmlHttpRequest object?
I had some discussions at work recently about this, where I was pushing for DWR [...]