benrasmusen.com » Ruby On Rails http://benrasmusen.com a web professional committed to creating value Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:09:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.1 en .script/console and other ruby on rails wonders http://benrasmusen.com/ruby-on-rails/scriptconsole-and-other-ruby-on-rails-wonders/ http://benrasmusen.com/ruby-on-rails/scriptconsole-and-other-ruby-on-rails-wonders/#comments Mon, 16 Oct 2006 15:11:55 +0000 Ben Rasmusen http://benrasmusen.com/archives/18 I’m relatively new to this whole Ruby on Rails scene. You might say I’m a bit of a n00b. But it’s not just Ruby on Rails I’m new to it’s frameworks in general and OO languages as well. Which is not a good combo. But that’s a topic for another post. Right now I’d like to share something I learned early on Saturday morning as I contemplated breaking my laptop on my face because my form would’nt update my database. Fortunately I was able to take a break before I did anything irrational and hoped on to the #rubyonrails IRC channel. A big shoutout to them! I learned a lot in a short amount of time and here are a couple of them.

.script/console
I’ll start with the best and go down from there. In the midst of my troubleshooting woes I was introduced to .script/console by a member of the aformentioned IRC channel. This is an invaluable tool in the Ruby on Rails framework. In a nutshell it’s a ruby console with access to your projects Classes and Database connections. You basically run ruby commands using stuff in your app. Holy freakin’ awesome! It’s a lot more responsive in terms of immediate feedback and you don’t have to worry about the hassle of views and other junk. Great debugging and testing tool. I know I should have known about this long ago, but we all have to learn at some point.

More info:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/Console
http://clarkware.com/cgi/blosxom/2006/04/04

tail -f log/development.log
This one is awesome as well, but on a different level. After spending near an hour wading through the development.log which was packed full of routing errors (which makes me wonder about the sanity of Locomotive) I was clued into this awesomeness. Turns out if you run this little line in a Terminal window in the root of your application you can see real time the log outputs, which is super handy in conjunction with the above .script/console command (a little dual terminal window action) because it becomes all the more verbose. Which is awesome when you’re trying to pinpoint a hidden issue.

Some other entries you might enjoy:

]]> http://benrasmusen.com/ruby-on-rails/scriptconsole-and-other-ruby-on-rails-wonders/feed/ Ruby on Rails Conventions http://benrasmusen.com/ruby-on-rails/ror-conventions/ http://benrasmusen.com/ruby-on-rails/ror-conventions/#comments Thu, 05 Oct 2006 18:58:29 +0000 Ben Rasmusen http://benrasmusen.com/archives/8 I’ve read a few blog posts that have to do with the frustration of finding basic Ruby on Rails conventions. For example if you should pluralize this or capitalize that. And I’ve discovered first hand that it’s helpful to have those things laid out before you get to into the project you’re attempting to develop.

I found this little article very helpful, you may find it on the rubyonrails.org wiki here: TipSheetForBeginners. Some of the highlights are:

  • Table (schema) in database ( plural, with underscores instead of spaces between words, like steering_wheels)
  • Model ( singular, first letter Capitalized, CamelCase for models like SteeringWheel)

Now the article is short and it’s not complete by any means, but it’s definately a start. I wish I had found this article before I had gotten to far in.

Some other entries you might enjoy:

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