Timetoast makes PC Magazine’s “Best Free Software of 2009″ list

I’m honoured to have my Flex/Flash app, Timetoast, rub shoulders with such greats as Google Earth and eBay Desktop in PC Magazine’s “Best Free Software of 2009″ list.

Timetoast is an online tool that allows people to easily create timelines they can then share on their blog or website. It’s a fun app which will certainly be getting some neat revisions in the near future! Here’s a link to the Timetoast timelines listing. If you see any other Flash, Flex, AIR or Rails apps listed, feel free to leave a comment, I’d love to know.

For a nice example of a Timetoast timeline out in the wild, check out the RTÉ 2008 Year in Review feature.

Greenprint also made it onto the list. Greenprint is a great desktop application that saves ink and trees at the same time by allowing you to remove blank pages and unnecessary advertising from your print jobs. They recently added a Mac version which is great news for all you eco-conscious Mac users.

Presenting Rails for Flash at LFPUG

As usual, the London Flash Platform User Group event will be held on the last Thursday of the month; that’s this Thursday, October the 30th.

First up this month are the guys at Unit9, they’ll be taking you through their processes and how they keep everyone in the company communicating effectively for maximum result.

I will be following up with a presentation on Ruby on Rails and Flash; taking you through the steps needed to create a REST-ful Rails application that is read and writeable through a Flash Front end. This will give you an introduction to Ruby on Rails and how this powerful web application framework can make it ridiculously easy for you to kick-start your next, or first, database powered Flash application.

The LFPUG will be held at it’s usual location, Cosmobar on Clerkenwell Road (54-56) and the presentations start at 19:00. For more information on the sessions, and indeed on how to get there, see the official LFPUG site.

See you there!

Insoshi: kickstart your social app

Insoshi is an open source social site with everything you would expect; messaging, blogging, connections and much more. If you download the source (writen in Rails), you’ll already have a fully operational social software platform to kick start your idea. To top it off, things can only get better; Insoshi is under active development.

If you’ve used Ruby on Rails before, you should feel very comfortable browsing the source, it is written in a concise and professional manner. For the novice Rails developer, Insoshi provides a great opportunity to understand the architecture of a fully functional Rails site. You’ll learn a lot from browsing the source of a complete application, something I found difficult to find when first embarking on my own Rails adventures.

Head on over to the Insoshi site to get started on your own adventure.

Ruby on Rails 2.0 is here

The latest version of the web application framework Ruby on Rails has just been released. Check out David’s post to see what some of the changes are.You can download the new release at www.rubyonrails.com 

Post RailsConf Europe roundup

I had initally written a rather extensive write-up of the conference and proceeded to lose the whole thing while saving it. Great.

Here’s the slightly-late-and-rather-short-version instead:

RailsConf Europe was a completely different type of conference for me as I usually just go to Flash and Flex related conferences and events. One thing I can say up-front is these guys don’t know how to party; on the other hand the Flash community hits the spot pretty much every time.
You Flash peeps can give yourself a pat on the back for that, if you so please. It’s fine, nobody is looking.

This being a Ruby on Rails centered conference I was prepared to get a bit of stick for being a passionate Flash/Flex developer, but this wasn’t the case (well, except one guy who I’m pretty sure was still stuck in 2002, his hair certainly was.) Most people there were pretty interested in what Flex had to offer. I also blew a couple of minds with my 1 minute AIR demo’s. Flex 3 really does make it incredibly easy to create a simple AIR app in no time whatsoever.

The back of the conference T-shirt.

There were a couple of Flex sessions at RailsConf. One of them was during the tutorial days and was a half day session about using Flex and Ruby on Rails together. I must admit I was slightly dissapointed in this session as it only dealt with xml-rpc REST calls, something I’ve already been using for quite a while. I was hoping that the session would also show some examples of the other data-exchange possibilities such as RubyAMF and WebOrb which both use the Flash Player native ActionScript Message Format (AMF).

I almost didn’t go to Simeon Bateman’s Flex session which, in contrast, was a lot shorter weighing in at just an hour. I was pretty pleased I did eventually go as he gave an excellent overview of the different data exchange methods and even managed to sneak in a couple of examples for our viewing pleasure. Simeon did a good job of walking through the different options available to Flex and Rails developers covering RubyAMF, WebOrb and XML-rpc calls. The Flash Platform introduction could have been a little shorter, but I think he wanted to make sure everyone knew about the new AVM2 and the advancements the Flash Platform has made over the last year or two.

I’m not going to go into any of the other sessions. I think I’ll let Stuart Eccles take over from here as he has been a rather busy bunny indeed!

In some other related news, it looks like there is an early alpha version of RubySWX for you to play around with. It’s not ready for production and has some security issues, so you may want to wait a little while before you hop onto that boat. Aral’s SWX demos have been quite impressive, so I’m sure this will become a method you may want to evaluate in the future.

Flex sessions at RailsConf Europe

 @ Although the RailsConf in Portland, USA seemed to concentrate on AIR sessions (then named Apollo), it looks like RailsConf Europe in Berlin, Germany (17-19 September 2007) is concentrating on Flex with not a mention of AIR in the program.There will be a general session on Flex entitled “Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Ruby on Rails” by Simeon Bateman, as well as an additional tutorial session “Using Adobe Flex with Rails” by Aslak Hellesøy which will most likely be a bit more in depth.If you’re interested in seeing what else is on offer at RailsConf Europe, I suggest you check out the conference sessions.

Embedding Flash into a Rails application

I just came across a new plugin that lets you embed Adobe Flash content into a Ruby on Rails based application with minimal fuss. It is based on the OpenLaszlo view helper and uses the much loved, and frankly indispensable, JavaScript based swfObject method.

If your Spanish Italian is up to it, you can check out the original Lipsiasoft project page. If on the other hand, like me, you have a bit of trouble getting your Spanish Italian on, you can always turn to AgileWebdevelopment.com who have an English page on the plugin over at: http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/flashobject.

Cheers to Lipsiasoft for making our lives even easier!

Apollo sessions at RailsConf 2007

Adobe will be presenting a couple of Apollo sessions at RailsConf 2007, the Ruby on Rails conference. Adobe is also a gold sponsor of the event.
The two session are entitled “Engaging with Web 2.0 outside the browser” and “How We Used Apollo and Rails to Build an Agile Project Management Application.”

Both the sessions will be presented by Christopher Haupt and Chris Bailey and are to be held on Friday May 18th.

I can’t make it out to Portland myself, so I’m hoping (glad) we’ll see a repeat of the RailsConf Europe event held in September of last year, although I haven’t heard any news on that quite yet; the site is still displaying the 2006 event. Edit: Thanks to Don for pointing the new site out.
You can find the RailsConf 2007 schedule here or just browse the RailsConf 2007 main site.

Migrating to RESTful Rails

This weekend I decided to re-architect a Ruby on Rails application I have been working on and migrate from an RPC architecture to a RESTful architecture. Wikipedia has a good article on REST that also compares RPC to REST so you may want to check that out before going on, although I’ll briefly explain REST in the next paragraph.

REST stands for REpresenataional State Transfer and differs from Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) because you don’t have to create a specific method for each type of CRUD manipulation. Your methods react differently depending on the way in which you actually request them. Rails looks at the http request type to decide what to do to the resource. The 4 available request types are POST, GET, PUT and DELETE. Most browsers don’t support PUT or DELETE requests so Rails fakes them; in other words you don’t have to worry about them right now.

Rather than pollute the internet with another attempt at explaining REST, I think I’ll just quit while I’m ahead and let the guys at B-Simple take over from here. Ralf Wirdemann and Thomas Baustert have written an excellent PDF guide to RESTful Rails which you can download from their website. I highly suggest checking it out; it’s a great resource that has only recently been translated to English.

Now Rails being Rails, it offers a great way to jump-start your RESTful web application: the scaffold_resource generator (available since Rails 1.2.)
Creating a scaffold resource of a database table creates a Rails controller with a number of different CRUD methods for that resource, it’s bloody fantastic! It’s a lot like the old scaffold generator, it gets something up quickly after which you can edit away to your hearts content.
Another really cool thing about Rest and Rails is that Rails allows you to specify a format in which you would like to receive the information; you want xml? Just tag add a .xml to your url and away you go. RSS? No problem, you already know what to do.

After migrating to the new structure I had a couple of problems; when I accessed my resource and provided a format it worked, but if I omitted the format it would generate an exception. (e.g. accessing www.mysite.com/products/1 gave me a “no action responded to 1″ error, while accessing www.mysite.com/products/1.xml worked just fine. Check out that PDF for more info on how formats work.

After a couple of hours I found out what my problem was. Because I was migrating the application, I had manually added my resource mapping to the routes.rb config; eagerly adding the resource to map at the bottom of the file (e.g. map.resources :products to map a table named products.) That was a mistake as lines at the top of the file take precedence over those at the bottom. As soon as I moved the resource mapping to the top of the file everything was working as expected.

All in all, migrating my application to a RESTful architecture was quite quick and easy and my existing authentication and authorization systems were easily dropped in afterwards. I now have a very flexible architecture that will allow me to make remote server calls from Flash, html, rhtml or pretty much anything else and specify a custom format in which to receive my data.

Life is peachy once more.

Getting Real with Web Apps

I recently finished the 37Signals book entitled “Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build successful web applications” and it looks like 37signals have hit the nail on the head with this short and concise guide to building web applications. I read it in one sitting after flipping through a couple of the pages and getting hooked.

The cover of ‘Getting Real’

For those that don’t know, 37signals is pretty much the darling of the web2.0 application development companies. For a start, 37signals developed the wildly successful Ruby on Rails web application framework while building applications like BaseCamp, Campfire and Backpack. One things for sure, these guys know how to build a web app; and it shows when you read ‘Getting Real.’

‘Getting Real’ won’t show you how to build that trendy tag cloud, mash-it-up with an eternal api, or anything else about the specifics of building a web app. What it will do is put you in the right frame of mind to make it a success. The great thing about this kind of book is that it works for lots of different types of people: designers, developers, project managers and project planners.
As the title suggests,’Getting Real’ is a book with a healthy dose of reality: You’re building this app for real people, remember?
The first few chapters will help you put your app on a crash course diet, stripping it down to its most fundamental core. It helps you translate your idea into a number of real goals which will help you get something out in the wild as soon as possible.
The whole philosophy of ‘Getting Real’ becomes apparent, even when you read the index page. It could put you on the right track even if you never the read the rest of the book (I’m quite sure you will though.) It’s pretty obvious the 37signals crew have brought their web app philosophy with them when they started writing this book.

If you’re planning a web based application, or are knee-deep in production already, then one things for sure: you need to get this book.

Being the fine folks that they are, 37signals are offering an on-line version for free at http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php. I highly suggest you fork out for the paperback though; its well worth it.