Someone pointed out to me that the layout of www.movesonrails.com breaks on IE7. It's easily fixed by editing /public/stylesheets/base.css and removing the * before the second line:

/* Hides from IE-mac */
html .clearfix { height: 1%; }
.clearfix { display: block; }
/* End hide from IE-mac */

It was fun! It was our first talk at a techy conference and we enjoyed it very much.

We had a nice chat with Dr Nic and some guys from fingertips and learned some new tricks :)

We hope the movies from the presentations will become available shortly so everyone can enjoy.

Here are the first set of movies, with special thanks to Byte Internet for the Bandwidth and for being our Rails hosting partner :).

1. Mac Style Login

How a simple prototype shake can be a lot more effective then an error popup.

2. Helping users made easy

Form validations in Rails are automatically uniform and centralized in your Model. Great functionality for free! Yes I know there is something weird with the gettext translation. This is fixed in the trunk :)

For some nice pictures, point your browser to Flicker. The podcast of the presentation should be comming soon!

This was brought to you by both Andre Foeken and Bart ten Brinke. Cheers!

Linking Ruby to Ruby was no problem. Even Java to Ruby seemed to work just fine. But the problems started as we grew past the infant stage and tried to send more that say a thousand records over the SOAPy connection.

The amount of XML was just to big to handle, the speed became unacceptable. Our first instinct was Gzipping the files, but that made almost no difference. Finally we tried SWA, SOAP with Attachments. SWA worked flawlessly...in Java...and in Ruby. Just not together. We tried everything but no luck.

Finally we decided we needed a fresh start, we threw the SOAP away (with the bathwater) and took a look at ActiveResource (Ruby) and RESTLets (Java).

ARes is wonderful, it worked (almost) out of the box and there was a lot less overhead. Combined with Zlib::Deflate this proved to be a good alternative. Sure it still doesn't win any speed races, but it is functional, easy to set up and simple to maintain.

The definition of almost:

Ticket 8563

Ticket 8566

Ticket 8567

Ticket 8568

We've been placed on the speaker list for Ruby en Rails 2007! See: http://2007.rubyenrails.nl/sprekers

There are only a few tickets left, so be sure to register quickly!

Update: 2007-06-02

You can now download a small and short teaser of whats to come :)

Download the Moves Teaser (Requires Quicktime with H.264)

I just bought this book: Hacking Exposed Web Applications (Second Edition) And it got me here.

This proves it: reading is bad for you. But hopefully this Cross Site Scripting Exploit of to_json will get fixed as a dandy side-effect.

The tutorials make it sound so easy. Plug and play even. Unfortunately reality (as always) bites hard.

SOAP integration is a piece of cake if you have one server and no authentication, but when you do the trouble starts. Although the problem is easy to solve once you know how, the lack of documentation on the subject is annoying.

Ruby's current SOAP implementation supports basic http authorisation during communication, however it does not support getting the WSDL file trough the same authorisation... (Argh! 1 ) So you have to pre-fetch the WSDL file and store it as a file, since Ruby does not support reading the WSDL file from a string (Argh! 2).

Since we have multiple servers running the same application on different ports the cached WSDL file is never correct...(Argh! 3) We solve this by overriding the WSDL's proxy setting.

The final code is short but it took me a while to find all this stuff out so I thought i'd post it here:

require 'soap/wsdlDriver'

# Connection settings
url   = "http://testingserver:3000/webservice"
usr  = "***"
pw  = "***"

wsdl_file = "wsdl/cached_file.wsdl"

factory = SOAP::WSDLDriverFactory.new(wsdl_file).create_rpc_driver
factory.options["protocol.http.basic_auth"] << [ url, usr, pw ]
factory.options["protocol.http.ssl_config.verify_mode"] = nil
factory.proxy.endpoint_url = url

I was looking for a migration that could convert my MyISAM tables to InnoDB, as I had mistakenly created some MyISAM tables. This sounds simple, but I wasn't able to find anything that did this. This simple migration I created, does the trick nicely.

class InnodbEngine < ActiveRecord::Migration
def self.up
  tables= [ 'addresses',
           'assets',
           'etcetera']

  for table in tables
    begin
      table_info = select_one "SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE '" + table + "'"
      if (table_info['Engine'] != 'InnoDB')    
        execute 'ALTER TABLE `' + table + '` ENGINE=InnoDB'
      else
        puts table + ' allready InnoDB, skipping for migration'
      end
    rescue
      puts 'Skipping table ' + table
      puts 'Table not found or InnoDB not supported.'
    end
   end
end

def self.down
 # Not needed
end

end

We were asked to do a quicky on the Holland On Rails rails conf :)!

We'll be talking about what we are doing, and we'll have a nice surprise for the rails comunity. We'll be posting that on our website around the same date. What it going to be? Just make sure you've got enough money for a big flatschreen....

Haven't you got a clue what i'm talking about? Pay them a visit: http://www.hollandonrails.nl/

After a period of downtime, we are back online and running at a new hoster. The blog is now running on the brand new Ruby on Rails platform created by Byte & Sparks. Byte is a hosting company in the Netherlands (where we are also located) and provides mass virtual hosting using all kinds of fancy stuff such as load-balancing and fail-over .

Who am I then... I'm the guy behind Sparks. I've built the hosting system for Byte, after already working for them for quite a while. I'm also in on the upcoming big thing, doing the technology behind the application.

Because Byte & Sparks want to prove they are good and want to improve their solution using the community, you can try running you're Ruby on Rails application for half a year for... nothing! The only thing you have to do, is provide feedback if you find problems or things to improve.

Sorry for the link time of nothingness. We found out the hard way that Textdrive is not the best Rails host ever. Especially when you're in Europe.

We have however found a very good replacement. We teamed up with Byte for our application servers, and as a spin off byte now has a full-fledged ruby stack for their customers.

More important: Byte is now giving away free testing accounts on their new rails application server. This server is much more reliable, faster and scalable then Textdrive will ever be!

So, what are you waiting for? Pay them a visit