“FullCalendar” provides a full-sized, drag & drop calendar. It uses AJAX to fetch events on-the-fly for each month. It also supports an intuitive interface to manage events that spans over multiple days or weeks. It is visually customizable and exposes hooks for user-triggered events (like clicking or dragging an event).

I decided to give it a try and utilize its hooks for user triggered events within our Rails application. This small effort resulted in a barebone Rails app that might provide a good base for your project which require calendar, scheduling or appointment features. I called it fullcalendar_rails and it is now available on github with a working demo at http://fullcalendar.vinsol.com.

Feel free to give your valuable feedback. I hope you will find this useful.

Update: On popular demand, I have added recurring events functionality with daily, weekly and monthly frequencies. It also allows for exceptions to recurring events including delete and edit features.

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Working on client projects, we saw a pattern – the client owns a domain, which is either parked or has a blog running on it, and then they commission us to build an application. While the application is being developed, they want us to setup a landing page on the server, with a couple of links – to the blog etc. and want to capture email addresses of people who are interested in the service that the application would offer.

We actually found a few ready to use options for this. This php based paid script was one and there is also a  free launching soon module in PHP/Jquery.

However, we did not find anything for Rails so Satish set out to write a plugin for it. Then we thought it would be good to integrate it with Campaign Monitor , since most of our clients use this service for running their email campaigns.  And subsequently Satish extended it to add Mail Chimp integration also.

Give it a spin and send us your feedback via the LightHouse project.

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Yes, we accept that there are some pain points, like hosting Rails applications at shared hosts. No we don’t need those in production, but don’t you wish it was easier to deploy a rails app for a quick review with a client (a client who can’t run it on his own machine). Yes php scores there, just throw the code on the server and you are done. Why do I still run this blog on wordpress and not typo or mephisto? The big reason is that it’s easy to let just apache handle everything.

But things might change soon with the launch of passenger aka modrails.

And the other classic allegation against Rails has been performance. Remember the discussion between JDD and DHH about CPU cycles vs. developer cycles. We are definitely headed in the direction of lesser CPU cycles for our Rails app. Rails2 made some advances towards that and with Ruby1.9 and YARV and Rubinium, we have high expectations. Also you have heard about Ruby Enterprise Edition , haven’t you?

So things might change, when people try to figure out the fastest web language or framwework , the next time around.

I and those around me here, are generally biased towards rails. Ruby makes us happy. For us the pleasure points in Rails were always far more than the pain points. The basic Rails principles of DRY and Convention Over Configuration clicked with us. Ruby’s and Rail’s simplicity and beauty clicked with us. We did not need hosting on shared hosts. We could work with Rails caching to improve performance. No wonder we were one of the early adopters of Rails in India. But today, I would like to thank the critics whose untiring rants have moved Rails in the direction of being much more than what is was a couple of years ago.

Some of those changes have been in rails, but more have been around it. If you would have noticed, most of these development are not in rails as such, but in the ruby ecosystem.

Rails provides developer productivity and joy; ease of deployment; and ever-improving performance. And no, now you don’t need to go back to Java. We knew it, I am just repeating it for you.

Extrapolate this one year old graph for yourself.

So what is your reason for not having rail-ed yet?

Update: Charles Nutter has a post on upcoming Ruby implementations here

[13:29:11 mjuneja works]$ ls -l | wc -l
 37 

There are 37 rails applications right now. This is purely co-incidental and has nothing to do with 37signals. ;-)

If I run all these apps on the default 3000 port, I cannot run more than one app at a time. If I run the apps at random ports, my browser history will not be app-sensitive. I am heavily dependent on my browser’s location bar’s autocomplete feature, so choosing random ports for my apps is not an option.

I want to be able to run apps on different but fixed ports. I need to be able to make use of my browser history. Also I need to spend minimum time configuring any new app.

This is what I did

I created a YAML file called rappaport.yml. The name rappaport is a short form for “rails application ports”, the fact that my wife runs a diamond jewelery business is purely co-incidental ;-)

The yaml file consists of application names and they port assigned to them, as show in this sample below

Next, I have a ruby script ss (short for start server) in the ~/works directory.
All the rails projects have a softlink to ss from their RAILS_ROOT. To start the web server for a project, I just need to execute ss from the app’s RAILS_ROOT.

The script assumes that the application name in the yaml file is the same as the directory name under which the rails code for the app lives ( convention over configuration! )

Everytime I create a new project, I append the app name and port to rappaport.yml. Also I create a softlink to ss from the RAILS_ROOT.

So I have a fixed port and a standard command to start the server for all my apps.

The next part is training the browser to access the application, on the same port each time, with minimum intervention from me.

Here, I make use of another ruby script called browser.rb.

This script takes rappaport.yml as the input and creates a list of links in a file called dev_bookmarks.html as the output.
I need to execute this script everytime I add a new project to rappaport.yml.

This is what dev_bookmarks.html looks like

Now I just need to add the contents of this file to Quicksilver’s index.
I go to Quicksilver’s Preferences and click on Catalog and drop the file dev_bookmarks.html from finder onto Quicksilver and Click “Rescan source”

In the information panel, I select “omit source items” and “Include content: HTML Links” and Rescan source.

I can see that the content panel contains all the links.

I can see the project links in the content meaning that quicksilver has correctly parsed the content. On the attributes panel, I select “Include in Global Catalog”.

To point my browser to a rails application running on localhost, I invoke the quicksilver hotkey and start entering the project name, and quicksilver prompts me the project name, and it already knows the port number too.

Obviously makes me feel proud.

Thanks Satish.

Here are the sessions I plan to attend at RailsConf2007.

http://myconfplan.com/users/mjuneja/conferences/RailsConf2007

Thanks DrNic for the cool app 8-)

I was feeling very nervous while starting but later I felt comfortable. Afterward we had ActiveRecord Basics by sur, me on ActionController and ActionView by Hemant. Next day in workshop we planned to get tada list done by students but due to some time constraints we could not finish tada list completely . Students were confused in starting but later on they got interest in the application. After the workshop they were amazed how easily things can be done as comparing to PHP/Perl. I should say thanks to Ritu for taking initiative for this presentation and workshop. She was also supposed to go there but she couldn’t go.

Build you own Ruby on Rails web application is a book specially written for people wanting to start exploring rails. It is being pitched as the “ultimate beginners guide to Rails” by sitepoint.
So if you have been appreciating Rails from outside, get hold of this book and jump right it. Start experiencing the joy of Ruby on Rails programming in hours, if not minutes.

This book is also an exteremely useful resource for companies who want to train developers on Rails.

Thanks Jamis, for the review which made me look at this book. Now that a new rails book is coming out almost every fortnight, it’s getting difficuilt to keep track.
Also there is this gem hidden in Jamis’ review : never use a plugin you would not be able to write yourself. We have learnt it the hard way and I am sure so have many other Rails developers.

In recent days i have monitored a very strange behaviour of respond_to in IE.I am sharing my experience in hope that somebody might explain it to me. As i cudnt find anything related to this from my best teacher google

I am using edge rails in one of my projects. some where in that i have used respond_to in following way…


def show
respond_to |format| do
format.js {render :partial=>’show’}
format.html {}
end
end


When i checked the response in firefox for html and xml both requests type, it was perfect. But when i checked html response in IE 6 creates a blunder :O.It was returning a js file with the javascript response.

But when i changed the code and placed the html call first and then checked xml call it worked fine in IE too.

def show
respond_to |format| do
format.html {}
format.js {render :partial=>’show’}
end
end


Now can somebody tell me why is this happening and anyone else faced this issue ever?

Its melodious …its amazing and i can keep humming one or other track all the time. Really i loved it

Chris has the music for Ruby/Rails Community.He calls is IRB Mix .Tape and its just fantastic.

Track 4 about sandboxing is just mind blowing…

$ ruby script/console –sandbox
Loading development environment in sandbox.
Any modifications you make will be rolled back on exit.

And Track 5 about underscore operator (_) .I hadnt found yet anything in irb giving the value of last evaluated expression in Ruby. But ‘_’ does this cake thing for me. Good job Chris

One more small thing that i learned from one of the comment….

>> 4*4
=> 16
>> 4**4
=> 256
>> 100**100**100
c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/rational.rb:543: warning: in a**b, b may be too big
=> Infinity
>>