Institutional Knowledge

Recently there has been a lot of buzz about Streamlined for Rails apps. Basically it’s smart scaffolding that understands table relationships. Again, that’s the most basic way of talking about it, but it will suffice for what we’re doing right now.

One of the things that I don’t think people understand about Streamlined is that it is designed for “back end” interfaces. The screens that only a few people see and use to administer an application. For those situations it seems to be pretty nice. I cranked out a small app in an hour and a half this morning that deals with a HABTM situation and it worked out quite well.

In other words it seems to be designed to deal with a very limited scope of a rails app. It will not solve all of your user interface problems. It will just make some of them a lot easier to deal with.

Omni presently has no user interface or logic controlling the handling of information. It’s just models, associations, and tests. It’ll be interesting to see how big it will grow over the next couple of weeks.

In an effort to further abstract the CAS Login portion of our Ruby on Rails applications, I’ve taken our CAS Login Module and turned that into a plugin that can be included in any past or present Rails applications and managed separate from the development of the applications themselves. You can read all about how the plugin works and how to use it in your application on the Developer Wiki.

This also marks the beginning of our public Subversion repository allowing other developers to access our code via SVN. Currently, the CASLogin plugin is the only source available and only Web Services has write permissions to the repository.

Links

• http://developer.csuchico.edu/wiki/ruby_on_rails:caslogin_plugin
• http://developer.csuhico.edu/svn

technorati tags:cas, wiki, plugin, rubyonrails

Via Riding Rails we learn of a content management project, RadiantCMS, which looks quite sweet.

Things called a CMS are notoriously complex. Cheers for keeping it simple.

No truer words…

Could Chico use something like this? Doubtful. Will we keep our eye on it? Of course!

When Rails 1.1 came out we didn’t want to break our existing apps (not that we were doing anything that would have broke, but why take that risk) so we did the prudent thing and “froze” our apps with the gems for Rails 1.0. That Rails allows you to do this is such a stupid-easy way isn’t that surprising. What’s also nice is that once you’ve tested on Rails 1.1 it’s just as easy to undo, rake unfreeze_rails.

That’s it. Did you expect more?