David Czarnecki

Ruby and Rails Version Application Progression

I did a quick assessment of our applications at work to look at the Ruby and Rails versions that we have running in production.

Number of applications running under Ruby … :

1.8.7: 1

1.9.2: 0

1.9.3: 13

All versions of Ruby are MRI.

Number of applications running under Rails … :

2.x: 1

3.0.x: 10

3.1.x: 3

Overall I think that’s pretty good. Our applications serve millions of gamers every day and so we need to stay current with our technology stack.

Internal Consistency

I recently started using Sinatra again for a few projects and found that my approach to developing these projects had changed significantly in such a short period of time (a couple of days). Looking at the difference between 2 significant projects, I wanted to enumerate what I found to be my “best practices”.

• Use a “self-documenting” application name. I see a lot of Sinatra projects that use app.rb. Your application is a unique and beautiful snowflake and you give it such a boring name like app.rb?
• Develop using Sinatra’s modular style. The changes are minimal and you don’t pollute the Object namespace.
• Organize your overall Sinatra application. I’ve gone with the approach of configure block(s), registration of extensions, followed by registration of helpers.
• In testing, take the approach of making the Rack::Test::Methods available in all test contexts.
• Sinatra::Contrib has many useful Sinatra extensions, especially Sinatra::Reloader. There are also useful extensions that can give you some of those handy Rails-isms like initializers (see sinatra-initializers).

I feel compelled now to go back and update past Sinatra projects to have internal consistency and that’s a good thing.

Do you have any Sinatra “best practices”?

first.rb

The first Ruby I ever wrote was in December 2005. It was akismet.rb, a small class for interacting with the Akismet service. My post to the spam-stopper mailing list can be found here. I personally never did anything with the class and I didn’t touch Ruby again for another 3 years until I started working at Agora Games. However, if you google for akismet.rb, you’ll see it took on a life of its own by providing a seed for other Ruby libraries and Rails plugins.

One of those libraries is rakismet, written by Josh French, which provides Akismet integration for Rails. By whatever happenstance, I started following Josh on Twitter at some point. We also met up at RailsConf 2011. However, it wasn’t until today that I found rakismet and caught up with the first Ruby I had ever written, in a much different form then when it was originally written nearly 6 years ago. I can’t take any credit for its current form and function.

Open source is interesting. You write a bit of code, release it and it takes on a life of its own. “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

UPDATE: 2011-09-02

I found what I believe to be the original Akismet.rb. Here’s the gist.

Let us count the ways of the n00b:

• Using require statements INSIDE the class
• Naming the file capital A kismet.rb
• Declaring instance variables
• Using the return keyword
• () for methods without parameters
• hasVerifiedKey for a boolean return
• protected :callAkismet

:)