Hey fans of everything concise. My finding of today is Haml and Sass which is a quickly growing replacement for Rhtml (and plain HTML) and CSS. Just check the syntax sample on their main page and admit it, it’s much simpler and cleaner than plain (R)HTML. Everything has a meaning, everything cuts to chase.

Haml can be used with Ruby on Rails as a plug-in that transparently adds the support to your ActiveViews. You simply rename your views from .rhtml to .haml and start deleting redundant code. In case of CSS, you place your .sass in the stylesheets folder and they are automatically compiled on demand. One thing I haven’t figured out yet is whether they do every time, or once per change to save performance.

Haml and Sass are also used in the StaticMatic toolkit, which is exactly how I discovered them. The toolkit lets you put together static sites lighting fast. You simply write your pages in Haml, model your stylesheets in Sass, preview and do a final build. As the result of building you get a bunch of little cute HTML files and CSS stylesheets ready for upload to the site. If you, like me, still like static sites and want to save time on bringing them up and maintaining, it’s your choice.

Let me know what you think. A couple of lines is fine.

Found the mention of that NetBeans 6 Beta supports Ruby on Rails and apparently is considered to be superior to Aptana, RadRails and others. I’m currently an Aptana user, which is Eclipse-based by the way, and pretty satisfied except for several things: code completion never works, popup documentation never works and the subversion integration is … a huge room for improvement.

At this very moment of writing I’m downloading the Beta 1 version of NetBeans 6 for a quick try. In fact the test run is scheduled for the morning, and I just wished you guys to know what’s going on. If everything is true what’s in the review I pointed out, and it all works even half as smooth as the guy describes, I leave for it without a bit of hesitation.

Let me know if you have any ideas on this.

Found this one. It sounds like a great idea to use a notifier in the production environment and get all the errors and unexpected situations in your mailbox.

Before now, I was sitting in the environment logs forever trying to find my way through tons of debugging records, now it all becomes a bit more straight-forward. Check it out:

Exception Notifier

Handsome guys from Rails Envy do a series of hilarious videos under the common “Rails vs. …” theme. I checked their latest “vs. PHP” and “vs. .NET” videos yesterday and have been laughing since then even when I slept.

If you have a healthy sense of humor, you are a Rails fan or simply ready for light critics, go ahead, check it out:

• Ruby on Rails vs. PHP
• Ruby on Rails vs. .NET

Also check their earlier flicks:

• 1 of 4 - Ruby on Rails vs. Java
• 2 of 4 - Ruby on Rails vs PHP - Migrations
• 3 of 4 - Ruby on Rails vs PHP - Organization
• 4 of 4 - Ruby on Rails vs PHP - Changing Database

Don’t take it serious. I mean guys are having fun and exaggerating it a bit, but it looks like true more or less. Enjoy!

You know that I’m charmed with the simplicity and the development convenience of Ruby and Rails. I like how the authors of Rails thought out every little detail of their framework bringing it complete and consistent. The flexibility of Ruby language is so extreme that it makes every framework be more or less general for the effective use outside the boundaries set by the author. However, this very flexibility may turn the blessing into a curse, if you don’t know what to expect and where to look for answers to your questions.

Yesterday I found a growing, yet quite loaded, collection of links and cheat-sheets around the Rails kingdom. They all are nicely organized and easy to use. Hope you will like this little chest of knowledge and thank Ryan for his invaluable contribution.

Best of luck to everyone and have fun! Life is SO GOOD!

Every time I think I have already seen all the major wonders of Ruby, I stumble upon something like this.

Ruby continues to teach me one important lesson – BE CURIOUS. I am… by nature, but I still notice a tremendous change in working habits – following what-if and is-it-possible models more often than usual. I used to evaluate the answers on these questions basing on my knowledge of the language. With Ruby things start to look different. The flexibility of syntax is so high that I seem can’t build the complete mental model of the language (like an interpreter embedded in a head) and quickly answer what’s possible and what’s not. It makes me to go Googling more and more to find existing solutions. Sometimes (as in example above) they are so elegant that it makes me cry.

Old man’s note: This workaround for calling private / protected methods smells to me. How they different from public methods then if all you need to figure out how to call that you weren’t supposed is only two more grams of brain cells. Hmmm. Do I get it wrong?