I just came back from RailsConf 2008 in Portland. This year was great. There were a lot of exciting developments to talk about, like MagLev, SkyNet, mod_rails and Rails 2.1.

The talks seemed better this year as well. The one I was most looking forward to was from Obie Fernandez, who wrote The Rails Way, published last fall. I can easily say this is the best Rails book published to date (sorry, Pragmatic). It’s packed with useful information, best practices, and real-world code. Obie’s excellent writing style along with contributions from numerous Rails coders make it a great read too. My copy is already showing wear. And at 900+ pages, it’s like a phone book.

Obie’s talk was given to a packed room, despite being scheduled on Sunday morning at 9am. The title of the talk, “The Worst Rails Code You’ve Ever Seen (and how not to write it yourself)”, discouraged my friends from attending (“sounds depressing”, one said). During the first lightning round, we had seen some pretty bad code proudly presented (to which Ryan Davis publicly expressed his horror).

But the talk was worth getting up for. Through a series of real-world examples, Obie (and co-presenter Rein Henrichs) showed the audience just how bad Rails coding can get. Some of the code was truly appalling, like a 1200+ line app in a single controller (no, really). Other examples looked, well, kind of familiar. Having been involved in several Rails projects myself since 2005, I’ve seen (and written) my share of bad code.

I’m happy to annouce a patch for Ultrasphinx that enables access to the geographical distance searching in the Sphinx full-text search engine.

Ken Collins put together an awesome update to the autotest sound plugin. His version supports a playlist directory, so you can easily cycle through different init, red and green sounds. His sounds are hilarious!

http://www.metaskills.net/2008/4/6/autotest-playlist-for-red-green-feedback

I’ve been using it all day :)

Some collected recipes to make irb and script/console a bit nicer to use:

• pretty printing (pp whatever)
• enhanced tab completion
• rails logging to console
• saves command history between sessions
• use readline extensions module

Tips were collected from posts by Dr. Nic, Toolman Tim and Dzone Snippets.

~/.irbrc

require 'pp'
require 'irb/completion'
ARGV.concat [ "--readline", "--prompt-mode", "simple" ]
IRB.conf[:AUTO_INDENT]=true

# load console_with_helpers if possible
script_console_running = ENV.include?('RAILS_ENV') && IRB.conf[:LOAD_MODULES] && IRB.conf[:LOAD_MODULES].include?('console_with_helpers')
rails_running = ENV.include?('RAILS_ENV') && !(IRB.conf[:LOAD_MODULES] && IRB.conf[:LOAD_MODULES].include?('console_with_helpers'))
irb_standalone_running = !script_console_running && !rails_running

# log Rails stuff to STDOUT
if script_console_running
  require 'logger'
  Object.const_set(:RAILS_DEFAULT_LOGGER, Logger.new(STDOUT))
end

# Keep command-line history between startups
require 'irb/ext/save-history'
IRB.conf[:SAVE_HISTORY] = 100
IRB.conf[:HISTORY_FILE] = "#{ENV['HOME']}/.irb-save-history" 

Update: my friend Joannou pointed out Utility Belt which looks pretty nice also.

Update 2 (a month later): Been using Utility Belt for a while and noticed some problems… it has a tendency to conflict with ActiveRecord validations and trigger bogus errors during callbacks. Also seems to destroy some of the init process with certain plugins like ActiveScaffold. Perhaps it’s too clever. I ended up rolling back to my old .irbc – YMMV.

Update April 9, 2008: Ken Collins has released a new version of the sound plugin with playlist support!

We’ve all been enjoying autotest, part of the ZenTest gem. If you’ve tricked out your kit, then you have plugins configured, so at minimum you’re red, green and growling. Now, things get really fun.

Watch a screencast of autotest running with sound effects

I’m stoked to announce the sound plugin for autotest. This simple chunk of code will fire off sounds for different events in autotest. I’ve provided a set of custom-made sounds, produced with my trusty Nord Modular synthesizer and fine-tuned for an optimal testing experience. You should be able to use these all day without annoying your neighbors too much.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Install mgp321

$ sudo port install mpg321

$ sudo apt-get install mpg321

2. Download and extract the plugin

The starter sound fx are in the zip file. Extract it in your home directory, it will create ~/autotest/sound.

autotest-sound-1_2.zip (86k)

3. Configure your ~/.autotest file:

require '~/autotest/sound/sound.rb'
Autotest::Sound.sound_path = "~/autotest/sound/sound_fx/" 

Enjoy TDD with audio feedback!

I’ve been using this setup for several weeks now. I initially wrote it as a gag, but I have since found it to be incredibly useful. It’s nice know what your testing status via audio – you don’t have to switch windows or take your eyes off the code. I’ve even turned off Growl, I don’t need it any more. audio makes testing more fun. :)

If there are any problems or feedback, please post a comment here.

UPDATE:Plugin instructions and zip file updated, now with Windows support. Thanks, John and Jamie.

UPDATE #2:Fixed bad path in instructions and doc fixes in zip file. (thanks, Matt)