A Better State Machine

I have been using AASM as my default State Machine Rails plugin for quite some time. It has always worked great, but now there is a better, more thorough State Machine I recommend. state_machine 0.9 has just been released, and as you can read in this blog post, they are rapidly moving towards the finalization of the 1.0 version. http://www.pluginaweek.org/2010/04/19/state_machine-0-9-0-locked-and-loaded!

What lead me to discover this fantastic plugin was the need to be able to call ActiveRecord observers in relation to the State of an object. With AASM, I had to incorporate my lib class calls in a method that was referenced in a state definition. I didn’t like this because it required my Model to have too much knowledge of the outside world. I think it is a best practice to encapsulate this type of functionality into an observer, leaving the model to be happy in it’s own little world. state_machine accomplishes this by allowing the placement of observer calls using a DSL provided by the plugin.

Rails Javascript and CSS Compression

To speed up site loading, there are two great plugins for “compressing” your stylesheets and javascript.

The first is bundle-fu. This plugin does not actually compress the files, but rather combines all of the individual documents into one before shipping it out to the client browser.

$ script/plugin install git://github.com/timcharper/bundle-fu.git

And then you simply wrap your sheet and script calls in the bundle method:

  <% bundle do %>
    ...
    <%= javascript_include_tag "prototype" %>
    <%= stylesheet_link_tag "basic.css" %>
    <%= calendar_date_select_includes "red" %>
    
    ...
  <% end %>

The Second plugin, which actually does compress all of your files, is sbecker’s asset_packager. This one is a lot more involved, so check out the github site for more information.

Shoulda Testing With Ultrasphinx

I use the Shoulda testing framework for my Rails applications. After installing and beginning to use the Ultrasphinx plugin, I needed to figure out how to configure and run in a testing environment. This blog entry held the answer: Stephen Celis: Testing with Ultrasphinx

Ultrasphinx MySql Location Error

After installing all of the necessary elements for Spinx and Ultrasphinx, I began following the instructions from Snax Fauna to get the system up and running.

rake ultrasphinx:configure

worked fine, but I encountered the following error upon attempting to index my models:

rake ultrasphinx:index
...
dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.15.dylib
Referenced from: /usr/local/bin/indexer
Reason: image not found

In my configuration for development, I use the MAMP MySql server. The rake configure command correctly pulled all of the connection information from database.yml, so that was not the problem.

I searched around and finally encountered this solution from Michael Hartl:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql

It worked brilliantly. Thanks Michael.