Matthew Bass

Jared Richardson just posted a series of interviews in anticipation of the upcoming RubyRX/AgileRX conference taking place in Reston, Virginia in September. In my interview we discuss iPhone development, MacRuby, Git, and testing frameworks.

I’m really looking forward to presenting again at RubyRX. I’ll be giving two talks this year. Git with Ruby will explore the Git source control system and how Ruby can take advantage of it. In Which Ruby Testing Framework Should I Use? we’ll briefly examine several leading testing frameworks and study the pros and cons of each. You’ll leave fully prepared to pick the best framework for your next project.

Let me know if you’re coming to the conference this year and we can link up in Reston. If you haven’t registered yet, what are you waiting for? RubyRX is a chance to network with the best and brightest developers in the area, and hear from thought leaders like Andy Hunt, Rich Kilmer, Joe O’Brien, and Chad Fowler. It’s a great way to keep your skills sharp in a down year.

Lindo helps you write and verify Rails functional and integration tests by opening the HTTP response body in the default browser for inspection. This can be a real time-saver when you’re trying to figure out why your assert_select or have_tag calls aren’t passing.

In its initial version, Lindo assumed that your app was running at localhost:3000 (a fair assumption given the prevalence of Mongrel last year). Now that Passenger is on the scene, something better needed to be done. The reliance on a running app server was a disadvantage to begin with. Now Lindo doesn’t require anything to be running. It dumps the HTML to disk, fixes any relative asset URLs, and opens the file using your default browser.

Once you’ve written your first test with the assistance of Lindo, you won’t want to go back!

Lindo was developed by my company, Adeptware, and can be pulled from GitHub. I’ve also posted a brief introduction to Lindo and some basic installation instructions.

I attended my first Radiant hack night last week. We met at John’s apartment and spent several hours coding up new features for Radiant, which is an awesome Content Management System (CMS) built on Rails. Rick and John worked on a redesign of the admin backend, while Michael and I began adding support for using gems as Radiant extensions. There is still some work left to do, but we made decent progress.

I really enjoyed the experience. If you’re at all interested in learning more about Radiant, or helping to contribute, I encourage you to consider attending the next hack night. Make sure you’re on the raleigh.rb mailing list to receive notification when it gets scheduled.

Mark Mzyk gave a brief review of Career 2.0, the book by Jared Richardson that I contributed to, over on his blog. He also recommends The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler, another excellent career-boosting read. (If you’ve posted a review of Career 2.0 on your own blog, let me know.)

I released the initial version of my auto-session-timeout plugin for Rails at West End Ruby tonight.

Have you ever wanted to force your users off your app if they go idle for a certain period of time? Many online banking sites use this technique. If your app is used on any kind of public computer system, this type of functionality is essential for maintaining the privacy of your data.

After installing the plugin, a small snippet of JavaScript is placed on each page. The JS polls the server every minute to see if the session is still active. If the user has been idle for at least an hour, they are immediately redirected to a timeout page. The session will not timeout as long as the user keeps clicking around. The timeout and polling intervals are both configurable.

The plugin is dead simple to install and configure. To get started:

script/plugin install git://github.com/pelargir/auto-session-timeout.git

Then hit the README for step-by-step instructions.