Don't stop at Rails, check out Seaside!

In order to develop web apps, I have struggled with Java/Tomcat/Struts for several years. Then there was Ruby on Rails and I thought: wow, what a framework, it can't get any easier... I was wrong. There's Seaside. Seaside is a Smalltalk based web application framework. Take Rails, remove routing and request/response handling, start thinking in object oriented components and let's change the way we think of developing web apps. Welcome to the seaside. And the best thing is: if you have mastered Ruby on Rails, it's quite easy to get into Seaside.

Here are some resources to start with:

• Squeak by example (a free book introducing Smalltalk/Squeak)
• The Seaside homepage
  
• Seaside Tutorial (by the Hasso Plattner Institute)
• Lukas Renggli's Website (one of the core developers of seaside)

Once you have got rid of your resistance against the Smalltalk syntax and the somewhat weird looking windows of Squeak you will be amazed how easy it is to develop web apps with Seaside. I will still be working with Ruby on Rails most of my time but Seaside definitely got my attention.

Code Syntax Highlighting on Web Pages with TextMate

Somehow I felt that there must be an easier way to achieve syntax highlighting on web pages than I described in this previous post. So after thinking and googling for some more time I came accross this cool function in TextMate:

Bundles -> TextMate -> Create HTML from Document

This creates an HTML-page of your current document. Voilà. And it even includes the CSS needed to make the page look like your current TextMate theme.

Update: It also works for displaying CSS, HTML and Javascript! (and probably for every other language which can be displayed by TextMate)

Add a character set to Vpim's Vcard-Export

If you are using Vpim to export Vcards and ever need to include a character set on your lines in the generated Vcard-file, here's how to do it:

# open up Vpim's DirectoryInfo::Field class
module Vpim
  class DirectoryInfo
    class Field
      class << self
        alias_method :orig_create, :create
        
        # we overwrite Field.create for setting the CHARSET
        def create(name, value='', params={})
          # specify the lines you don't want to add a charset to
          lines_to_ignore = %w(BEGIN END VERSION)
          params.merge!({'CHARSET' => 'ISO-8859-1'}) unless lines_to_ignore.include? name
          orig_create(name, value, params)
        end
      end
        
    end
  end
end

Ruby Syntax Highlighting on Web Pages

Here's a fast and easy way to do syntax highlighting on web pages (e.g. blogs). This works for ruby and html/xml:

First Install Jamis Buck's syntax gem

gem install syntax

Then create a file ruby2html.rb with the following content

require 'rubygems'
require 'syntax/convertors/html'

#create a new ruby2Html-converter and convert clipboard-content to html
converter = Syntax::Convertors::HTML.for_syntax "ruby"
html_code = converter.convert(IO.popen('pbpaste', 'r+').read, false)

#wrap the code in a pre-tag with class 'ruby'
html_code = ["<pre class='ruby'>", html_code, "</pre>"].join

#output the generated html-code to the console
puts html_code

#write the html_code back to the clipboard
IO.popen('pbcopy', 'r+').puts html_code

Then just copy the content of the clipboard into your blog or webpage.

Warning: the code uses the cmd-line tools 'popen' and 'pbcopy' to access the clipboard. Those tools are MacOSX specific. If you're on Linux see this blog post, something similar for windows users is describe here.

Add this css declarations to the header of your web page (change them to fit your need):

pre {
    background-color: #f1f1f3;
    color: #112;
    padding: 10px;
    font-size: 1.1em;
    overflow: auto;
    margin: 4px 0px;
    width: 95%;
}

/* Syntax highlighting */
.ruby .normal {}
.ruby .comment { color: #6a6969; font-style: italic; }
.ruby .keyword { color: #7f2a53; font-weight: bold; }
.ruby .method { color: #077; }
.ruby .class { color: #683c2b; font-weight: bold;}
.ruby .module { color: #050; }
.ruby .punct { color: #000; font-weight: bold; }
.ruby .symbol { color: #000; }
.ruby .string { color: #2a9a67; background: #e8f5f5; }
.ruby .char { color: #F07; }
.ruby .ident { color: #004; }
.ruby .constant { color: #07F; }
.ruby .regex { color: #B66; background: #FEF; }
.ruby .number { color: #F99; }
.ruby .attribute { color: #7BB; }
.ruby .global { color: #7FB; }
.ruby .expr { color: #227; }
.ruby .escape { color: #277; }

If you need syntax highlighting for XML or HTML you can modify the ruby2html.rb to use the XML-Converter of the syntax gem.