I have been meaning to blog about Phusion Passenger for a while as about 3-4 months ago we migrated Stubmatic from using Apache / Mongrel Cluster to Phusion Passenger A.K.A. mod_rails.
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I recently needed to setup recurring payments through PayPal’s express checkout for a subscription based site I have writen using Ruby on Rails. There is already an excellent framework for interacting with most payment gateways, including PayPal, for Ruby called Active Merchant. Unfortunately recurring payments support in Active Merchant for PayPal Express Checkout is limited to a script pasted into their lighthous bug tracking system. The trouble is that this script only covers creating subscription profiles and also later getting details of that profile, but I needed to be able to suspend and cancel subscriptions profiles as well as make changes to the subscription from my site.

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Following my previous article I discovered Chatopica an excellent chat widget, you can integrate directly into your blog. Current topics are related to programming and design but custom topics are coming soon.

Chatopica is created by Tom Bray and Robert Cadena of SearchCoders, Tom being the presenter of the excellent eSeminar on an Easy MVC approach to developing flex apps, I blogged about.

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For all you Apple Mac fans out there, Mac OS X 10.5\’92s release has been announced for the 26th October 2007 (As promised).

I have already pre-ordered my copy and looking forward to the 300 new features.

In particular:

Ruby on Rails – “Work in a developer’s dreamland. Leopard is the perfect platform for Ruby on Rails development, with Rails, Mongrel, and Capistrano built in”

For more information, scoot over to Apple’s Website

Mephisto is an excellent blogging platform written in Ruby on Rails by Rick Olsen and Justin Palmer both of whom are behind the excellent Lighthouse Issue Tracking Software . This article / tutorial takes you step by step through the process of creating a custom theme / templates.

To an extent I am going to assume you are already familiar with Ruby and the Rails Web Development Framework, but where possible I hope to keep things as simple as possible.

First of all one of the best ways to go about learning how to create a custom template / theme is to download one of the existing themes you like from the Mephisto Themes Gallery and look inside the .zip file and see how these template authors have gone about implementing their themes.

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I thought I would post a very quick tip on how to execute a command line / shell command with Ruby. There are several ways to run command lines / shell commands in Ruby as discussed by Jay Fields however by far the most useful of these is the %x command, as follows:

1. @whois = %x[whois www.gotripod.com]

And what is important and not mentioned by Jay is the fact that you can pass parameters into %x[] as follows:

1. dom = ‘www.gotripod.com‘
2. @whois = %x[whois #\{dom\}]

Following my article earlier today on Live Validation, I have had a response from Alec regarding how to create a custom validator to use with his Live Validation framework.

Having asked if a custom Validator could be passed in the .Now() function Alec had the following to say:

In regards to passing a custom validation method into the .now method, it will not \’91create\’92 the validation method as such, but will accept one you have made, as long as your custom validation method takes a value as the first argument, and throws a Validate.Error exception when it fails (in order to pass on the failure message made easier by using Validate.fail), and true if it passes. For example:

1. Validate.Example = function(value, paramsObj)\{
3. // the following sets up default options and overides them with those passed in
4. var params = Object.extend(\{
5. failureMessage: “Default failre message goes in here!“
6. \}, paramsObj || \{\});
8. // here you would check the value you wish to validate (the one passed in), against some expected value
9. // if it fails then use the Validate.fail method will throw an exception containing the failure message
10. if(value != ‘My expected value‘) Validate.fail(params.failureMessage);
12. // if the script reaches this far then no exception has been thrown, so the validation passed
13. return true;
14. \}

Alec clarified: “…if you take a look at some of the included validation methods they contain calls to some of the other ones internally, as they will throw exceptions and halt proceedings if they fail, so act in much the same way as the simple one we have above. Validate.Email is a simple example of this and can be easily adapted to make a reusable postcode format validation for instance.”

Following Alec’s example above, you can easily then use the validator using the following:

1. Validate.now(Validate.Example(), value_to_validate, \{options\})

Using a custom validator opens up many possibilities such as making an AJAX call to the server to check the uniqueness of a username or password.

For more information:

Live Validation

Documentation for Validate.now()

I came across a great new validation library the other day which I wanted to share with you all. Live Validation by Alec Hill is a cross-platform client-side JavaScript validation framework which provides real-time feedback to the user as they type.

LiveValidation in action

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TktIt.com is a self service ticketing solution for the social networking generation. It allows bands, clubs, companies etc to sell tickets, places to any event or activity they may run, for example gigs, training events, sports activities, festivals, exhibitions etc. Tickets can be sold directly from the users websites and payment is made directly to PayPal, in addition users can track their ticket sales directly from TktIt.

Tktit.com – The self service ticketing site.

This was my first full development outing into the realms of Ruby on Rails which has been an inspirational and educating experience and I will be posting several articles in the near future on some of the techniques I used such as using script.aculo.us to produce a similar color selector to the one I did in .Net/JQuery.

With my new focus on Rails, I have decided to move my blog to the excellent Mephisto Blog, from now on I will also be focusing my articles a little more towards not only Ruby on Rails but also Web Development, Web Design, UI Design and Javascript.

I have also used this opportunity to streamline the design of the site, there were a few things that didn’t work quite as they should on the old site and will have been improved along with a revamp of the colour scheme.

As I write this www.miletbaker.com still points to the old blog until all the content has been migrated and I have configured Apache to relay requests to my old urls to their new location. Once this is complete that will also be migrated across.

Also look out for the Jive (Javascript Input Validation Engine) for Prototype which I am currently working on with George which will feature real time inline validation as well as validation calls via Ajax and a Rails plug in. Check out Live Validation.