June 9th, 2008 | by Derek Willis | published in django, Rails
A couple of folks have asked me lately whether, having first worked with Django and now with Rails, I would recommend one over the other. I resisted the impulse because, first, I’m an expert in neither framework and second, because the answer really is: it depends. So, that about wraps it up, eh? Actually, I [...]
May 11th, 2008 | by Derek Willis | published in Rails
For most of the past week I’ve been at a Ruby on Rails boot camp conducted by Big Nerd Ranch, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts from the experience. First, if the other courses are like mine, you should go if you can. Being pulled away from work and into an environment [...]
May 8th, 2008 | by Derek Willis | published in Rails
Before I forget this, I have to write it down, or next time I’ll be bugging my co-workers for the answer. Let’s say you’ve got a table in your database that has a (gasp!) non-sequential ID. Non-numeric, even (horrors!). And you want to build a form to input records, including a specific ID. Passing the [...]
May 6th, 2008 | by Derek Willis | published in Rails
Goodies from today: Using partials with bject and not :locals (no need to put the instance variable in every controller that will make use of a partial). Plus, collection in partials to display tables of data, for example. And partial _counter, too. (ie, widget_counter). Dang, I had no idea. Ok, I’m finally clear on setting [...]
May 5th, 2008 | by Derek Willis | published in Rails
Today was my first day at the Ruby on Rails class at Big Nerd Ranch, where I’m joined by Aron. The setting (and weather) is beautiful, and while we got off to a slow start this morning, I’ve picked up a couple of useful things that I hadn’t known about Rails (which only leaves about [...]