It's been a few weeks since Rob, Nic, Doug, and I competed in this year's RailsRumble - after the dust settled from the 48-hour competition we had created an app (Qflip) that went on to take 2nd place. From what I can remember, it was both fun and stressful - check out the Flickr photos for proof.

Doug shared his take from the event on the Viget Inspire blog and described a technique that I think shows a lot of promise for design and development teams working together:

Do you know what all the pages do? How they're structured, and what they communicate? Great, now build them. Using just markup and some gray backgrounds, you can make a working version of your site in no time flat.

I documented my experience over at Extend and reinforced the importance of "shipping":

...Our codes were far from perfect, but we realized that the real value was in getting a product out there that could be used in the way it was intended by a real audience. As a result we now have real feedback and focused ideas on how to make the application even better.

Since the event, we've increasingly seen continued usage and coverage of the application:

QFlip - Get strangers to influence your Netflix queue. Sounds scary, but you might end up with some interesting picks! Developed by the wonderfully named "Scatapult" team.

— Rails Inside

Qflip is an interesting service that uses Netflix’s open API to help subscribers make movie choices. What I like about this service:

• It’s quick and easy
• It provides value to my Netflix membership
• It’s fun in that it has an element of surprise and randomness
• It’s based on people, not algorithms

— Tom Willerer

If you are a Netflix user with friends' of the same movie-renting persuasion, and you have an evil sense of humor, this is your app.

— NetworkWorld

QFlip is a Netflix hack that enables other people to mess with your queue. I'm not brave enough to try it, but if you do let us know what you think in the comments.

— Hacking Netflix.com

We plan to continue working on the app and reacting to feedback that we get from our users. As part of that work, we will be extracting the Netflix-specific functionality into a publicly-available Gem. Stay tuned.

Do it!

class ApplicationControllerTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
  context "An instance of ApplicationController" do

    setup { @controller = ApplicationController.new }

    should "return nil when there is no :user_id in session" do
      @controller.stubs(:session).returns({})
      assert_nil @controller.current_user
    end

    should "retrieve the current user when there is a :user_id in session" do
      user = Factory(:user)
      @controller.stubs(:session).returns({:user_id => user.id})

      assert_equal user, @controller.current_user
    end

    should "return nil when the :user_id in session can't be found in the database" do
      @controller.stubs(:session).returns(:user_id => 1)

      assert_nil @controller.current_user
    end

  end
end

Rails provides an easy way to send session data in functional tests when accessing an action (the 3rd parameter is session data):

  get :index, {}, {:user_id => 1}

As you add to your functional test suite, this becomes quite tedious and doesn't play well with tools like Shoulda. Here's where doing it the old-school way helps:

context "A GET to :index" do
  context "as a logged-in user" do
    setup do
      @request.session[:user_id] = Factory(:user).id
      get :index
    end

    should_assign_to :messages      
    should_render_template 'index'
  end
end

Thanks to Matt for giving me a hand with this today.

Got your new box all set up? Let's do some Rails:

$ rake db:create
!!! The bundled mysql.rb driver has been removed from Rails 2.2. Please 
install the mysql gem and try again: gem install mysql.

rake aborted!
no such file to load -- mysql

If you're on Ubuntu, do this:

$ sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev 
$ which mysql_config
/usr/bin/mysql_config

$ sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/bin/mysql_config
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Successfully installed mysql-2.7
1 gem installed

If you're running on OSX and have installed mysql from MacPorts, mysql_config is already installed:

$ sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/opt/local/bin/mysql_config5

Done.

Not only are tags great, they're a requirement of Web 2.0 (read the handbook). Here's a quick way to pull out those tags in a meaningful way:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :taggings
  has_many :tags, :through => :taggings do
    def to_s
      self.map(&:name).join(', ')
    end
  end
end

Now, calling @post.tags.to_s will return the list of tag names separated by commas. The real magic is when you do this:

puts "#{@post.tags}"

Sometimes you don't want them all frozen (maybe you want to build Hpricot on your target system instead):

  $ rake gems:unpack GEM=coderay
  (in /Users/preagan/Projects/sneaq)
  Unpacked gem: '/Users/preagan/Projects/sneaq/vendor/gems/coderay-0.7.4.215'