Recently, I needed to create some static reporting pages for Skribit.  From a quick search, I got a lot of results that talk about Rails and static pages, but none did exactly what I needed:

1. To be able to generate pages with different paths from one URL
2. Pages to persist across Rails deployments

Not seeing any solutions that fit my needs, I set out to come up with my own.  Here is what I ended up with.

First, I needed to add a route for generating/displaying the reports:

From here, I could just use the standard caches_page :show declaration, but that would only generate the page I wanted if I used /report/2009/05/25 as the URL.  What if I wanted /report to generate the report for the current week?  Well, you can do something like this:

The magic is in the after_filter method cache_weekly_report.  We basically use the same mechanism Rails page caching uses to save our new report page.  Now, calling /report will generate a static report at /report/2009/05/25, or whatever the current day is.

The last thing to do is to make sure that the reports persist through new server deployments.  That can easily be done with a symlink in your capistrano script:

And that’s it!  What do you think?  I’d love to know if there are any simpler solutions to this.

Lars says IntelliJ can’t beat IDEA for Java development. I say that’s fine, but Eclipse doesn’t have to be better than IntelliJ, it just can’t be more than $500 worst . How much IDE does one need anyway? When IntelliJ first entered the market, they offered a IDE that offered a huge (with a capital F) productivity gain over existing IDEs, but since then Eclipse has caught up. While I would concede that IntelliJ has some very smart features that doesn’t exist in Eclipse, they only offer me marginal benefits towards overall productivity. I feel like I make that up easily with Eclipse’s excellent source control facilities, the breadth of plugins available, and through my experience with the tool.

Another thing is, if you’re heart is set on IntelliJ, you’re most likely never going to give Eclipse a fair shake. It’s the same with me towards IntelliJ. Good developers invests a lot of time learning and loving our IDE’s, and it’s not easy for us to give up on something we’ve invested some much time in mastering. Having said that, if IntelliJ can revolutionize the IDE market again, I’ll be one of the first to plop my $500 down for a license.

Now about the Ruby IDE front — there’s been a lot of news about Ruby IDE support recently, which is a good thing. Being an Eclipse advocate, I of course have been using RDT and RadRails, but these plugins haven’t really advanced as much as I had hope (hopefully the Aptana crew will be able to get it on track). I would love to contribute to the project, but I just don’t have to time. This leads to one of my biggest gripes about Eclipse: the cost of building the robust platform that is Eclipse is that it requires a huge investment out of the developers to understand how to code to that platform. The Eclipse guys need to work on making this easier.

I recently tried the Ruby plugin for IntelliJ, but right now there’s just too much Java in the way (why do I have to specify a classes directory? Why do I care about JDKs and compiler options?). JetBrains really needs to make a standalone Ruby IDE, and not make Ruby development feel like the unwanted stepchild of Java (this is where Eclipse’s Perspectives concept really shows its value). I’ve also downloaded NetBeans with the Ruby Plugin, but because of some annoying errors and the lack of documentation (need to know what the shortcuts are, see IntelliJ’s write ups on their Ruby Plugin) I decided I’ll wait until that project is further along. Initial impression is that it doesn’t seem to suffer from the ‘peanut butter in my chocolate’ problem that IntelliJ has, but why does it start WEBrick when I load the project, and how would I change that to be Mongrel?

I would love to give TextMate a whirl, but I’m not ready to pay $2,060 for it (that’s TextMate plus the MacBook Pro I would get to run it on — I’m on Ubuntu Linux).

One thing I would like to say about all these IDEs (TextMate excluded since I’ve never used it): I wonder if the path that these IDEs are going is sub-optimal. Should we be be building Ruby IDE’s in the Java mold, or should we be doing it in Ruby/RoR/CoC mold? If someone was to build an IDE not knowing what Eclipse/NetBeans/IntelliJ/Visual Studio is, what would it look like?

For now I’ve gone back to Eclipse (I’m in love with the ‘Synchronize with Repository’ feature, where is it in IntelliJ?), but I’m going to try the Ruby support in the Dynamic Language Toolkit instead of RDT to see how that works out. I’ll post a follow-up about my experiences with DLTK and Ruby+NetBeans once I get more time with them.

I usually get my backgrounds from a couple of photo blogs I subscribe to, but using Flickr for my backgrounds was such a good idea (and a good excuse to play with ruby), that I thought I’d give it a shot.

After some trail and error, and some help online, I was able to come up with this ruby script to do the trick. The script will pull the interesting photos for that day, and will try to find the best fit for your screen resolution. If you don’t like the current background, you can run the script again to change it. With a simple cron entry you can have fresh background at periodic intervals (I have mine set to every 2 hours).

I created the script under Ubuntu GNOME. If you want to give the script a try, you’ll have to edit the script and put in your Flickr api key and shared secret as well as your screen resolution (unless you’re runing on 1440×900). You’ll also need to have rubygems and the rflickr gem installed.

After some tweaking of a graph originally created by a member of the ST-J Java Group, this is what I think is the most accurate representation of 2005:

This graph was creating using Indeed.com‘s niftly Job Trends tool. What does it say? Not much really – to me it seems as though the software development market is pretty healthy.

And what about Ruby? I’m not sure it reveals anything – I suspect that its flatness has more to do with the hiring behavior of Ruby shops than anything else.