I had been on it already before christmas. But motivation was lacking and it turned out it required some modifications to get going. Specifically the wise guys of Rails Core decided nobody was using pagination so it had to go. Or possibly they decided they where unable to improve it and hoped the community would fill the gap with something better? So the old pagination stuff was kicked out of Rails 2 and replaced with an optional (and likely very unsupported) plugin while telling everyone to use something else.

So I turned to will_pagination as it seemed like it was the most recommended one of the young Rails 2 scene. It appears to work well but I had to redo my pagination control. So far I have just hacked something ugly together… seems to work with the ugly site anyway.

The biggest hurdle then was that my auth_generator-based user-login system seems to have been unsupported for ages. And it had several issues with Rails 2. And that my use of pagination with the acts_as_taggable_on_steroids plugin had to be changed. Both was fairly simply. The latter would have been tricky if I hadn’t found a trick in a comment on on a blog. The actual proposed fix in the main blog entry being way too much work for me to bother with

On the up-side it seems that Rails 2 run a bit faster than Rails 1 did. Maybe it’s just placebo tho. I guess I’ll have to see about that.

Then I fixed a slight bug on the site (if someone used ‘ in a name that was to show up in the Housing Directory. It would no longer show markers on the map when page loaded). And added Kinship profile links that use the kinship name instead of their id. And off to release it went. So it is now live on Rails 2.

Post release I did get one major annoyance. Mainly that if I use the same cookie name as the Rails 1 site I’d have people throwing exceptions when they first returned to the site. Changing the cookie name should have fixed that. I hope

I replaced Vanguard with Lord of the Rings Online and it turns out the community tools are not all that developed. In fact there is a forum for each server and that’s pretty much it. So it’s up to the inhabitants of the servers to figure out how to organize their community and how they want to communicate with each other.

So far we have had forum stickies of kinships and events that one person took the responsibility of updating. This has rarely worked well because we all just want to play the game really. Spending a lot of time on manually updating lists becomes boring after a while. And even the most dedicated people still have other things to do in their spare time anyway.

So I figured it was a good project to work on in Rails. And now it is sort of live here: lotro.houseofkenja.com.

I made some improvements from my previous flirt with Rails. I now have both a development and a production database. And I use the database migration tools in Rails to make update my production database with the latest developments. The latter still takes some effort to get right tho. Since it is much easier to build databases directly in the development database than writing migration files. So I have to hash out the migration files after developing the code… Not too smart as they then don’t get tested much before I release the code to production. But maybe I just haven’t found tools yet to make this easer.

One issue with Rails that came up today is really mind-boggling tho. Having coded Java for years I am so used to not having to work much with character encodings. Everything Java does is in Unicode so you just need to handle the places where things come in and out of it. And mostly it is easy to take care of.

Turns out Rails is not quite ready for the Global Village idea. On an app where everything runs in UTF-8 I still had to apply some hacks to actually get the text displayed correctly. Turns out Rails (or Ruby?) has no support for encodings so it messed up UTF-8 names coming out of my database even tho the web pages are also encoded in UTF-8. Annoying but it seems the hacks work. So one can live with it.

Apart from that I have no real new things to say about Rails. I am getting a feeling that even tho the framework gets a lot of hype it seems there is not that much community around it. Specifically I am finding a lot of stale ‘documentation’ on their WIKI and I find it hard to Google myself to straight answers. And a lot of the community solutions to common issues seems half-baked and either dead or crawling very slowly. I suppose I have been pampered in the Java world where a lot of companies are sponsoring projects and people have had a lot longer to come up with good solutions.

Well. More from the battle-front as this project develops.

Of course to be useful for quick data entry I needed to add a bunch of AJAXy stuff. Having already had experience with the Dojo toolkit it would have been the easy way to go. But then I needed some backend to power it too. PHP would have been an obvious choice since it is so easy to host. But data persistence is so annoying to setup. Instead I found out that Dreamhost (where I have an account) also supports Ruby on Rails.

Having made my salary on Java development these last years I have, of course, heard a lot of hype about the framework. So i figured it would be a good time as any to give it a spin and see what makes it so great.

Getting off the ground is super easy it seems. Rails is based on conventions and code generators. So getting a quick CRUD site together is as easy as running a script, configure data access and generate some boilerplate code for the tables you want to access. And you are off.

But that is where the chain breaks a little. One of the comments I have seen about Rails is that compared to Java persistence frameworks like Hibernate (that I learned entirely from the manual on their website) documentation is much better for Rails. And you wouldn’t need to buy books. Strange tho since the most prominent links on their documentation page is two books and their ‘manual’ is a couple of descriptions of add ons to the framework and not the framework basics itself. So basically you are left with a conventions-based framework that only has documentation the the actual API. Yay!

But Google (or any search engine really) is your friend here. Good queries and some patience sifting though mailing lists and blogs will eventually answer most questions.

The actual framework is nice enough once you get to know it. I don’t really like the syntax of Ruby very much. After years of C-based languages I miss the easily read block markers that curly braces make. Having an ‘end’ keyword blends into the code too easily even in well-formatted text IMO.

As for the actual site it will flow with my motivation to play the game. And Vanguard is somewhat down that scale right now. I got a basic site up with room for most of the diplomacy essentials. Cards and NPC decks. I also added the option for registered users to build their own deck but it does not do much other than just your cards.

I’ve gotten a lot of work to add quests to the site also. Mostly with the main focus still being on diplomacy. I’ll likely finish it up sometime soon if I get a spare moment. Apart from that my work on the site is a little dubious. But then as long as I am the only real user it does not matter too much I suppose.

It’s been placed on my ‘House of Kenja’ domain like the Dark and Light map since it is where I do my ‘gaming stuff’.
The site can be found here: House of Kenja – Vanguard site.