But using a host like Dreamhost has some other nice little bonuses. Like for instance today I discovered that they had upgraded Rails and removed the old version I was using. Now that shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as they posted they would a while ago. But having been working on a couple of new features, whenever I could be bothered to look at it. I was putting off just deplying a compatibility fix. Of course I had never gotten the features done and now the upgrade finally hit, resulting in my site no longer working.

So as a result had to do an emergency release. Lucky I had already gotten most of the site working on Rails 2.1.1 so it wasn’t a big deal. But they also released Rails 2.2.2 so now I have to get that working before they remove 2.1.1 as well…. *sigh*

There is not a lot to say about the post as he is mostly correct that the inclusion of OSGi mostly a plumbing thing in the JEE App Servers of the day. But at least it seems to be a much better technology that basing everything on JMX, since it was never really meant to be used to handling loading of all kinds of things in a complex server.

The reason I am responding to the post at all is that I find it somewhat strange that anyone would even consider the idea that Sun would invent a competing development- and deployment-model to JEE, even if perhaps not surprising from a person is very focused on OSGi. The whole idea about Glassfish (and Jboss and WebSphere) is that they implement the JEE spec as set by a JSR.

And as far as I know there is no standard even defined for deploying enterprisy applications in OSGi. So if we are going to make a new way to deploy stuff in OSGi, perhaps someone should come up with a model that can actually replace JEE instead of just saying it is “broken” and then have everyone rolling their own way of doing things. If we are all doing things in different ways we don’t need an App Server to begin with, we will just load the modules in OSGi we need and figure out how to put them together ourselves, without putting it all in Glassfish…. or Jboss or WebSphere.

What I find odd about the usage of OSGi in Glassfish is that Sun is still working on a component model of their own, to be included in a future Java release while OSGi isn’t. But it seems that the developers inside of Sun isn’t going to eat that dog food and are just going with what everyone else are using in the first place.

Bree-land Homesteads
Bainburg
Bedbourne
Blackwell
Bronburg
Burrstow
Flinthurst
Flitton
Grimstable
Hamlin
Hirfold
Knockhouse
Melcot
Westcomb

Falathlorn Homesteads
Amon Thanc
Celethmar
Dol Luith
Ecthelhad
Imlad Lind
Thorellant

Shire Homesteads
Berrybridge
Cropfurrows
Mousehill

And I also fixed Maremead as it should be Haremead
Thorin’s Halls Homesteads
Aisgarth
Dólgrof
Geirskáli
Kvisgren
Lindgarth
Mestrof

Now settle down Turbine! It’s very annoying when you change something without us, who leeches of your functionality, isn’t informed of it.

Tags: LotRO, Laurelin, Google Maps, Turbine

Tags: LotRO

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

Okay, so it is still ugly. But functionality-wise it has moved a far distance from back in July when it was just a kinship listing. In between I have added, first, an Events Calendar and now also a Housing Directory.

The events calendar seems to have gone by pretty much unnoticed however. I personally add events I find to it. But nobody else seem to do and I doubt anyone really checks it very often either. A shame really, as it allows people to subscribe to upcoming events either via RSS or iCalendar format. It would make keeping up with the social life on Laurelin easier for most I’d wager.

Also I am a bit proud of the ‘Upcoming Events‘ page that show a list of events and a live countdown until event start. Making timezone calculation a thing of the past… if people actually looked at it . Also it is really missing the official events held. But the official events staff only post vague clues before the events. No time or place information is given.

Last night I then released the latest sprout of functionality, the Housing Directory. Basically anyone can now register what house they live in on the server. The idea is to make it easy to see who you live next to. Or to find where to go to visit someone, but actual searching didn’t make it in the initial release.

The actual map used is a bit of a throw back to some of my previous projects. It turned out Turbine (the people making the game) already had a Google Maps-based map on their official WIKI: LoreBook. So having worked with the API previously I simply use their map tiles and integrated it into my own site (while mentioning where I got it – of course). Then it was just a matter of mapping all the 120 housing locations and writing the backend and frontend code for it to show them.

It was all rushed a bit tho. And it shows. I only tested it in IE on Windows after deployment and then discovered that my dynamically updated drop down selectors seems to be broken there… DAMN! And default security settings block the externally-hosted chat window… Double-DAMN!

I guess I still have some work to do tonight then…

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.

As mentioned in my previous blog entry getting the lines on the map wasn’t really all that much of a challenge. What turned out to be the biggest piece of work was getting the editing tools working. And perhaps more importantly: getting them implemented in a way that didn’t break the ones I already have in place for normal markers.

Getting all this done required me to – once again – re-factor large parts of my code. Usually something that isn’t a big issue when you normally write code in decent IDEs. But the loose nature of JavaScript makes it hard to write good re-factoring tools I suppose. At least the ones I’ve found don’t do any magic in that field.

This latest re-factor did result in my first real piece of polymorphic JavaScript code tho. Specifically I needed the normal markers and the transport lines to work as much the same as possible. And also the editors for them needed to work the same so I didn’t have to add a lot of redundant code. It’s not really all that pretty at this point. But at least it’s reasonable easy to move on from the point I am at now.

With transport lines in the need for map editors have increased a bit. So I will continue to add some more of those as I find trustworthy people who are willing to take on the job. Recently one member of Mystical Alliance was added to the staff. And hopefully one more from the same guild is interested in contributing. Still haven’t found any Dark players who I feel I can trust enough for this (and also have the time/interest to do it). So the search goes on in that direction too.

Moving on from here I have several ideas what I would like to do. But I suspect my progress from here on will slow down a bit due to my somewhat limited motivation to actually play Dark & Light. Most of my current guild seems to have decided not to play. And most of the reasons I initially wanted to play this game seems to have died when NPCube had to rush out the game to make some money.

If I do go on with this project my next goal will be more focus on allowing people managing their own map with marker sets of their own types and icons. Parts of the code has already been prepared for this. But more changes needs to be made. And also I need to implement some pages where people can sign up and manage their profiles and map. So even if I manage a high level of motivation it is going to be a while before I have that ready.

Technorati Tags: javascript