➜ MVC for Titanium

➜ Youth Lagoon are making magic in my speakers

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Appcelerator Titanium + Coffeescript + MVC

So I’ve been using Appcelerator’s mobile development framework, Titanium, lately, and overall the experience has been good.

The benefits of being able to make use of my Javascript knowledge to build a multi platform mobile app that runs natively are huge.

There are a few problems with it though when you’re coming from Ruby.

• getting a testing framework to work with it is a pain.
• a small community of developers using it, so often when you hit a problem, there’s nowhere else to turn, you’re either the only one with this problem or no-one else has found a solution. Either way, you’ve just got to figure it out yourself.
• Ugly code. Let’s face it, Javascript doesn’t look good.
• Where’s the MVC? The example app provided by Appcelerator is a masterclass in how to avoid separating concerns and jam everything into 1 file. Unfortunately, it’s a pattern that I often come across in Javascript.

This is where coffeescript comes in. Suddenly javascript starts looking good and you feel better about using it. Combine this with a sensible folder structure and separate your code into a more MVC-y way of doing things and Titanium looks like a contender for doing some serious app building.

Apache and Snow Leopard 10.6.5 upgrade glitch

I upgraded to 10.6.5 today and promptly discovered that I couldn’t restart Apache. I kept getting this error:

/usr/sbin/apachectl: line 82: ulimit: open files: cannot modify limit: Invalid argument

A quick search and I found this post and it worked for me.

Passenger Error: The application spawner server exited unexpectedly: Unexpected end-of-file detected

I got this error this morning after I thought it’d be a good idea to migrate my new Rails 3 app to Ruby 1.9.2.

Kind of a weird error because it doesn’t seem that helpful on the surface.

Digging into the Apache error logs revealed this error mesage:

[BUG] cross-thread violation on rb_gc()
(null) 

Ok, now we’re getting somewhere. This is an error due to gems being compiled in a different version of Ruby. Ah, now it makes sense. I was using bundler with the path set to /my/app/gems and they were all compiled against REE 1.8.7.

rm -rf gems
bundle install --path gems

Fixed that problem. I then ran into another error message:

git://github.com/binarylogic/authlogic.git not checked out

I’m running the edge version of Authlogic and for some reason Passenger was having a hard time with it. Right, could be to do with me running preview 4 of Passenger 3. A quick

gem install passenger

and an update to httpd.conf later and my app was back.

Override a rake task

Today I ran into a problem where we have a company gem that includes a bunch of helpful rake tasks, one of which imports a production database into your dev db.

I wanted to do some stuff after this rake import task that was specific to the application I’m working on.

I first tried to overwrite the task, like you would do with any Ruby method. No dice though, this had the effect of running my lib/import.rake task before the gem task that I was trying to override.

I saw a few posts about this but they all seem to be overkill for what I wanted. I didn’t want to monkey patch Rake unless I really had to.

Then I struck gold…

Rake::Task['some:task:name'].clear`

One line to stop the original task and then I could crack on and do whatever I wanted.

namespace :db do
  task :import => :environment do
    Rake::Task["db:import"].clear
    ...
    Rake::Task["my_post_import_task"].invoke
  end
end

Simple.

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paulyoung:

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