At this point it's all in the hands of the beta testers.
One found an issue with XServer and FXRuby on MacOS because I had set the row header width to 0.
I confirmed on my eeepc and changed it to 1 pixel.
Problem finished.
The expectation is that I have a tech demo tomorrow so I pushed through the big changes version v.02 which boiled down to a restructuring of the layout, more unit tests, and a batch query process.
On the Drails front, I've renamed it to FXCess.
Using the template that I started with PaperTrade, I was able to quickly build some unit tests which confirmed that I can not only use ActiveRecord to interact with a small sqlite3 db but, also build using TDD which, for a project in which I have a very clear idea of what's going to happen is the fastest way to build.
So far:
C:\fxcess\test>ruby test_all.rb
Loaded suite test_all
Started
.....
Finished in 0.531 seconds.
5 tests, 7 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Friday, June 19, 2009
ID3A is born
Well, after several weeks of hitting my head against the wall of my imposed deadline, I am releasing ID3A (ID3 Analyser) to beta testers tonight.
There are a lot of lessons learned in this first rush to beta and I'm going to jot them down now so I don't forget:
I'm grateful that one of my beta testers is none other than Sergio Fierens (author of ai4r) and I found him to be a great resource for a functionality that I wanted to add to my app which wasn't explicitly built into ai4r.
Right now the majority of the beta testers are stock market traders so I expect that there is a strong probability that there may be changes to the application skewed towards that contingent.
While this might seem a far afield from 'rails' it's not - I am beginning to expect that it would be a very simple thing to 'port' RoR onto the desktop.
I hereby dub that project "Drails" (Desktop Rails).
There are a lot of lessons learned in this first rush to beta and I'm going to jot them down now so I don't forget:
- Ruby rules in just about every way. The ease of the programming language provided me the flexibility to bounce the code around and find out where things went wrong faster than any other language I've used before.
- While I was kvetching about the lack of an IDE last time, I have to point out that FXRuby is so straightforward that one only needs to use google and the API to put pieces together. Case in point, I needed a file dialog form and initially I was afraid that I would have to cobble one together but, the FXFileDialog widget was already created and packed more functionality than I really needed.
- requires matter - as in where to put the 'require' statement. This should be top level and make sure that the "require 'fox 16' " is the top line. Otherwise you'll have a nice mess in the stdout as FXRuby reloads your requirements a second time
- Ocra is a funny beast. It's a handy replacement for rubyscript2exe now that the latter is broken due to some changes in the Ruby internals however, it has some of it's own "gotchas" such as: location matters when compiling the Ruby application. Since I was coding on a virtual Windows XP system, I found that if I compiled on the desktop, I could only run it that desktop. Finally, I compiled in the root folder (C:\) and found that it would work in my Vista system's desktop.
I'm grateful that one of my beta testers is none other than Sergio Fierens (author of ai4r) and I found him to be a great resource for a functionality that I wanted to add to my app which wasn't explicitly built into ai4r.
Right now the majority of the beta testers are stock market traders so I expect that there is a strong probability that there may be changes to the application skewed towards that contingent.
While this might seem a far afield from 'rails' it's not - I am beginning to expect that it would be a very simple thing to 'port' RoR onto the desktop.
I hereby dub that project "Drails" (Desktop Rails).
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Beta Cut 1 of ID3 app
Getting laid off was something that really impacted my development process as I've had to focus the marjority of my time on finding another job.
While that has not borne fruit as of yet, I have completed two drafts of a white paper on creating classification trees (a la ID3) and thinking about how to build a Windows app in Ruby.
Thankfully, there is FXRuby - which once one gets over the annoyance of there not being a sensible IDE to build the interface, the actual coding is pretty straightforward. Coming from a background of creating GUI interfaces in VBA for 8 years, it's a new experience to have to manually type out the location, properties, and relationships for each widget.
Fortunately, Ruby gets the backend portion right making anything cobbled together in Visual Basic (including .NET) to be fairly lacking in robustness.
Having looked at a few of the GUI kits in Java, I am also thankful that the author of FXRuby has adhered to Ruby standards and not twisted it into some Ruby looking, Java accented monstrosity to build around. There are enough Java coders out there doing nasty stuff to Ruby already as it is.
The actual compilation to a Windows app is much easier with Ocra than the previous rubyscript2exe and allows for some niceties such as bundling in specific dlls. Once this project is out to the beta testers, I'm going to take a whack at creating a generic database creation tool with FXRuby and sqlite3. Sort of a poor man's Access if you will.
While that has not borne fruit as of yet, I have completed two drafts of a white paper on creating classification trees (a la ID3) and thinking about how to build a Windows app in Ruby.
Thankfully, there is FXRuby - which once one gets over the annoyance of there not being a sensible IDE to build the interface, the actual coding is pretty straightforward. Coming from a background of creating GUI interfaces in VBA for 8 years, it's a new experience to have to manually type out the location, properties, and relationships for each widget.
Fortunately, Ruby gets the backend portion right making anything cobbled together in Visual Basic (including .NET) to be fairly lacking in robustness.
Having looked at a few of the GUI kits in Java, I am also thankful that the author of FXRuby has adhered to Ruby standards and not twisted it into some Ruby looking, Java accented monstrosity to build around. There are enough Java coders out there doing nasty stuff to Ruby already as it is.
The actual compilation to a Windows app is much easier with Ocra than the previous rubyscript2exe and allows for some niceties such as bundling in specific dlls. Once this project is out to the beta testers, I'm going to take a whack at creating a generic database creation tool with FXRuby and sqlite3. Sort of a poor man's Access if you will.
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