One thing that amazes me is the amount of code required for some simple O/R mapping, or I am missing something? I hope to be wrong about this, but it seems like an EJB3 "entity bean" requires, for each column in a database, the following items written and maintained:

• a private member variable
• a getter method
• a setter method

As I have some Ruby on Rails experience, where inheriting from ActiveRecord gives you those things out-of-the-box, I am amazed of the sheer amount of boilerplate code needed in Java for the same thing! I asked a friend wih ZendFramework knowledge about how it worked there, and it seems like Zend_Db_Table_Abstract works just like ActiveRecord.

I can’t be the first one perplexed by this, especially not when the development guide for the ASM 3.0 Java bytecode engineering library contains exactly the above parts as an example of generating bytecode! (See section 3.1.3.)

In app/controllers/sessions_controller.rb:

  def demo
    params[:login] = 'demologin'
    params[:password] = 'demopassword'
    create
  end

In config/routes.rb:

  map.demo '/demo', :controller => 'sessions', :action => 'demo'

Another upcoming book is Facebook Platform Development with Rails, which sounds nice but I’ll probably never get around to do it… :-)

Update Andy Hunt kindly replied to me:

It’s a collection of essays from leading ThoughtWorkers. We’ll have an announcement up in the next week or so.

Sounds interesting!

My next AJAX step was to get in_place_editing working. The first problem was the InvalidAuthenticityToken and the second issue was that I use a different controller, but now it works fine!

  def print
    @thing = current_user.things.find(params[:id])
    render :layout => "print"
  end

My routes.rb contains something like:

  map.print_thing '/things/:id/print',
    :controller => 'things', :action => 'print'

The print layout is currently bare-bone HTML with this script snippet right before </body>:

<script type="text/javascript">javascript:print()</script>

Now I’m learning about layouts in Ruby on Rails. As suggested in the Midnight Oil blog (Beds are burning?) article SimpleSidebar – If you have sidebars, you need this plugin I now use SimpleSidebar in The Project. At first it didn’t work at all, but updating config.plugins in config/environment.rb was an easy solution! :-)

Today I will move to another project at the client’s department. Change is good! :-)

I lookup things in the Rails 1.2 book but as I’m using Rails 2 I’m browsing the web quite a bit too. One very useful resource I’ve found so far is Akita’s tutorial. So far I have restful_authentication working (from the restful_authentication gem), a “welcome” controller and two domain-specific models. I’m working on two related controllers.

A few words about using an activation step when registering a new user. I started out with the Restful_authentication & Activation instructions but I thought that having a HOST global variable was really silly so I found the retardase_inhibitor plugin and now I can properly generate URLs in the ActionMailer.

I have plenty to read anyway though, and yesterday I spent some time on my latest project. I want to use Rails 2.0 but I keep Googling and reading pages like Rails 2 Upgrade Notes a lot when things don’t work exactly as they did in previous versions. A complicating issue is that the web interface for my project will be in Swedish so I will give my controllers Swedish names, but I want English names in the database so it will either be a kind of mix under the hood or I’ll use set_table_name in the models. I hope that Swedish Rails can help me out a bit!