So after messing up a couple of git branches, I finally get it work, yey!

Here are the steps:

• Watch the railscast about sending email
• Install the gem with TLS

sudo gem install ambethia-smtp-tls -v '1.1.2' --source http://gems.github.com

• Add the following to your environment.rb (Be careful after the Rails::Initializer.run do |config| block. )

#to the top of file
require 'smtp-tls'

...
#to the very end of the file
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings =
{
    :address => "smtp.gmail.com",
    :port => 587,
    :domain => "gmail.com",
    :user_name => "dkberktas",#not with @gmail.com
    :password => "xxxyyyzzz",
    :authentication => :plain,
    :enable_starttls_auto => true
}

• Run the mailer generator by

script/generate mailer user_mailer

• Go to UserMailer class and add the method

  def registration_confirmation()
    recipients  "xxx@gmail.com"
    from        "xxx@gmail.com"
    subject     "Thank you for being that awesome"
    body        "no I am just kidding" #if you want to pass parameter do it like this -- > ":user => user"
  end

• Add a sample method to application controller and add it to the routes.rb

#in application controller
  def mailDeneme
    UserMailer.deliver_registration_confirmation()
    render :text => "OK"
  end
#in routes.rb
map.mail  '/mail',  :controller => 'application', :action => 'mailDeneme'

If you see an error like this:

Net::SMTPAuthenticationError (530 5.7.0 Must issue a STARTTLS command first.

You miss the item above about  installing smtp-tls gem. Read it again again, or check this forum post.

ps. This is the official rails guide.
ps2. this is another link.

• Blog post which is a good summary of alternatives — (kind of a survey)
• A related question on StackOverflow
• Blog post about Delayed Job link
• Heroku suggests Delayed Job, so this is the one I am looking for
• and finally this is the Heroku guide for using Delayed Job
• Railcast about Delyaed_job
• Tip&Tricks

If you are interested, we are using Delayed Job for creating our heatmaps for remotespots usability testing site. Heatmap project will probably work as a separate project so that others can also use it for creating heatmaps on top of their images. Stay tuned for the heatmap side project!

Steps for Delayed_job

• Install the plugin from github (from collectiveideas) with

script/plugin install git://github.com/collectiveidea/delayed_job.git

• Create the model

script/generate delayed_job

rake db:migrate

• You can set priority and a certain time for the job to be put on queue.

send_later(:your_method_name, -3, 3.days.from_now)

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1143589/what-is-the-pastrykit-framework
• http://daringfireball.net/2009/12/pastrykit
• http://ajaxian.com/archives/pastrykit-an-iphone-webdev-library-from-apple

Sencha Touch — you should definitely see their kitchen sink, it is pretty cool.but there is no commercial license yet.

• http://ajaxian.com/archives/sencha-touch
• http://mobile.tutsplus.com/articles/news/sencha-touch-html5-mobile-framework/
• http://www.endofnative.com/

iUi — not that many people using it I guess. I build a site with it, if it is sth fast and easy to learn, iUi can do the job.

• Sites build with iUi — http://code.google.com/p/iui/wiki/PoweredBy

jqtouch — demos seem very nice, probably better than iUi in terms of current release capabilities and size of community.

iWebkit — demo seems promising, but not ready for prime time.

SproutCore — not for iPhone specificly, but its demo seems nice.

So my choice for the next task is jqtouch. not iui this time.

• Setup Paperclip plugin with Amazon S3 to upload videos in rails
• Paperclip and Amazon S3

ps. If you are having an error like this

ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (5 for 4)

this is probably because you have both the aws-s3 gem and right_aws, just change the environment.rb
as in the following link

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1550708/rails-paperclip-conflict-between-aws-s3-gem-and-right-aws-gem-how-to-solve

ps2. If you are planning to deploy to heroku add the gem to .gems file, or you will get an error like this “App failed to start” — your application is missing the following gems:…”

For image upload and manipulation, Paperclip seems to be the solutions. The following links does a great job of describing the installation process and basic usage, so I have nothing to add here.

• Paperclip: Attaching Files in Rails (don’t use SVN, use git repo instead as in the second link below)
• Goodbye attachment_fu, hello Paperclip
• http://railscasts.com/episodes/134-paperclip
• The Ruby On Rails Paperclip Plugin Tutorial – Easy Image Attachments
• Ruby On Rails Polymorphic Paperclip Plug-in Tutorial

So far so good, but if you are following railstutorial, you will probably doing this stuff to micropost, and you will probably get an error like this,

1. “missing” image replacement in microspots
2. In the log/development.log file,

Solution:

If you carefully inspect the log file you can catch the line

Just with just one line, open your model and fix the accessibility:

class Micropost &  ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessible :content, :photo
...

ps. In case you are a noob like me in RoR, this link shows howto uninstall the paperclip plug in.

ps2. Another possible problem might be your ImageMagick installation, make sure you have the correct path by trying convert and identify command. In case add the path to development.rb as described this Stackoverflow entry.

Summary of Steps to add Paperclip

• script/plugin install git://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip.git

• script/generate paperclip product photo
• In the model

has_attached_file :photo

• In the form

header part

<% form_for @micropost do |f| %>
<% form_for @micropost, :html => { :multipart => true} do |f| %>

body part

<p>
<%= f.file_field :photo %>
</p>

• To show the uploaded file

<%= image_tag @product.photo.url %>

Since finding a good starter document is a very important decision, I took my time to select my first RoR source. I went over the following books and decided to use the latter one:

• Ruby on Rails For Dummies
• Sitepoint Simply Rails 2nd Edition
• Beginning Ruby on Rails
• The Ruby on Rails Tutorial Book

Although it is called as a tutorial, when you get the pdf dump, the 12 chapter tutorial is approximately 500 pages, which is literally a book.

The language of the book is very clean and most of the time funny. You can easily develop the code when you are reading it.  You can also follow a test driven approach if you want, but you don’t have (I didn’t).

I finished the book in 7 days with a daily 4 hours concentrated reading/coding sessions and with lots of Starbucks Misto (thanks Starbucks Besevler crew!).

The final code is at Github, and live demo site at Heroku.

As a pointer for the further steps, the tutorial suggest some pointers but I prefer to go on with my path, which requires ImageMagick and Paperclip, so next post will be about these two.

See you next time!

ps. I really like Heroku. Grails has something similar but to be honest, it is not that magical (as in iPad).

After 3 nights the application was ready for the submission. It got rejected since I didn’t read the iPad User guidelines carefully (actually I just skimmed it in 5 minutes). The rejection reason is “You can’t show more than one popover at the same time”. I fixed the problem, and it is available in the app store (App Store link)

I will probably change the default RSS feed of Hackernews which only show top 30 posts. Probably something on GAE, and maybe a simple my favorites kind of thing.

So I changed all the groovy file locations into a new folder(package) with my application name ( by the way all these are about my latest online usability testing tool Remotespots.com project). But something weird is happened with the ImageTools plugin. Since I move the controller files, ImageTool class is no longer visible to the controller that uses imagetool. Also, there is no way to import ImageTool since it is in default package, to solve this, go to .grails folder in your home folder and locate your projects folder and change the package of ImageTool.groovy as the following screenshot shows.

further information link

Ad hoc distribution is one the things I really don’t like at all.

These are the caveats  :

-Download the distribution provisioning profile again from the Provisioning Portal, and remove the old one (from the organizer) before installing the new one

-Don’t forget to add the Entitlements.plist file with the key get-task-allow and the value false. (also add it tho the target build settings as Code Signing Entitlements key )

- If the client uses Windows make sure use .ipa file for sending the .app

- It is not iTunesArtwork.png but only iTunesArtwork

The links that explain the process:

• http://johnehartzog.com/2009/04/iphone-app-ad-hoc-gotchas/
• http://www.innerfence.com/howto/install-iphone-application-ad-hoc-distribution
• http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-development/3156-problem-iphone-ad-hoc-distribution.html

Java Dergisi dagitim olarak cok iyi bir is basarmis, neredeyse her yerde gormek mumkun. Derginin fiyati biraz yuksek(9.90) ozellikle Java ile ilgilenmesi olasi ogrenciler icin fiyat biraz hedef kitleyi dusurebilir. Derginin basim kalitesini dusurerek, dergi fiyatinda biraz oynama yapilabilir diye tahmin ediyorum, cunku kullanilan kagit cok cok sacma bir bicimde kaliteli. Guzel ornekler icin, bkn Matematik Dunyasi, Wired, NTV Bilim.

Yazilar korktugum gibi giris seviyesi tutoriallardan olusmuyor, gerci burada bir denge yakalamak cok zor, onlarca dali olan java dunyasinin hangi alanina girseniz bir uzmanlik alani cikiyor. Ornegin Java ME ve Androiddin arka arkaya yazilar ile islenmesi cok hostu. Biri gitmek uzere olan, biri yerlesmeye baslamis siki teknoloji.

Teknik yazilarin disinda, birazda genel havayi soluyan yazilarin eklenmesi derginin okuma keyfini arttirabilir, ornegin bu sayida James Gosling’in SUN’dan ayrilmasi ya da Oracle’in SUN’i satin almasi satir aralarinda gecistirilmis.

Son olarak, derginin Java dergisi olmasi illaki Java programlamasi ile ilgili olmasini gerektirmez. JVM ustunde calisan diger dillerden de bahsedilmesi (jruby, jython, scala, groovy) ve bunlari kullanan frameworklerin tanitilmasi da bence onemli bir katki olur.

Umarim dergi yeterli satis rakamlarini saglar ve surekliligi saglayabilir.