1. Add config vars to your Heroku environment  http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/4/7/config-vars/

heroku config:add S3_BUCKET=production-bucket-name S3_KEY=8N029N81 S3_SECRET=9s83109d3+583493190

2. Add the same constants to your .profile file

export S3_BUCKET=development-bucket-name
export S3_KEY=888888888
export S3_SECRET=999999999

ps . Blog Post on Heroku about AWS S3 — http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/4/7/config-vars/

ps2. and yes this post is also about  heatmap.me which is my pet project for online heatmap generation.

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.

• 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).

Anyway, for some time I consider turn back to good old J2EE, then wander on the land of some other Java enterprise frameworks (Spring MVC, Wicket, Struts 2, Hibernate etc ) then Google App engine Java with its in progress full stack framework like environment. Then I decide that all the ones mentioned above has steep learning curves and without feeling complely comfortable with them, It is imposible to develop sth quickly.

Then the obvious direction was rails. First give a try to Django, then read some about  RoR but both of them somehow scare me out. I need to learn a new language (which Django tutorial specificly warns about looking a good python tutorial before devlde into Django), on the other hand, Grails (my love!) just start the sentence with “don’t worry about the groovy, you can learn it along the way”.

Obviously, Grails is relatively new compared to two other alternative and it has (or used to have) to many bugs for a relaible product.

But trust me, it is easy to just start and kick the first alfa version of sth out is a joy.

–

Ok this post is suppose to be a yet another introduction to Grails tutorial, so…

Steps to Get Started

1.  install Grails (there is nothing I can add here — http://www.grails.org/Installation)

2. open command line and create a project with grails create-app Yeap

3. Go to the created directory cd Yeap

4. Type grails run-app

That’s it!

I’m currently using Apache Shiro plugin (previously JSecurity), Gwt plugin, Postgresql, Eclipse for the development, More posts related to these will be here soon (I hope)