Rails 3.. This bundle of delight is sure to put a smile on your ugly ass. So scrumptious in fact, after reading this blog post you’re probably going to do one of two things.

• frolic through the sunkissed meadow blowing dandelion petals
• feed splashing narwhals sardines out of you smiling mouth

Thats the kind of elation you’ll get when you bear witness to what Rails 3 pony’s up. Pretty much on par with organic unicorn whispers.

Lets begin this exaltation with our rapture from dependency hell. Meet my new best friend bundler. 1.) Specify your gems in a Gemfile  2.) Run “bundle install” 3.) Profit.. Need to lock down your gems? “bundle lock” I’ll let you marinate on that for a second…

Scope this player..

  class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
    scope :published, lambda {
      where("posts.published_at <= ?", Time.zone.now)
    }
    scope :published_since, lambda { |ago|
      published.where("posts.published_at >= ?", ago)
    }
    scope :recent, published.order("posts.published_at DESC")
  end

Stop drooling all over your keyboard for a second there chief and reflect on the allure of these refactored scoping methods. Ahhh, yes..

Moving on, stay with me..

No more pouting over routing. Rails 3 sprinked nectar all over routing’s face. Basically, more minimalist, succinct, powerful, flexible, sexy routing. e.g.

  # Rails 3
  root :to => 'forthe#win'

  # Rails 2
  map.root :controller => "forthe", :action => 'win'

  # Rails 3
  resources :products do
    resource :category
    member do
      post :short
    end
    collection do
      get :long
    end
  end

  # Rails 2
  map.resources :products, :member => {:short => :post}, :collection => {:long => :get} do |products|
    products.resource :category
  end

Still want more, fine.. How about agnosticism? Use whatever ORM you like. Use whatever javascript library your pretty little head desires. Rails 3 won’t judge you.

Well cupcake, so ends another spectacularly humorless blog post.. Hopefully you’re not nauseated by my writing and are becoming elated to begin working with Rails 3.

Ever since that fated column of light struck my monitor and forced my browser to google Solr, I’ve had the strength to overcome my addiction to SQL searches. Gone are the days of “select intervention_date from developers where search_method like ‘%sql%’”

Get out of that darkness cupcake! Let some light brighten up that dark and dreary world of murky sql search statements and enter a radiant and luminous world of vibrant Sunspot search!

We can get through this together…

Step 1: Installation

  gem install sunspot
  gem install sunspot_rails

Step 2: Define What to Index

  class Rehab
    #...
  end

  Sunspot.setup(Rehab) do
    text :addiction
    integer :relapses
    float :relapse_average
    time :admitted_at
    string :cure do
      addiction.gsub(/(darkness|clouds|shadows)/, 'sunshine')
    end
  end

Step 3: Search

  search = Sunspot.search Rehab do
    keywords 'light sunshine'
    with :patient_name, 'Benny Freshness'
    with(:relapses).any_of [2, 14]
    with(:relapse_average).less_than 4
    any_of do
      with(:admitted_at).less_than(Time.now)
    end
    without :cure, 'Moar SQL'
    order_by :average_relapse, :desc
    facet :cure
  end

Step 4: Profit

In all cerealness, I’d like to shed light on the line ‘facet :cure’ for a lightsecond as this really illuminates the vibrance of Sunspot. A “facet” is a glint of search aurora. Say my search lights up 45 results, by faceting on cure, we can get tallies of how many of each distinct cures are retuned in the result set e.g ‘moar SQL’:10, ‘Solr’:5, ‘Sunspot’:25, ‘Zippo’:1

By faceting we can irradiate our result set and re-kindle that old flame for search burning inside us all.

Furthermore, feast on these tasty Sunspot nuggets:

1. kindergarden easy index control
2. keyword search, ordering, scoping, awesomeing
3. indexing custom/dynamic field goodness
4. DSL which feels like your native toungue
5. faceting for days, CUSTOM FACETS!!
6. extensible, pick an ORM, any ORM
7. will_play with will_paginate
8. order by field value, relevance, geographical distance, or your face

Well folks, thats all I can illuminate for you here today. Hopefully my annoying “light” analogies don’t have you plotting to kill me by now. I also hope I cast some light on something you might be able to use or find interesting.

So remember, use the force, don’t join the dark side of SQL searching, step into the magnificent light of Sunspot!

OK, I know what you’re all thinking, “What about CakePHP?” Cake is undeniably an Olympic gold medalist framework featuring many similarities to Ruby on Rails. Ahhh Rails, I promise someday I’ll devote more time to you, but until then my programming world resides primarily in PHP. Sometimes you have to make the best of the hand thats dealt…

Which brings us to the lovely, elegant, graceful and genteel Kohana framework.

Enough fluff, I’m about to punch you in the face with some factualizations. Here’s reasons why Kohana has street cred:

1. The strictest OOP PHP has to offer
2. Dainty footprint, no extra libraries like PEAR
3. Locks down GET, POST, COOKIE, and SESSION with XSS protection
4. Auto-loads classes like butter
5. Orginization
6. Flexible and extensible
7. Godlike power over events
8. Rapid Application Development

Don’t believe me, download the framework and see for yourself!

First of all not having to support PHP4 means less code and enables more robust functionality for the framework. Auto-loading, for those of you who haven’t yet experienced its awesomeness, steadfastly promotes great justice. Gone are those agonizing days of having to use require_once() and the likes.

MVC, well we all know the virtues of MVC. Also, the RAD aspect is pretty rad as well.

Event handling enables you to poke your head in at almost any time during execution just to say hello or stay and enjoy a spot of tea, cherio.

Time for some snippets!

Here is a basic controller:

class Freshness_Controller extends Controller {
  function freshen()
  {
	// Load the view as an object
	$view = new View('freshest');
	// Adding variables to be displayed in the view
	$view->title      = "Welcome to Bennyfreshness's blog.";
	$view->heading = "Wow this is indeed extremely fresh.";
	$view->content = "I've never seen so much freshness.";
	// Render the view
	$view->render(TRUE);
  }
}

You get the point… Clean, concise code…

To bring this party to an end I’d like to end with some closing remarks. If you’re doing web application development in PHP I strongly recommend checking out Kohana. Its short learning curve, vibrant community, friendly IRC (#kohana on irc.freenode.net), and most importantly rich and robust code base will increase your productivity and you’ll have more fun while programming.

So how do you get me to go back to developing in Cake?

Take the letter “c” out of “cloth” and the letter “f” out of “way”

Wikipedia defines RAD as

A type of software development methodology which uses minimal planning in favor of rapid prototyping. The “planning” of software developed using RAD is interleaved with writing the software itself. The lack of extensive pre-planning generally allows software to be written much faster, and makes it easier to change requirement

Enough about RAD itself, lets get into some of the benefits.  Hold on to your terminal cassonova…

• Speed up development
• Write less code
• Focus on functionality, not mundane repetitive tasks
• Create a more modularized and organized project
• The acronym is actually RAD, which, itself, is pretty rad…

There are countless numbers of RAD Frameworks across all platforms.  Since this is more of an introductory post on RAD Frameworks we’re only going to go over a few basics.  This post will detail some aspects of CakePHP, one of the more popular PHP frameworks.  They describe it on their site as follows…

Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

So lets dive right in, two basic but integral ideas…

MVC – Model View Controller, this is an architectural pattern which helps seperate business logic from presentation.  The model handles data.  The controller manipulates data.  And the view presents the data.

ORM – Object Relational Mapping, in a nutshell, gives you objects which you can play with instead of having to access database data directly.

Now to the nitty gritty…  Lets show you how to get CRUD (create, read, update, delete.. sorry for another acronym, hopefully last) up and running in no time flat..

Start with your database table.  Lets say you were selling books.  A typical book table might look something like this (simplified).

CREATE TABLE books (
id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
title VARCHAR(255),
author VARCHAR(255)
);

Once you have your config file (user, pass, database) set correctly, now you get to ENJOY THE MAGIC OF CODE GENERATION.  I can’t stress enough what this next part does for one’s mental health.

From a command line or terminal run the following commands..

• cake bake model book (creates your book model)
• cake bake controller books scaffold admin (creates your CRUD controller scaffolding with admin functionality)
• cake bake view books (creates all your views for CRUD)

Now, after three lines of code pasted into a terminal, you have generated a fully functional, extensible, modular CRUD application, including error reporting, user friendly flash messages, well, I hope you get the point..

The beauty of this is that you don’t waste time on mundane tasks, you can start hacking away on the unique functionality of your next killer app almost immediately.

Keep in mind there are a few more caveats and gotcha’s when working with a framework such as CakePHP, but generally you will find them to be a godsend in your web development world.  A world where heinous devilish monsters must be dealt with on a daily basis (IE6).

Please post questions, this is a VERY general overview but I’d love to go into more detail….

So this time around its all about TLC.  Going to stay on top of this and consistently fill it with tasty nuggets.  Check back often!