So after a week of trying to get rails 3 to do the simplest things, which is install with datamapper, cucumber, testunit, and the devise plugin for authentication and authorization, I have gone back to using sinatra. And here is why. I spent a week trying to get all of these seperate components to work together nicely, I even wrote 3 patches for the devise plugin for datamapper which made it into the master branch. But in the end last week has not been as productive as I would have liked it. Almost 100% of my time has been used to track down bugs, writing fixes, and trying to see which combination of rails 3 beta, datamapper, and devise versions work together, all that with a side order of cucumber. So while I have done a lot of work this week, I haven’t really moved forward. And being stuck in the same place I was in last week is a very frustrating situation.

So, as I am a very adaptable person, and I want, nay, need to see progress in the things that I doing, I decided to go back to using sinatra for development for now, and work on the small apps that I am developing, which can then be used as rack middleware apps in rails 3 when it is finished, and doesn’t have so many version compatibility issues with other plugins, or vice versa.

In fact I am using something I discovered yesterday called padrino. Which I would describe as, a framework that sits on top of sinatra, but gives you a good starting base and a rails like structure, but with the stability of sinatra.

I also discovered minitest yesterday. Minitest is the replacement for testunit in ruby 1.9.1, so even though you use testunit in 1.9.1, what you are actually using is minitest with a testunit wrapper. Now, minitest is great, once you get to know how to use it. But therein lies the problem. While the actual tool is great, the documentation, examples etc is extremely poor. I basically had to do a little trial and error to get things going with it. This frustrates me, and I would rather spend my time using a tool than trying many ways to find out how to use it properly (hence me holding off on rails 3 for the time being).

But anyway, I feel this will be a more productive week. Just in 2 hours yesterday, I was able to get 70% of the way with sinatra/padrino as I did in a week with rails 3 beta. Now, that is not a slight on rails 3, it just means that it was a bold move on my part, (one that did not pay off) to try and use rails 3 in its beta state, and expect everything to work with it smoothly, or with much less fighting with the code than I did.

So onwards and upwards to week 2. I am expecting big things from this week.

So, I have decided to take upon myself a year of bettering myself somehow with regards to ruby and rails. So each day of the week, until 28th February 2011, I will spend at least 1 hour (or at least that is the plan) to do something. Whether that be to code something, read up on something, fix some sort of bug, blog about something, anything that means that I am improving/learning/contributing in someway.

So to that end I actually started two days ago. I ported my (what was) sinatra app to rails 3, changed to using devise as a authentication/authorization gem (although cancan seems  to me to be better at authorization so I will be using that if I can), decided that I would test using testunit/matchy/rr/shoulda, then I started using the better_logging plugin for rails, which breaks on rails 3, so I fixed it here and sent a pull request on github. All in all a pretty productive weekend.

But I have a feast of things that I working on at the moment. Let me see if I can give a quick run down on what will be keeping me busy.

• I forked the mailr webmail client so that I can rails 3 it and make it look nice and continue to improve it
• I have decided to use vim as a my text editor/ide of choice, so I will be writing some scripts for it in ruby, to make day to day things easier to do, all my vim file are here
• Along with the mailr project I will also be creating a more flexible contacts app for it
• Also I will be finishing my small but extremely long running (in development terms) self productivity app.
• Ahhh, and not to forget my rails blog posts that I have not gotten around to writing yet.

Anyway, that is at least a few things that will keep me occupied, focused and improving over the next few months. I am always having new ideas, and I already have an ideas backlog to work through that I haven’t detailed in this post. So I am in no doubt that I will have a host of things to do this year. And you never know, I may even finish something this year. Now that would be good.

You can follow my public exploits here on github, and I guess you can read here about my not so public ones. But for minor updates I think I will just use twitter.