Paul Danter

SVN Client For Leopard That Fits Right In

I’m currently using a trial copy of Versions by Sofa.

It’s a nice and slick client app, that is beautifully designed and looks and feels native on the mac. I’ve been using ZigVersion, which is free for personal use, and I’ve been pretty pleased with it, but Versions has a little extra bling. There’s only a 30 trial and no free version, so be prepared to pay the 39 Euros if you can’t help yourself when it comes to great UI.

You can download your trial of Versions here.

On a side note, if you’re more inclined to use simple and functional web applications for SVN, checkout the ruby on rails app warehouse, which is now available free.

Ruby on Rails Install on Leopard

A couple of nice tips for a fresh install:

• Dan Benjamin has the most comprehensive guide online for a purpose built rails install. It can be found here.
• If you want to install a sepecific version of rails, the syntax is:

  sudo gem install -v=2.1.0 rails

• If you use MySQL rather than SQLite, you can get the fixed preference pane here.
• If you have multiple versions of rails installed and want to start a project with a previous version:

  rails _2.0.2_ myapp

  

Stripping .svn files

If you want to submit a project to a new SVN repository, you may need to strip all the .svn files from it before adding it.

If you are running a unix based system (including OS X), you can do this with the following command (be aware that you cannot undo this—if in doubt, don’t do it) run from the top of your project directory:

find . -name .svn -type d -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf 

You will now be free to add the code to a new repository.

Talking to a Rails Web Service (API)

As much as I like rails, there are parts that are undocumented. This is sometimes frustrating, but often a great learning exercise as it means looking at the rails source for answers.

I wanted to write a simple ruby script to access a SOAP web service I’d implemented as part of a web app. There are a couple of key things that are required which I found hard to find in the documentation. “Convention not configuration”, only works when the convention is known!

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Pragmatic Rails Deployments

The pragmatic bookshelf has done it again – this time making sense of the one burdensome issue with the Rails platform: deployment.

While still in draft, “Deploying Rails Applications A Step-by-Step Guide” by Ezra Zygmuntowicz and Bruce Tate brings the whole process back to basics with great insight, tips and tutorials that ensure however you deploy, it is less painful.

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