Linking imges in Monorail

A quick one 

Say you have an image or god knows what and  you need to add a link to it, in html you ll do something like

<a href="http://foo.bar/something.html">
<img src="..." /> </a>

in a view you can do this

<a href=$UrlHelper.For("%{ controller='product'}")>  
    <img src="$!Image.Path" alt="$!Name" />
</a>

Ruby Ireland Meetup - 9th of December 7.30 Fitzwilliams Place

It looks like Ruby Ireland is getting a bit more attention from people, and that is great to see
I had my own reservations about if I should continue going to these meet ups because basically I haven't been doing much Ruby in the last months, but I do love to hear about it and it does give me ideas about how to work on my own code. I see people solving problems in a completely different way to what I would do and I think that has value and I hope they don't mind me showing up there.
Also ,there is a common ground in software development and web development in particular. This is why we are gonna start a podcast on software development and I hope it will work out
and by work out I mean that it makes us learn more about how we develop software and hopefully get some feedback from the community, no matter were they are.

Declan McGrath came up with the idea in a thread in ruby groups, we met up and came up with some ideas for topics:

Ruby

• in general about hosting an Ruby on rails application,
• how do mongrels work and what do they actually do,

General Software development Topics

• What is Inversion of Control Dependency Injection and why do you use it
• Improving your tests . Test Driven Development

Tools / frameworks

• What Tools are you using for software development productivity
• The Linux distro Declan is using for recording/editing the sessions
• Funnily enough I would probably mention castle
  

After, we got some interest from Justin McCarthy (haven't met him yet) but its great to see more involvement.
These are initial thoughts would welcome any suggestions , corrections later on, etc

What s happening

Since my last post I ve been trying to avoid writting about trivial small things however meaty post take time and I just dont have it right now.

Questions in my head now

- when do you create a service?

- where can I find an example of a well designed GWT app?

Events that Im interested in 

GGD 4th of December in La Taverna di Baco in the Quays (in dublin)

IJTC its the 7th of January in UGC, some good speakers but it feels like thi IcTC conferences are a bit desorganized

FOWA Dublin -  March 6th. I want to go but dont know really why

Edit: missign OSSBarcamp Dublin - 28th March 2009 this is one I want to go to as well :)

Cool Things

 - I ve been using Pencil ( a  pluggin for firefox) and its pretty cool because its easy to use, lightweight, free. Great for putting screens togheter quickly 

Ruby Ireland Meetup

I was in ruby Ireland last night ( good turn up btw) and it was great to see Paul Campbell talking about Couch Db, a non relational DB in their own words

"Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free
document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. Among other
features, it provides robust, incremental replication with bi-directional
conflict detection and resolution, and is queryable and indexable using a
table-oriented view engine with JavaScript acting as the default view definition
language."

Anna showed some interesting rake tasks and i did a short intro to jQuery (slides here) hopefully someone found it interesting.

This Saturday the 13Th is the open coffee meeting in the New York Grind that will include the talk about trying to come up with something similar to alt.net Ireland. as discussed in previous post

And the universe didnt disapear (aparently) thumbs up.

jQuery ExtJS talk

I m doing a lighting talk about jQuery and ExtJs (maybe mention GWT) in the next Ruby Ireland on the 9th of September link

I ll add a link to the slides as soon as i finish them, any suggestions very welcome.
so far i m doing a quick intro, some of the features, stuff i found useful or interesting or use with code samples and finally some links. For jQuery I m touching on ui.jquery and themeroller and the event observer implementation link

For ext again intro and show some code and then maybe touch on EXT (GWT implementation of EXT Js) just started to have a look at this but it does seem very promising

Cheers

From Code Monkey to Code Crafter II

Hi again

Well hopefully that meeting will go ahead on the saturday the 13th of september

http://www.opencoffeedublin.com/september-saturday-opencoffee-dublin-1392008/

looking forward to it now :)

Trying GXT (ExtJs in GWT)

Today I'm trying out Ext GWT

To use Ext GWT

Installation was simple ( i needed the java sdk i got 1.6Update 7 )


downloaded GWT1.5.1 and decompressed it. happy days!


then i ran the sample hello and I was running, really fast





[if you have problems with some error that ends with <0.49> and then an exception, it s very likely to be that your path is reading some other version of java first, if so go to environment variables and change your system settings so you have the recently installed java sdk first]





to check the java version open the command line and do java -version


Why Ext GWT?





GWT is a compiler that converts Java source into JavaScript


this means you write and test java code






Getting Started


as in the sample i went and changed the email application and it changed properly and that was cool, lets get to the business now


lets create our own app and try to handle some event



Creating an Application


There is an ApplicationCreator that generates a series of files including a java file with a sort of hello world, an html file a css file and two cmd files this all following a naming convention.





Adding support for GWT -EXT


OK I went to the Ext GWT documentation web and there are a few screencast, if you follow them you get to the EXT-GWT (from extjs.com) hello world however there isnt much more sample applications , there is one but seems like a big jump




To be honest this took a while to get right, i m not used to java and the path convention is a bit too strange, i followed the video in the docs above and finally its working :)