The last few days I found different solutions to use textile in Rails application. Let’s have a look to the different ways.

Requirement: RedCloth installation

First you will need to install RedCloth (generally already needed to install Ruby and Gem)

$ sudo gem install redcloth

Few month ago I started posts on admin tools for Rails and advanced ruby on rails to help in applications. This week end I found some frameworks doing that stuff: Application builders, that means things are on going.

hobo

• hobo
• hobo screencasts
• hobo quick start

• assitant for model creation
• user management, roles
• an interface to manage models

If you can do with the default theme, this builder is a good start, the new website is nice and the you can find help and demos about the framework.

[EDIT: there is a long article on oreilly gmt]

ajuby

ajuby

It’s another try for an Application builder but I haven’t found any activity for the last month. Is it still alive ? [EDIT: see the comments]

Conclusion

I really think this kind of Application Builder are great for developers. Think about this, Rails is a great framework already, make development faster, but when you develop an entire Application from scratch it’s not really DRY, has you have to set up again and again basis of your business needs, as user management. With Application builder don’t need to repeat these steps and you have every things ready to work. It s going further than Rails then make development very Rapid.

links

• hobo
• ajuby

Not a big digging week, at least some nice links:

• Geokit: a Rails plugin for building location-based apps.
• Gooby: a ruby interface to the google api, now version 1.
• Ruby 1.8.6: no comment, just for those who didn’t know :).
• WhatALi.st: GTD website or how to share and work all together on list, whatever list.

For this week, that’s all folks.

I’m sure many happy users of textmate know about its blog bundle. And many other don’t know or haven’t tried it before, TRY IT! It’s great. How did it work for me?

First try

• Bundles > Blogging > Setup Blogs

Edit the text and add your blog:

myblog http://editor_name@myblog.com

Then post to your blog

• Bundles > Blogging > Post to Blog

As said it was my first view. But you can do much more…

Don’t copy content, fetch it!

The first very useful feature is fetching. Once your blog configured in Textmate, you can ask to fetch your articles:

Bundles > Blogging > Fetch Post

Choose the article you want to work on, Textmate will create a new editing document including your content and some metadata (title, dates, etc…). Now you can modify it. Then just post your article back to your blog when finished. That’s simple!

Create an article from scratch

As the article you are reading, you can create an article from scratch. Create a new docement from the template (here textile):

File > New from template > Blogging > Blog Post (Textitle)

Only the metadata title is showed by default, put here your title, and then add metadata you need:

• Bundles > Blogging > Headers >
  • blog
  • category
  • comments
  • date
  • keywords
  • ping
  • pings
  • tags
  • title

or use the metadata name as snippet.

Add images

The most amazing in Textmate blogging, is the asset management. As example, just drag and drop a picture in your text, where you want to see it, Textmate uploads it to your server and inserts the code to display it in your text. Again, it s very simple and fast!

Preview

While you are editing your article you can see some of the format applied directly in your text (bold, italic, underline,..). If you want to see how will like your article before posting it (included the pictures!) use the preview feature:

• Bundles > Blogging > Preview

Conclusion

All these features are specifics to the blogging but of course all other useful Textmate things will help you: spelling, enclosure,... Then just try it !

Some links:

• Textile reference
• Textmate