A few months back we decided to release the inject plugin, however we didn’t post it to the Rails wiki because we were still reorganizing our domain structure and didn’t have anonymous Subversion access to our repositories.

For now we have two plugins in the trunk, but more might follow in the future.

Inject

The inject plugin allows you to do cross-domain AJAX-like http calls. You can find (a little bit) more information on the Rails wiki entry for Inject.

Url for domain

Url for domain adds :subdomain support to the url_for method. Actually it adds this to a the url rewriter code, so you can use this options on every helper/method with url_for-like syntax. Again, more information can be found on the Rails wiki entry for Url for domain

Have fun with the plugins and lets us know if you have any problems. We have a little project coming up which uses both these plugins, so keep an eye out for that.

To compensate for the current lack of a proper portfolio, here are some screencasts of the work we’ve done recently:

• Adding an article to the Rijnboutt Van der Vossen Rijnboutt website.
• Ajax drag-and-drop sorting for the slideshows on the Hendriks Schulten architecten website.
• A small demo for a community site we wrote as part of a proposal.
• Examples of questions and feedback for some tests and questionnaires.

In the past I usually tested the feeds a Rails application generated by writing a functional test that checked the HTTP status code and matched certain strings in the feed using a regular expression. If that checked out I hand-tested the feed using the online feedvalidator. Needless to say, this became very cumbersome after a few times, especially for one of our projects that generates a whole list of different feeds depending on the state of the account. Time to add validation to the functional tests.

Unfortunately the feedvalidator is (not yet) written in Ruby, so we have to do system calls to a python script to validate. I installed the feedvalidator in the script directory, which looked like the correct place to put this. A protected method on the testcase makes sure we can easily test feeds.

def validate_feed(content)
  validate = File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../script/feedvalidator/validate.py'
  path = Pathname.new(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../tmp')
  Tempfile.open('feed', path.cleanpath) do |tmpfile|
    tmpfile.write(content)
    tmpfile.flush
    result = `#{validate} #{tmpfile.path} A`
    unless result =~ /No errors or warnings/
      raise "Feed did not validate: #{result}"
    end
  end
end

So now the testcases looks like this:

def test_atom
  get :atom
  validate_feed @response.body
  assert_equal 'application/atom+xml', @response.headers['Content-Type']
end

Note that this validates the feeds on level ‘A’ which only tests for MUST directives. For completeness you should probably still test either with the online validator or temporarily set the validation to ‘AA’ or even ‘AAA’.

Rumor has it that if you validate your feeds at ‘AAA’ level Mark Pilgrim will come to your house and crown you Prins of the Feeds. Lucky lucky!