Massive Robot launches twaud.io

20 MAY

Well, it’s been a bloody long while again since I’ve posted here and I suppose you’ve all unsubscribed me now. To be honest, I wouldn’t blame you.

However, silence here does not mean that I’ve been sitting on my arse doing nothing. In fact, the reality is very much to the contrary. Loads of stuff has been going on but there are two new pieces of news. Firstly, I’ve renamed and rebranded my company. We are now Massive Robot and we are available for consultancy and development work so if you have anything in mind then please contact us. Joe has done the branding and it’s something I’m really pleased with.

Check the business cards…

Along with those is a new site and a T-shirt. The final and most important Massive Robot branding will be the kicks. I’m working on those at the moment.

This week launched twaud.io, Massive Robot’s new service. The idea is simple – it’s like twitpic but for audio. Go to the site or use the API to upload your audio and you get a page with a short URL and a player for your followers to listen to it. This is just the start and we are working on a whole load of new features for it so follow @twaudio to keep up to date.

The build of twaud.io has been an interesting and fun experience. I was able to use Twitter’s new OAuth based login process via twitter_auth which I’d recommend wholeheartedly for as a foundation for Twitter applications, although I have hacked to allow for both OAuth (for the site) and username/password based (for the API) authentication where normally you must choose one or the other. It also uses S3’s direct uploading facility via SWFUpload which was not easy to get going but has provided a really scalable system as the application stays completely out of the loop of the bulky upload process. I love the direction web development is moving in at the moment.

Posted under: Projects , Rails | 13 comments | Read More →

It's Been A Long Time...

23 JUN

But I’ve not just been sitting on my arse playing GTA IV, oh no. Well, not all the time anyway. The reason I’ve not posted anything (or been particularly active on the web in general) is that I’ve been damn busy. Most importantly, Catherine kindly gave birth to our first son, Max, back in March which has been quite a change and sapped a lot of my hacking time. I have to say though, despite the horror stories that many veteran parents like to feed you, our experience has only been good. In fact, not good, great. I recommend this reproducing lark.

Secondly, I’ve been hacking away nearly full time on one of my favourite projects to date, Peoples Music Store with LRUG stalwart and renowned anarchist, James ‘Bringing London To Its Very Knees’ Darling which is maturing nicely under private beta as we speak. Peoples Music Store is a great idea from some of the guys behind bleep.com whereby users can construct and customise their very own download store from the music they love then get free music themselves if people buy from their store. It’s a great way to both promote and show off you’re own music taste or in depth genre knowledge and find new music from stores you trust while getting some free digital swag along the way. I’m probably not explaining it well so just drop me a line if you want and invite and the site will explain itself. Public launch is coming in a month or so.

Building Peoples Music Store has been a great learning experience. We run the site on a cloud computing platform and from content ingestion to audio preview delivery to application servers to download packaging and delivery everything has been designed to scale horizontally – and I’m pretty proud of it. Thin, Rack, Sphinx, God, Starling and a whole load more cool open source gear is all running in there. I really need to get to blogging some of what I’ve discovered about working with Rack. It simply is the dog’s bollocks.

So, enough of the excuses. What’s on the horizon?

Speaking and Conferences

I’ve taken some time of speaking and conferencing in general so as to spend lots of time with Catherine and Max but come September I’m restarting the conference trail. Firstly, I’m doing a presentation and a tutorial (with Jarkko Laine) at RailsConf Europe all about JavaScript related Rails stuff and I’m likely to have a slot at @media Ajax as well. Also, I’ll be heading to dConstruct as is the tradition.

Hacking and Open Source Business

Although I’ve not commited to Low Pro or Low Pro JQ for a good while now they are both very much alive. I’ve simply not come across anything that I’ve felt the need to add for a while. If you have any suggestions or patches do let me know. I’ve actually got time to commit them at the moment. Another little project that I’m hoping to get off the ground is called Evil which is going to contain lots of Merb/Rack goodness. The first by-product of which is the merb_openid gem for consuming OpenID in Merb apps (it’s still not quite production ready though so don’t go using it just yet). I’ll let you know what Evil actually does when (or if) I actually get something working.

So, that’s all for now. Just a bit of a status report. I promise I’ll get some useful content written that you actually care about very soon.

Posted under: Events , JavaScript , Low Pro , Misc , Rails | 11 comments | Read More →

How Good Is This?

02 JAN

>> a = 79.99 * 100
=> 7999.0
>> a.floor
=> 7998
>> b = 7999.0
=> 7999.0
>> b.floor
=> 7999

I’ll tell you. It’s not good. I hate floating point calculations. Happy new year!

Posted under: Rails | 18 comments | Read More →

The State (And Future) Of The UJS Plugin

16 JUN

I’ve been chatting to Luke and users of UJS about what to do with it and still haven’t quiet decided hence the lack of news but below is a rundown of where we are at on the whole thing. However, this is definitely personal opinion and doesn’t necessarily represent Luke’s opinion on the matter.

Essentially, the status is that, of late, I personally have not used UJS at all and have found a much better process by using Low Pro on its own without all the Ruby scaffolding of the UJS plugin. Secondarily, after talking to lots of developers at RailsConf it seems that the UJS plugin has failed to truly achieve it’s main goal which is to get Rails developers to write JavaScript using progressive enhancement. Many people seem to mainly use the plugin to get their JavaScript in to a separate file which is actually not even essential to progressive enhancement and I think this is a failing in the design of UJS itself. To achieve progressive enhancement you really need to think of JavaScript as a separate layer on top of a working HTML application but UJS lets you get away with keeping behavior in your views and hence leads many developers to think in the same way as they did before but think they are unobtrusive because they don’t see any JavaScript in their HTML – which is obviously not what we wanted to achieve. While many people can and do successfully use UJS for progressive enhancement even more seem not to – UJS has not been the ‘angel on your shoulder’ that I originally wanted it to be.

On top of this, the method by which the generated JavaScript is kept in the session has many limitations which myself and Luke have been aware of from the start. It’s not generally a good idea to keep this much information in the session (in fact, normally I never store more than a user ID if I can help it) and while acceptable for light to medium use it does have an upper limit depending on the type of session storage you are using. Rails edge now uses cookies to store session info by default which have a very very low limit which will cripple UJS completely. We have considered other alternatives such as some kind of file based storage but every time it just strikes me as too much scaffolding just to allow developers to put behavior in their view files which, as a said above, I’ve come to believe is a really bad idea anyway.

One of the things that I do personally like and something that has received the most positive feedback are the behavior helpers (the make_*) stuff which essentially encapsulate common tasks with sensible defaults in a very Rails like way. It’s a real time saver and the conventions provided mean that the best path (such as using this.href for the Ajax url) is the easiest. Recently, I’ve come to do this in my own projects via Low Pro and it’s behavior ‘classes’ (although they need a better name!). Now via Low Pro I can write stuff like:

Event.addBehavior({
  '.product a.description' : Remote.Link({ update : 'product_description' }),
  '.product' : Draggable({ revert : true }),
  '#basket' : Droppable
});

I really like this and am slowly building up a library (which you can see if you look at the Low Pro trunk) of common behaviors. There’s a date picker, a drag/drop implementation and the remote stuff I’ve illustrated above. I’m planning on writing autocompleters and in-place editors as behaviors as well. But behaviors have proven really easy to write and I love them as a tool for building site specific components. In fact, as I’ve worked with Low Pro it’s become apparent to me that behaviors are by far the killer feature which is interesting as they were just an experiment I hacked together one day without much thought.

So what to do? Well, there’s two ways to go as far as I can see. The first is to shut down development on UJS completely (or hand it over to another party if anyone is interested) and go on to promote the techniques of implementing progressive enhancement using Low Pro that I’ve found to be so successful recently. This could possibly be via the UJS4Rails site or through my own site – I’m not sure which would be a better platform right now.

The other would be to re-think the UJS plugin totally and go for some kind of 2.0 release that would take a completely different tack. However, all of the ideas for this I’ve thought of or heard so far don’t really compel me to write them. I think to work on this myself I’d need to be sure that I’d want to use it and so far this is not the case but any ideas and feedback are very welcome so please do drop me a mail or feedback on this list.

Either way, we need to make fixes to the current plugin to make it work with Rails 1.2.3 which I’ve been working on recently but I’d love patches if you’ve already solved these issues yourself (which it appears many of you have).

So yes, that’s it. Let me know what you think, I’d appreciate any feedback you have.

Posted under: JavaScript , Low Pro , Projects , Rails | 21 comments | Read More →