Working With Rails

June marked the start of a series of Ruby on Rails Hackfests. During this time developers battled it out contributing enhancements, bug fixes and documentation to the framework we all know and love - Ruby on Rails.

This post kicks off a collection of interviews with the winners of this contest, beginning with Christophe Porteneuve.

Christophe is heavily involved in the Rails community having been a speaker at ParisOnRails, ParisWeb, and The Ajax Experience. In addition to contributing to Rails he also contributes to the Prototype and script.aculo.us libraries; teaches Rails and is also an IT book author.

Q: What is your connection to Ruby on Rails?

I discovered Ruby in early 2005. I've been coding since 1989 and have been using about two dozen languages, most of them professionally, and I was looking at the time for something more expressive, and more agile, than my language of choice by then (which was Java, and prior to that had been Delphi). Ruby felt profoundly right.

Later that year I dipped in Rails, and after 6 years of professional J2EE work it blew my mind; it got almost everything right, and very right at that. Sure, a few things were missing and could be improved on, but the philosophy and agility were astounding. I fell in love.

For the past 5 years I've been leading the Software Engineering department of an internship-intensive IT college, and this past academic year we've been the first in France to teach classes (and top-notch ones at that) in AJAX, Ruby and Rails. Students loved it!

Next month I'll be changing jobs to become CTO of Ciblo, and I already committed them to pushing Rails for every new project, including all client works.

I'm also a member of Prototype Core and contribute there quite a bit; I also patch Scripty now and then. Finally, I'm currently wrapping up the quasi-official book about Prototype and script.aculo.us, already available in Beta at The Pragmatic Programmers. It'll be the first comprehensive, in-depth coverage of these libs (following in the nice tracks people such as Dave Crane started treading).

Q: Tell us about the sort of contribution you made during the contest.

Well I hadn't even realized there was a new Hackfest going on. I did contribute a couple patches to Rails (and sure hope to contribute much, much more in the near future), but my tickets and patches on Rails' Trac are mostly about Spinoffs (Prototype and script.aculo.us). Thomas' and Sam's committing a few of those patches in June got me to #8 at this Hackfest :-)

Those patches were mostly little tweaks, like obeying tabindex (if any) when determining the "first" element in a form, etc. There are a few left in store before we release 1.6, e.g. extended semantics for Enumerable#grep. My biggest contributions this year were in rewriting, with Andrew Dupont, the $$/Selector area for 1.5.1. It was really cool, and Prototype users love it! I also just entirely rewrote the InPlaceEditor (and InPlaceCollectionEditor) for Thomas, as it was seriously needed, and it just landed in the trunk.

Q: How did you first get involved contributing to the Rails source?

Well, I love open-source. I've been using FLOSS since 1995, and I've got strong coding-fu so it's only fair I give back whenever I have time. With Rails and Spinoffs, it's actually very easy to give back, because of the agility of it, and how big they are on TDD (wink), so you feel more confident your patch is right.

When I hit a few snags at the time I discovered the libs, Thomas pointed me to the Google Group (RubyOnRails-Spinoffs), which is pretty top-notch. As things go, I'm now a prominent voice there, and after those first two questions, all my posts have been answers :-)

Q: Tell us about your development environment

I've forsaken Windows a few years back, so I'm 99% of the time on Debian GNU/Linux with a KDE graphic environment. I just finally got myself a brand-new MacBook Pro too, which I'd been longing for (plus, you don't really feel like you belong in the Rails family till you switch to OSX ;-)).

The desktop apps I use most are Firefox (with Firebug, of course), Thunderbird, Konsole, Vim, SSH, Subversion, AmaroK for music (best tool ever!), and Kopete for chat. As for online apps, I use Trac, Campfire, Basecamp, Google Agenda and Google Groups quite a lot. And I definitely need to give a try to Justin's and Rick's Lighthouse and Warehouse.

On OSX I'm fond of Quicksilver, Adium and iTerm (and probably TextMate, once I get to it).

As for development, with Rails I'm mostly using Vim as I find it tedious to launch RadRails, because of Eclipse. I love Eclipse, I use it whenever I need to do Java work, but with Rails I find it snappier to just use an editor and filesystem hooks. I have a Konsole session set up with a few tabs for the code, console, server, log, MySQL shell if I need it and regular shell for RI lookups and ad hoc IRB sessions to fly.

Q: Rails 2.0 - What kind of features and functionality do you think we are likely to see in this release?

Quite frankly I haven't had much time to follow the directions 2.0 is taking these days, except for the nice sexy migrations, dumping of route maps, nested REST resources in the routes (very nice one!), etc.

As a developer who has to deal with international apps or non-English single-language apps all the time, I sure wish G11n were built right in, instead of through numerous, competing plug-ins such as Globalize or its recent, streamlined Globalite variant.

But I believe Core is going to slim even further down instead of biffing up. I can understand the philosophy. For instance, pagination got the boot (which at least makes a good pretext to switch to the better will_paginate plugin).

I'd love to see better scaffolding/generation out of the box, perhaps helpers favoring accessibility, markup, progressive enhancement, this kind of thing. Currently the code they spew is pretty sub-par, I find myself using a lot of my own helpers instead. Sam wants the whole Spinoffs-related helpers to be rewritten from scratch, and I hope to tackle that with him later this year.

Stuff like any-depth eager loading on associations would be cool. Then again, as I said, I haven't got time these days to track every changeset.

Q: Closing words

For those interested in Proto/Scripty, I'll be speaking at The Ajax Experience at San Francisco, from July 25 to 27, and possibly (TBC yet) at @mediaAJAX London in November.

I'm looking forward to contributing quite a good deal to both Spinoffs and Rails from next September onwards, and you can expect quite a few cool things either as new versions of Prototype/Scripty, or plugins to Rails.