Courtesy of one Mr. Andrew Roth (via the Engines mailing list, helpful guys there), here is how to fix errors between Exception Notifier and the Engines plugin:

It was easily fixed by making the exception_notifier an engine by making use
of an app folder to play nice with engines (or should we say so engines
would play nice with it).

So a find|grep -v svn in my vendor/plugins/exception_notification folder
gives

./app
./app/helpers
./app/helpers/exception_notifier_helper.rb
./app/models
./app/models/exception_notifier.rb
./app/views
./app/views/exception_notifier
./app/views/exception_notifier/exception_notification.rhtml
./app/views/exception_notifier/_backtrace.rhtml
./app/views/exception_notifier/_environment.rhtml
./app/views/exception_notifier/_inspect_model.rhtml
./app/views/exception_notifier/_request.rhtml
./app/views/exception_notifier/_session.rhtml
./app/views/exception_notifier/_title.rhtml
./init.rb
./lib
./lib/exception_notifiable.rb
./README
./test
./test/exception_notifier_helper_test.rb
./test/test_helper.rb

and cat init.rb is just

require “action_mailer”

Since installing the Engines plugin as part of the Savage Beast setup process, I’ve been burning with curiosity about what kind of performance impact Engines would have on our production app. The cause for my concern was primarily the 100 or so lines that Engines spits out to my debug console for each and every helper method lookup. Surely, scanning through every plugin on every call to any helper can’t be the most efficient thing for us to be doing?

Tonight I ran some load tests with Apache AB to see if there was any substance to these concerns. Each test did 500 requests on a sample of three random pages from our site (running in production mode). Here were my results:

Looks like Engines is a far different beast in production vs. development (as James said). The difference between integrating SB into the app directly vs. integrating it via engines is well within the margin of error for these tests. Thus, I am no longer concerned about the marginal performance impact of Engines for the time being.

Now, on to fixing its conflict with the Exception Notifier.

Another installment in the “it probably exists elsewhere on the web, but my Google searches weren’t finding it”… how does one take their development database with them into production mode (for performance testing purposes, in our case).

Option 1 - Export Fixtures, database independent. Complicated.
First, run “rake db:extract_fixtures” to make your existing database into a set of YAML files that are saved in your /test/fixtures directory.

Next, copy the .yml files in your /test/fixtures directory into a subdirectory of your /lib folder. We have a folder for rake tasks, which is /lib/tasks, so I copied the fixtures into /lib/tasks/production_fixtures.

Finally, create a task that will import all those fixtures. Part of my reason for writing this blog is in hopes that someday someone will stumble upon it and suggest a better way to accomplish this importing of a directory of fixtures. But until then, you can create a file called “db.rake” in your /lib/tasks folder, then add the following lines to that file:

task :load_fixtures => :environment do
require 'active_record/fixtures'
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(RAILS_ENV.to_sym)
Fixtures.create_fixtures('lib/tasks/production_fixtures', 'table_name_pluralized')
Fixtures.create_fixtures('lib/tasks/production_fixtures', 'table_name_2_pluralized')
...


Where “/lib/tasks/production_fixtures” is the directory you put your .yml files in. With this method you need one of these lines for every table, but it works (I just created a list of the files by outputting my directory list into a text file and copying it into the text file).

Finally, run “rake db:load_fixtures RAILS_ENV=production” and you got yourself a populated production database.

TODO: How does this compare to “rake db:fixtures:load”?

Option 2 - Copy MySQL database. Requires MySQL. Simple.
This option is far simpler, but requires MySQL for it to work in the way I’m about to describe. These examples assume that your mysql user is “root”, password is “secret”, and db names are “development_db_name” and “production_db_name”.

To dump your existing database to a file,

mysqldump -u root -psecret development_db_name > db_dump.sql

And to import it into a new database

mysql -u root -psecret production_db_name < db_dump.sql

Voila.

NOTE: Make sure your development and production databases are on the same migration before trying this stunt.

Jordan said it, and I couldn’t agree more: one of the real weaknesses of Rails development in Windows is the lack of a killer IDE. I never realized how good I had it when I was developing C++ with Visual Studio and Workspace Whiz, but after a few months of developing in Rails, where I’ve gone through about an IDE per month, I have sussed out my baseline requirements for a usable IDE. Most of these things are not what I’d consider “fancy” features, but if they aren’t in my IDE I get very annoyed very quickly:

1. IDE keeps a project workspace that can be updated to include new files with somewhere between “little” and “no” effort
2. When I press “CTRL-F” on a word, that word has automatically populated the find dialog box
3. There exists the means to define a key combination for invoking a “find in files” dialog box,
4. And that find in files dialog can search for regular expressions
5. I can open any file in the project in a couple keystrokes without using my mouse
6. Syntax highlighting exists for HTML, CSS, JS and Ruby
7. The IDE does not fight with me about tabbing
8. The IDE doesn’t crash
9. The IDE doesn’t pause and stop me from what I’m doing. Ever.
10. Intellisense (Not essential, but highly desirable)
11. Built-in debugging (Not essential, but highly desirable)

I guess they aren’t trivial requirements, but it doesn’t seem to me like I’m asking for a ton here.

So far, I have over the last six months spent some time using (in chronological order): EasyEclipse, Ultraedit, PSPad, NetBeans, and Ruby in Steel.

I don’t have the time to do a wordy comparison of the bunch of them at present, but the following spreadsheet details my experience with them in regard to my 11 essential (and almost-essential) attributes:

As you can see, some IDEs got evaluated more than others, because some of them got on my nerves almost instantly (UltraEdit, Netbeans), and some stayed in good favor for long enough to evaluate them thoroughly (PSPad, Ruby in Steel). My biggest beef with Ruby in Steel had been that I could not figure out a way to get a file opened with a single keystroke. But after exhaustive Googling, I learned today about the magic of CTRL-ALT-A, which brings up a command window where I can type “open [filename]” to immediately open any file in the project. Eureka! At $50, Ruby in Steel is currently my decisive winner in the contest for least-annoying Rails IDE.

— UPDATE — 

After some cajoling, I persuaded Josh Jensen, creator of Workspace Whiz, to create a version of his world-class Visual Studio plugin that is compatible with Ruby in Steel.  What does it mean?  It means that you can get instantaneous one-key lookup of any file or tag (=method or class name in Javascript or Rails)  in your entire project.   That is, you can hit CTRL-D, type “message” and, as you are typing in “message”, Workspace Whiz will be interactively telling you every Rails or Javascript function/method in your entire project that begin with the word “message”, similar to Google Desktop searching, if any of you use that.  Or you can just press CTRL-space on any method and have Workspace Whiz jump to the method (again, Javascript or Rails).  CTRL-left arrow will then return you to where you started.

Pretty damn cool stuff.  Curious if RadRails has anything like it?

The only question is when Josh will release this version to the public.  If you post a comment that you want it below, I can find a way to make it happen.

James Stewart maintains a terrific blog that enumerates the particular differences between the many Rails plugins that interface with Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps (both for showing the maps, and for doing distance calculations, etc.). On his blog he refers to an “updated comparison” of all the plugins that exists on the “foss4r wiki.” However, the link he gives has been dead for awhile. I found the cached version on Google and thought others might find it helpful to put it online here on a site that exists. It ain’t the most beautiful table you’ll ever see, but if you’re doing geolocating with your Rails app, it is one of the most useful ones (click to see the full-size version).

I’ve been using Geokit and YM4R, but have been disappointed that as yet I haven’t been able to find a way to get Geokit to look up distance using a through clause, that is, it looks like any model that you want to do a distance lookup on needs to be “acts_as_mappable” itself. This is a bummer, since we have at least three models that will all need to store the same [lat, lng] coordinates if I’m not wrong about this. Not very DRY, but for the most part, it is a very functional, easy to setup, and extremely well documented plugin that I would recommend.