Category Archives: Uncategorized

Mobile Training

I just finished a 3 day mobile training session in Columbus, Ohio. I taught cross-platform mobile development with Rhodes, RhoSync and mobile web UI techniques. I was thrilled to be joined by Brian Moore, who demonstrated how to use mspec with Rhodes (rspec-like testing framework for mobile) and a new debugger that supports breakpoints, stepping, [...]

BlackBerry browser limitations

Developing on BlackBerry Web UI is like stepping into 1996 with one-hand tied behind your back. It teases you into thinking you can use css, but without the ability to position divs, table-based layouts are the way to go. If you are surfing the open web, you get to use the 4.7 browser on newer [...]

WebOS Workshop Notes

Yesterday’s webOS workshop, hosted at Pivotal Labs, provided an immersive learning experience for Ruby on Rails experts who were Web OS newbies. We required that everyone had installed the SDK in advance and verify their installation by building a very small sample project. I told people ahead of time that they would be turned away [...]

What classes are Enumerable in Ruby?

Enumerable is a powerful mixin that provides some really slick operations on collections. I started looking at it since I think it is important to teach map and inject, but ended up teaching about most of its methods, since they are so cool. I found a great series of exercises and added to it to [...]

Notes from Rails 3 bugmash

Blazing Cloud hosted a “Do One Thing for Rails 3″ bugmash and Workshop curriculum hacksession. We had four participants: Melanie Archer (@mejarc) Karen Zeller (@karenzeller8) Sharon Lee Sarah Allen (@ultrasaurus) We followed wycats instructions for getting started. Some pre-conditions that weren’t spelled out: Ruby 1.8.7 is required, which implies a re-install of rubygems (you need [...]

Wrangling Custom Radius Tags

I’m integrating a beautiful Javascript app, InfiniteCarousel, into the Radiant extension architecture. The app creates a photo carousel: A scrollable panel of images with nice left and right buttons, captioning, and links. If interested, feel free to install from github. The app is built largely in JQuery and has a pretty simple mark-up: <ul id="headerCarousel"> [...]

How to include a block in a soap4r request

Here at Blazing Cloud we recently had to write some Ruby code to integrate with an external service via. SOAP. I cringed a little at the thought of working with SOAP, but I was pleased to find that the soap4r gem is fairly easy to use and works pretty well. Getting Started with SOAP4R is [...]

How to include a block in a soap4r request

Here at Blazing Cloud we recently had to write some Ruby code to integrate with an external service via. SOAP. I cringed a little at the thought of working with SOAP, but I was pleased to find that the soap4r gem is fairly easy to use and works pretty well. Getting Started with SOAP4R is [...]

Test Driven Development: Why it’s awesome

I have been programming Ruby on Rails for about 3 months now, and have been following a fairly strict Test Driven Development (TDD) methodology using rspec for the duration of that time. Using TDD has been a great experience, and now that I’ve been doing it for a while I never want to go back [...]

Test Driven Development: Why it's awesome

I have been programming Ruby on Rails for about 3 months now, and have been following a fairly strict Test Driven Development (TDD) methodology using rspec for the duration of that time. Using TDD has been a great experience, and now that I’ve been doing it for a while I never want to go back [...]