Marcel Scherf » rails

Railswaycon is over

Marcel Scherf — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:20:49 +0000

And I took some notes. A larger post will follow here and on the imedo devblog
Overall it was fun. Good presentations, but the rooms were to small and there were not enough powerplugs.

RailswayCon 2009 Berlin

Marcel Scherf — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:41:09 +0000

Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow I will be attending RailsWayCon 2009 in Berlin

Render partial with layout

Marcel Scherf — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:19:24 +0000

Just a quick tip:

It is possible to pass a :layout option to a render :partial call like this
<%= render :partial => 'some_list', :layout => 'list_widget' %>

RailsConf Europe 2008 in Berlin

Marcel Scherf — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 01:40:26 +0000

Oh well RailsConf is over. It should be more often. I really liked it alot. Very interesting and sometimes entertaining talks. I will be posting some articles about the talks on http://devblog.imedo.de and some more here within the next weeks.

I certainly learned alot and I just want to say, if you ever have the chance to see Justin Gehtland, go for it! He’s one of the most brilliant and funny speakers I’ve seen.

The hotel and service personal were all very nice. A very pleasant time overall. Can’t wait for next year.

Sending Email awesomely with Rails

Marcel Scherf — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:13:48 +0000

If you would like to send HTML Emails with all the bells and whistles that Actionpacks Actionview provides checkout my freshly released plugin awesome_email on github.

It will enable you to use layouts/templates for your HTML Emails and it will inline CSS information inside the HTML to make sure it works in almost all Email clients.

For more information see my blogpost on imedo’s devblog about awesome_email

Using jQuery with Rails

Marcel Scherf — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:11:21 +0000

There’s a nice plugin which acts as a dropin replacement for prototype and scriptaculous in Rails. It’s called jRails and is just a simple plugin. It replaces all the helper methods to use jQuery instead of prototype and scriptaculous.

Get it here: http://ennerchi.com/projects/jrails

Or install it with this command:

./script/plugin install http://ennerchi.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/jrails

and copy all the javascripts to your apps public/javascripts directory.

That’s it. You are now rolling with jQuery and jQuery UI goodness.

Rails deployment made easy

Marcel Scherf — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:44:52 +0000

There’s a new gem called passenger which makes it very easy to deploy your rails application on a Apache2 server. Here is the website of the project: Passenger

There’s also a short screencast you can watch to see how easy rails deployment can be: Passenger Screencast (the video is made by Ryan Bates from railscasts so the voice should sound familiar )

Galaxynomads

Marcel Scherf — Sun, 04 May 2008 19:29:52 +0000

As some might know, I’m writing on a new persistent browserbased game that is located in space.

On the galaxynomads development blog (which I can’t access at the moment, because I have no access to my old email account) I announced in November 2006 that I was going to develop it with Ruby on Rails. As time went by a few things came up and I found a great new job (day to day Rails development, yeay!) and I also moved to Berlin earlier this year.

So as you can imagine I haven’t had much free time to develop the game. I did some small things and all, but nothing really that good to show off really. Basically groundwork for all the game mechanics.

Last week I took a short leave and I could actually work on the game a bit. I built 2 prototypes of a hexagon tiled map, using some of the stuff I learned from looking at weewar.com and kdice.com which are also very popular and great browserbased games.

The first prototype didn’t work out so well so I started a new one by using a new approach. So the second time it really worked like I had expected it to. It isn’t pretty yet, but the basics work. The map has several layers with an imagemap on top. This is how it looks so far:

It highlights all the surrounding hex tiles when you hover over one tile and shows what map points (extra money points or capture points i.e.) and units are currently inside the tile. You can also click on the map to activate a certain tile.

I used jQuery for the DOM stuff this time, because it’s a very nice lightweight alternative to prototype and scriptaculous. So far I haven’t run into any issues.

If there are any developers or designers interested in joining the game making process feel free to leave a comment and I will get back to you.