I've been a TextMate user for a long time now and I'm still finding new things to do with it. Here recently I wanted to use the RubyAMP TextMate Bundle and was a little miffed to find that it was pointing to my OS X system ruby. The error message looked something like this when it went looking for my ruby/gems.

No such file to load -- appscript (LoadError) from 
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `gem_original_require’
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `require’
...

I just had an issue pop up today that seemed to be an issue for a few others. It seemed that all of a sudden that my autotest was stuck in an infinite loop after a failure or error. At first I thought it was related to some additions to my ~/.autotest file but after commenting out the whole lot of additions there, I realized it was something else. Here was my fix. Basically I think these errors are always related to a file that has changed during your test run. Now we just have to find out what that files are. Here are the steps I took to find out.

OK, so you want to keep your code placement REALLY organized. You have read about my persnicketyness and now you want to practice the best in concern placement and keep those controllers of yours really slim. Like me, you may want to try and keep controller feature additions to very specific one liners of code. Organizing your controller code to do just that with ActiveRecord models or even your own custom classes is a pretty easy task, but how do you keep things simple when dealing with controller actions that have to send email AND you want that single email link of code to be responsible for everything in it's own encapsulated way.

One of the things that I have really grown persnickety about is the placement of code. For example, I am a huge advocate that controllers in a rails project should read like a mini Domain Specific Language (DSL) and that as much logic as possible be delegated to the models. In my opinion the best way to do that in a Rails project is to learn the proper usage of ActiveRecord Association Extensions. You can check out the Rails API on this page and scroll down to the section called "Association Extensions" if you read the official docs. In short:

Only now do I really get this image from DHH's blog. I am really beginning to despise SOAP for some reason, but I guess I will "get it" as I learn more about it -- as it seems to be the only way to do business with the big players out there. For a glimpse of some of my hell, check out this Ruby + SOAP4R + WSDL Hell article.

Tim Toady tells us that (There Is More Than One Way To Do It) and I am sure this is not the first and not likely the last blog post you will ever see that tells you the best way to install RAILS on OS X. Some people would just rather than go the simple path but I implore you, do it this way. Gaining the experience of compiling your own software will help you down the road when it comes time for doing more advanced things, especially deploying your RAILS app. When you are done, you will have a rock solid deployment environment for RAILS that will include: