Dirk.Net

YQL makes it super-easy to consume data in your web app through a unified SQL-like API. And HTTParty by John Nunemakers makes HTTP really easy. A perfect match.

In environment.rb:

config.gem ‘httparty’

Now, just create a model. Be sure to use the public endpoint for now, as the others need oauth authentication.

class News

  include HTTParty
  base_uri  ‘http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql’
  
  def self.new_york_news
    self.get(”", :query => {:q => ’select title, abstract, url from search.news where query = “%New York%”‘,
        :format => ‘json’

      })
  end

  def self.new_york_news_hash
    self.new_york_news.parsed_response["query"]["results"]["result"]
  end
 
end

In you controller:

class NewsController < ApplicationController

  def index
    @news = News.new_york_news_hash
  end

end

And your view (for example):

<h1>New York News</h1>
<% @news.each do |news_item| %>
  <% content_tag :h2 do %>
    <%= link_to news_item["title"], news_item["url"]  %>
    <% end %>
    <% content_tag :div do  %>
      <% content_tag :p do %>
        <%= news_item["abstract"]  %>
      <% end %>
    <% end %>
  <%  end %>

Be sure to check the API docs of YQL for many other options and watch the excellent screencasts by Christian Heilmann in the YUI theater and elsewhere. The possibilities are endless.

It’s a two step process:

1. Create a rake task (in lib/tasks/clear_memcached.rake for example):

namespace :cache do
  desc ‘Clear memcache’
  task :clear => :environment do
    ActionController::Base.cache_store.clear
  end
end

2. In deploy.rb add the following:

namespace :cache do
  desc “Clear memcach after deployment”
  task :clear, :roles => :app do
    run “cd #{current_release} && rake cache:clear RAILS_ENV=production”
  end
end

and (depending on your task chain):

after “deploy:update_code”, “cache:clear”

Hope it helps.

This error can be caused by an outdated version of the globalize2 plugin, so try

 script/plugin remove globalize2

and

script/plugin install git://github.com/joshmh/globalize2.git

Hope it helps.

Getting RSpec and Webrat to cooperate has gotten a bit easier recently, so make sure you have all the latest versions of the webrat, rspec and rspec-rails gems installed. Some quirks remain which might trip you up coming from TestUnit. For example if you

cd spec/integration

and

spec ./user_integration_spec.rb

or

ruby ./user_integration_spec.rb

you might get

undefined method `visit (…)

while a similar procedure would run fine in test/integration with TestUnit

But with RSpec, when you run

spec ./spec/integration/user_integration_spec.rb

or

rake spec:integration

all is well. It seems you have to stand at least in the spec directory or above, otherwise the block

Webrat.configure do |config|
  config.mode = :rails
  config.open_error_files = false # prevents webrat from opening the browser
end

in spec_helper.rb will not run correctly.

So remember that RSpec is a bit less forgiving than TestUnit in how your tests are called.

It’s also important that you run

script/generate rspec

after installing RSpec to have the rake tasks “installed”.

Finally, his procedure will likely not be necessary with recent versions of Webrat and RSpec.

See here for a testing system for Rails that integrates RSpec and Webrat, it makes a  lot of sense.

Having used Sven Fuchs’ routing_filter to localize routes (see here for alternative solutions), I now moved my authentication to devise from authlogic. This broke my localized routes with the default configuration, so for example

http://localhost:3000/en/users/sign_in

failed with an

ActionController::UnknownAction

error.

Fixing it was super-easy, simply open your config/initializers/devise.rb file and uncomment (currently line 81)

config.use_default_scope = true

and it should work like before.

Note that this works only with Rails 2.+, not with Rails 3 where it’s probably better to use a scope block to prepend locales to you routes, instead of the routing_filter plugin.