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LocationBot

Suneth and I decided to take a quick stab at solving iOS6 Map's annoying lack of business listings (by that I mean Suneth pretty much writing the whole thing!). We are pretty much done with a fully functioning app that helps you search either Google Places API / FourSquare Venues API and get a set of results. When you find what you're looking for, you can quickly use the app to flip over to iOS6 Maps for navigation with just one click!

More about it later...

But here's my awesome icon (LocationBot). Not too bad for an hour's worth of work... right? Attempt #2.

One really interesting thing I came across recently is validating a field vs association. I've always written something like this (assume this is a... Company model with a attribute called owner_id and a belongs_to association called owner):

validates_presence_of :owner_id

What's better to write is:

validates_presence_of :owner 

This actually makes sure that your :owner_id actually maps to a real object in the database. So you can't just set a random integer as owner_id and get away with it!

After doing a whole load of reading, the solution is absolutely simple. Here's what to do. On your backbone (or any other client side JS) side, we add some jQuery goodness with the following method:

$.ajaxPrefilter( function( options, originalOptions, jqXHR ) {     options.url = 'http://yourdomain.com' + options.url; });

This prefilter allowed all my BackboneJS calls to be hitting the remote API correctly. I've put this on my main.js before the router is initialised just to be sure.

The difficult bit was the server support for CORS (cross-origin resource sharing). Browsers don't like to let webapps just talk to other domains by default and require the server to specifically support this.

With CORS, there's generally 2 calls made. The first call is a test from the browser with the HTTP header OPTIONS. Browser asks for what HTTP headers, requests and origins are allowed by the server. Your server has to respond accordingly or none of this will work. The next call is the actual backbone fetch() call.

After all that reading... yes, someone made a fantastic gem for this purpose!! Rack-Cors (https://github.com/cyu/rack-cors) is a rack-middleware addon. The setup instructions are there, it works with rails 3. Quick sample below from application.rb. And that's it!!

This is really the ultimate user role management gem! It is derived from another popular gem called CanCan, written by the great Ryan Bates himself (guy who does railscasts). This gem really builds on the humble beginnings of CanCan. Some of its core features:

Managing user roles

Permissions per user, account type, roles and roles groups

Lots of features like caching engine to autoload permissions etc.

Categories, licenses etc etc etc!!

git-checkout is the key here. Here are the quick steps:

Checkout the branch you want to merge into: git checkout production

git checkout feature_branch_name <list of files> to merge just the changes from specific files: git checkout push-notif-branch app/controllers/controller.rb config/certificates/* ...