Chris Parsons The meandering musings of a coder

I'm been working on Action Web Service recently, and thought I'd attempt to get the tests working correctly in rspec. Doesn't look like it's documented in the blogosphere, so here goes...

Here's the original sample test:

I've decided to move the invoice ruby DSL stuff I've been working on over to this blog; it fits nice and snugly over here.

So anyway, I've checked in a bunch of stuff on the DSL. Main improvements are to do with the currency part of the DSL, so that you can do some nice things with currency symbols:

Update: Looks like this doesn't work in all cases as Kinkless doesn't quite manage to sync completed tasks back from iCal - shame...

Now I've not blogged before about the wonders of Kinkless GTD and the superlative GTD implementation it offers. The wonders of this set of scripts wrung $69.95 from my credit card to purchase OmniOutlinerPro -- heck, it went a long way to convincing me to get a mac...

I'm a big fan of the Plan in kGTD, do in iCal approach Mr Mann advocates on his fine productivity site. To this end, I've discovered a neat counter-hack to the iCal method that's not perhaps as well documented as it could be...

Ruby afficionados might be interested in reading about a DSL (Domain Specific Language) I've thrown together for rapidly processing invoices.

I've blogged about it over at the company blog - check over there if you're interested.

You may have noticed things have been rather quiet on this blog as of late.

The main reason is that my focus has shifted to our company blog at blog.edendevelopment.co.uk, and to further developing Pin in the Map (pininthemap.com).

Feel free to subscribe there if you want more updates. I'll eventually move over some of the tutorials I've written to that site also.

Our company has recently finished our first ever Ruby on Rails application: Pin in the Map.

The application makes it really easy to label a map point with some descriptive text, share it with your friends or put a link on a website. It even links to Google Earth!

I'm after beta-testers... if anyone's got a spare moment and wants contribute some useful suggestions, that would be great.

http://pininthemap.com. Hope you find it useful - I certainly will :)

I've recently written another article for diyplanner.com entitled "Up in Smoke: Disaster Recovery for Paper-Based Planning".

You can read it here.

Markus Demolsky has recently written a detailed and helpful tutorial PDF explaining how to use the Spring Rich Client Master/Detail component.

Not having easy access to hosting himself, he asked me to host it here for him. Get it here:

Master/Detail Tutorial by Markus Demolsky (PDF - 181Kb)

My project is shrink-wrapped in virtual plastic and the client is happy, so that just about wraps up my look at Spring Rich Client.

After writing a full app from conception to completion, I thought that it was a useful and powerful framework deserving of attention. There are plenty of features you get thrown in for free, such as decent localisation support and excellent form binding capabilities. A couple of closing thoughts follow...

I've been playing quite a bit with Ruby on Rails in the last couple of weeks, and I'm liking what I see. I watched the videos and bought the book, and I'm writing a web application in it now. I'll let you know how it goes.

However, before I get too deep into this; I have a question: did any java coders out there find a good reason not to switch?