The upgrade was relatively problem free, the only real issue that we ran into was that somewhere in between 2.1.2 and 2.3.4 the *_tag helpers (text_field_tag and such) have started behaving slightly different in relation to element ids. These helper methods now call the undocumented sanitize_to_id method, which cleans up the element ids by getting rid of characters such as [ and ] and putting in underscores instead. While this is a good change (the form_for helpers were already converting the field names to such element ids, so this change makes the helpers more consistent), it was unexpected (I have not seen any documentation referencing it, not in the 2.2 or 2.3 release notes). This changed a lot of ids in web forms that we were using, and it broke a fair bit of custom Javascript which we had to repair.

So, if you’re upgrading Rails from 2.1.2 or older to 2.3.4 ensure that you check your views for custom Javascript to ensure that any fields generated by the *_tag helper methods that are being referenced with Javascript are referenced properly.

Happy coding!

When you use the standard version of Ruby getting SQLite support is easy, you just install the sqlite3-ruby gem (gem install sqlite3-ruby) and you’re done (you need to have the SQLite libraries and dev headers installed on your system already of course). This does not work for JRuby because the sqlite3-ruby is a native gem (containing C code with extensions on standard Ruby).

So how do you get SQLite to work with JRuby and Rails? Get the gems for JRuby! Assuming that you have SQLite installed on your system, you simply need to install the activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter gem (this will automatically try to install the activerecord-jdbc-adapter and jdbc-sqlite3 gems if you don’t already have them). In your Rails project edit config/database.yml and change the adapter type to jdbcsqlite3 and you’re done

There are a number of activerecord-jdbc gems available (just type “gem search –remote activerecord-jdbc” in your shell to see them), including connectors for Apache Derby, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

A term that’s uttered quite often by software developers everywhere is that they like to “scratch their own itch”, and I felt the same way when I started looking at software for my website again. While there are certainly good blogging tools and content management systems and frameworks out there, none of these seem to be exactly what I want (often they do a lot of things that I don’t want, and they lack a few things that I do want). While WordPress is certainly sufficient for the time being, I know I want to make something that scratches my itch

Most of the existing products that I have seen and tried are written in PHP (examples are: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and more). Instead I’ll be using my preferred web application framework: Ruby on Rails. I’ll be using JRuby instead of regular Ruby, at least for development. I’ve heard good things about JRuby so far, using it for this project will give me a good chance to see how well it works.

As suggested by my colleague, I will be blogging here about my progress… so stay tuned