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I've been doing a ton of work with the newest Zend Framework version 1.8.2 this weekend. I've found that typing out all the requires for each class can be a pain, so I made a quick TextMate snippet to make adding @see directives for phpdoc at the same time as the require_once directive. Here it is; simple but useful:

/**
 * @see $1
 */
require_once "${1/_///g}.php";$0

Add this as a "Tab Trigger" for the word "see" then just type "see" and hit tab then type your class name. It will auto fill the comment and the path to the pear-conventionally-named .php file. Got any other useful TextMate snippets? Please do share!

I’ve recently been getting doing some development in XCode and Interface Builder (learning the iPhone SDK). I found XCode a real pleasure to work with (especially its unique form of “Code Sense”), but I did miss some of TextMate’s default text shortcuts, specifically “delete line” and “duplicate line.” There are some Key Binding options in the Preferences but nothing like those.

I asked a question on StackOverflow, a great new wiki/forum/help site for programmers and was pointed to the Cocoa docs and some useful posts where I figured out how to put together these simple key bindings. Results follow.

Create the file ~/Library/KeyBindings/PBKeyBinding.dict if it doesn’t exist and add the following to the file:

{
    "^$K" = (
        "selectLine:",
        "cut:"
    );
    "^$D" = (
        "selectLine:",
        "copy:",
        "moveToEndOfLine:",
        "insertNewline:",
        "paste:"
    );
}

The above snippet creates a key binding for “^$K” (Control-Shift-K – aka TextMate’s “delete line”) and “^$D” (Control-Shift-D – AKA TextMate’s “duplicate line”). You can see there’s loads of different macro’s you can add to this file to make unique key binding snippets. Note that they won’t take effect until you restart XCode.

I'll be honest. I don't really want to learn Silverlight all that badly. I cannot get excited about technology that forces me to develop on a specific platform. So, I found it pretty exciting to hear recently that there's quite a modest effort being put forth to creating tools to facilitate cross-platform development.

Enter the Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK. The SDL is a bridge between Silverlight and the Dynamic Language Runtime of .NET (which includes IronRuby, IronPython and others). What this means is you can develop Silverlight apps in Ruby or other languages without needing all that zany Visual Studio/C# stuff and Microsoft Technology.

What follows is my first foray into Silverlight development on a Mac - a quick sample that plays a video. To recap before I start...it kinda sucks :P There's no development tools - cool, I can use TextMate, but creating XAML by hand would definitely suck. Maybe this is where Expression Studio (seems to be available for Mac) is really going to be necessary.

The other huge detriment to developing with SDL/IronRuby is the fact that documentation is extremely limited (please let me know if you know where I can find the IronRuby/Python Silverlight documentation!). I managed to get by by looking at some samples and at the C# MSDN documentation for Silverlight. For example, it took me awhile (not being a Ruby master) to figure out how to change the source of my MediaElement:

XAML (easy):

<MediaElement source="test.wmv"/>

C# (doesn't seem too bad...from the MSDN)

mediaElement = new MediaElement();
mediaElement.Source = new Uri("test.wmv", UriKind.Relative);

IronRuby (looks a lot like the C#)

media = MediaElement.new
media.source = Uri.new "test.wmv", UriKind.Relative

I first tried setting source = "text.wmv" and it failed because it's expecting a Uri object. One thing that has been difficult is the difference between setting properties in XAML and in the code-behind. For example, the Margin parameter:

<MediaElement source="test.wmv" Margin="5"/>

Sweet, that's easy.

media.margin = Thickness.new 5

Hmm, not so easy. Objects are nice though ;) Guess I'm just used to the Flex style where the parameter names are the same (case-wise) and value wise in both MXML and Actionscript.

Silverlight on a Mac

Step 1: Install Silverlight
It's currently at release Silverlight 2 RTW (2.0.31005.0). Download that sucker and install it.

Step 2: Download SDL SDK
Next you need the dynamic language SDK. This allows you to write apps in IronRuby and IronPython. I downloaded sdlsdk-0.4.0 (Everything) and unpacked it in /Applications/Silverlight/sdl-sdk.

Step 3: Mono
Mono is an open-source version of .NET (sweeeet). You'll need it to use all those .dlls in the SDK. I installed the Mono.framework 2.0.1_1 package for Mac OS.

Step 4: Create the skeleton
The SDL SDK includes tools for creating applications. All you need to do open Terminal and:

# go to where you unpacked the sdl sdk
cd /Applications/Silverlight/sdl-sdk
# create a "rubylight" app called "SilverlightApp"
script/sl ruby SilverlightApp
# cd into the new dir
cd SilverlightApp

Now if you open that folder with your favorite Text Editor you should see this structure:

To start the development server, run the following when you're inside SilverlightApp. The /b option starts the server with the current directory as root and then opens it in the browser (http://localhost:2060)

# start the chiron server through mono
mono /Applications/Silverlight/sdl-sdk/bin/Chiron.exe /b

You might want to add aliases to your bash_profile so you can quickly type these paths in the future:

# ~/.bash_profile
# silverlight aliases

alias chiron='mono /Applications/Silverlight/sdl-sdk/bin/Chiron.exe'
alias sl='/Applications/Silverlight/sdl-sdk/script/sl'
alias slserver='/Applications/Silverlight/sdl-sdk/script/server'

Once mono is running Chiron, you can go to the development link and you should see:

Click on "index.html" to see the app (not sure how to add indexes to chiron yet :P)

Just to see how the app is made, open up SilverlightApp/ruby/app.rb and change the the string in the following line:

message.text = "Welcome to Ruby and Silverlight!"

Now, refresh the development server and you should see the different text string. All this is doing is initializing the TextBlock control in SilverlightApp/ruby/app.xaml with the x:Name of 'message' to a string.

That's about it. You're now developing Silverlight on a Mac with Ruby. Let me know if you kick ass with this and want to give me help ;) or if you find any good "RubyLight" docs.

To deploy the app to a server, you need to compile your "ruby" folder into a .xap (a fancy .zip) folder. You can use chiron again to do this:

# change to the ruby dir of SilverlightApp
cd ruby
# running with /z flag creates a XAP file
# with dynamic language dependancies
chiron /z:ruby.xap

Now when you FTP it your app, you move up ruby.xap instead of the ruby folder

Sample

Here's the silly thing I made while setting this up and playing with it. It's a button that loads a wmv into a MediaElement with a play/pause button.

/tests/silverlight/ruby

And here's the source:

/tests/silverlight/ruby/app.xap

You can check it out by renaming the .xap to .zip and unpacking it (xap is just a zip afterall).

Overall

I think what's lacking in Silverlight currently is high-end design. Sure .NET guys can jump right into it, but Microsoft will never get to the level of Flash without designers getting involved. Plus, I think that more "design-centric" developers use Mac and Linux these days. Sure, you can do much of what Flash does with this technology but it's moot if it looks like shit because some Microsoft Certified guy made it who can't design a button.

I'm excited to try Expression Studio. If it is as great for designing XAML as they purport, then ES combined with the Dynamic Language SDK could be the way to go for Mac. I just hope that Microsoft doesn't forget about the "non-proprietary" community on this.

Sources

• http://www.iunknown.com/2008/03/dynamic-silverl.html
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.controls.mediaelement.source(VS.95).aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/hugunin/archive/2007/04/30/a-dynamic-language-runtime-dlr.aspx
• http://rubydoes.net/2008/04/15/silverlight-ironruby-using-controls/

Just picked up a great book on Rails coming from a PHP background called Rails for PHP Developers. The examples in the book call for Rails version 2.0.2. I ran rails -v and lo-and-behold, the version of rails that is packaged with Leopard is pretty old.

Rails uses a program called RubyGems for installation (as well as the installation of numerous other Ruby-related plugins and app). First I needed to verify that I had a current version of Ruby gems:

gem -v
# 1.0.1

According to RubyForge, the latest version of RubyGems is 1.1.1, so I ran this script to update. Gems is pretty cool because you can keep your software updated from the terminal (usually) without having to download anything manually:

gem update --system
# Updating RubyGems...
# Attempting remote update of rubygems-update
# Successfully installed rubygems-update-1.1.1
# 1 gem installed
# Updating version of RubyGems to 1.1.1
# Installing RubyGems 1.1.1
# ...
# RubyGems system software updated

gem -v
# 1.1.1

Now that Gems is current, I can update Rails. Running gem update rails didn't seem to work very well so I think it's best to remove previous versions of Rails (and the book I mentioned above said as much) and do a clean install:

gem uninstall rails

I removed all versions and executables as well. Once this is done, you can install Rails fresh (currently version 2.0.2). Trouble is, when I ran gem install rails I got the following error:

gem install rails
# ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::RemoteFetcher::FetchError)
# timed out fetching http://gems.rubyforge.org/gems/activerecord-2.0.2.gem

Through a bit of googling/trial and error and running gem help install I found an option to (-p, --[no-]http-proxy [URL]) use an "HTTP proxy for remote operations" and this seemed to do the trick:

gem install rails -p -V
# Installing gem actionpack-2.0.2
# Downloading gem actionpack-2.0.2.gem
# ...
# 4 gems installed
# ...

rails -v
# Rails 2.0.2

Yay, Rails! All the -V flag does is (I think) to show the verbose details of the installation (so it prints out the files it's writing and whatnot). I'm no *nix whiz so feel free to correct me. Hope the proxy idea helps someone else out.