Some new programming books …

I’m reading: “Ajax on Rails” by Scott Raymond (O’Reilly) and “Prototype and script.aculo.us” by Christophe Porteneuve (Pragmatic Programmers).  These are very closely related  - Prototype and script.aculo.us are the ajax and html dom manipulation libraries that Ruby on Rails uses.

So far I have spent more time with Ajax on Rails. It’s very well written and I have learned much.  Prototype and script.aculo.us is a beta book - it’s a work in progress. I’ve bought beta books from Pragmatic Programmers before, they notify you when there is an update and you just download a new pdf file.

New Tidy XHTML Validator

Using an updated, and much improved, Tidy plug in for Firefox, I revised the xhtml in my ActionShootingScores Ruby on Rails application. Now the xhtml passes the Tidy validator (which it did before) and the new dtd validator which works the same way as the wc3 validator.

I’ll be moving the revised code to the production site this weekend.  [Friday 3/30] Done!

Added Page Caching to ActionShootingScores

Today I added page caching to my Ruby on Rails application, ActionShootingScores for IDPA matches. This should significantly speed up viewing of match results. I handle expiring the cached pages this way: When a match is being edited, it goes into an unpublished state. After the match director is happy with it, he or she publishes it. On both of these state transitions the pages associated with the match get expire_page() called for them. Also if a match is deleted it’s pages get expired.

Later, I’ll add this to the other match types.

Rails 1.2 Deprecations

I just updated my Ruby on Rails to 1.2

I’ve got a cascade of deprecations that I’m correcting:

<% end_form_tag %> to </form>

<% start_form_tag %> to <% form_tag %>

:post => true in a link_to(), changed to :method => “post”

More will likely appear …