The art of the leg up

The first step with any piece of free software is to stand on the shoulders of as many other people as possible. 3accounts has to make use of as much stuff that is already in place if it is to make any headway.

• First and foremost I'm using Ruby and Rails. Both the language and the framework help get rid of the annoying plumbing you need to do to get web applications to work.
  
• Secondly I'm using plugins and gems. I committed the basic structure of the login page today, and that is all plugins - specifically the restful_authentication and open_id_authentication plugins.
• And finally I'm cribbing techniques. The Rails community delights in using screencasts and podcasts. Some are a waste of time, but the screencasts at Railscasts are definitely worth viewing to get you up to speed with Rails development as quickly as possible.
  

The month in review

Well I'm not quite sure where August has gone. It's the bank holiday here on Monday and that to me is the official end of summer. Not that there's been much of one in Britain this year.

Anyway I've been busy on a couple of fronts. Firstly I've been squeezing a few packages into the upcoming Ubuntu Gutsy release. The 'apt' versions of 'sqlite-ruby' and 'mongrel' should be uploaded soon, to join the 'vim-rails' package which is already in there.

I've also added bash-completion to the 'rubygems' package and got that committed.

All this is part of my personal campaign to make Ubuntu ridiculously easy to develop Rails applications on. The 'rails-toolkit' will soon move to my Personal Package Archive on Launchpad. 'rails-toolkit' installs all the packages and gems for developing Rails applications without any messing around with scripts and lengthy instructions.

However once the Ubuntu Universe moves into freeze at the end of the month it is time to start getting real with the main feature - 3accounts