BenCurtis.com

My latest project, UploadJuicer is running on Rails 3, and I’m loving it. Back in the Rails 3 beta 1 days, there were still a lot of rough edges, but beta 4 has been great so far. Until I wanted to upgrade UploadJuicer to Rails 3 RC (1). After the upgrade, I got this:

ActionController::RoutingError (uninitialized constant ApplicationController::AuthenticationHelpers)

AuthenticationHelpers happens to be the first module I include from ApplicationController, and it lives in lib/authentication_helpers.rb. After a bid of head-scratching as to why something that has worked for ages and ages in Rails suddenly stopped working (and in between a beta and an RC release, to boot!), I remembered this change in config/application.rb from running rake rails:update:


# Custom directories with classes and modules you want to be autoloadable.
# config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/extras)


That looked promising, so I uncommented it, changed extras to lib, and bam, problem solved. Life on the edge is an adventure. :)

It says something about the sorry state of my blogging lately that my blog is the last place I’m announcing my latest project, Juicer. :) It’s a handy service for offloading image uploading and resizing from your web app. Now you don’t have to tie up your server to handle long uploads or to do a bunch of thumbnails. You can keep your app super-responsive for the core of what it does, and leave the uploads and resizes to us.

Though my blog is the last place I announced the project, it’ll be the first place I announce the Ruby gem that goes along with it. :) I just published a gem that uses the Juicer API (via RestClient) and makes it pretty easy to integrate Juicer with a Rails 3 app. I’ve done the hard work of getting the direct-to-s3 upload with swfupload working for you, so all you have to do is make a few tweaks to your model and you have uploads and thumbnails done for you. You can get at the gem (and a sample Rails 3 app) at Github.

We’ll be posting more about Juicer at the Juicer blog, but I imagine I’ll mention things about it here from time to time. :) And hopefully I’ll get around to posting some of the fun code-related things that make up the service.