Over the past few months I’ve been working hard to relaunch this site and get a few other ones ready to launch over the next few weeks. This site is just the start! Getting designs finished, doing all the tweaking that needs to get done, let alone get all the content ready.

All these sites will be running on the WordPress platform, and all on one install of WP 3.0. Being able to run them all on a couple of servers and having the same administration login for all should make it easier to manage them. I think one of the best features with WP 3.0 is the fact that they merged WP and WPmu together. It makes it a lot easier for people that have multiple sites to manage them.

Now I’m sure a few of your are thinking, but wait AJ you’re a rails developer…That’s right, I am a Ruby developer. Well the reason I chose WordPress as the platform is that it just works. I don’t have to muck around with security, logins, blogs, taxonomy, pages, etc. All I had to do was some design work (or farm parts of it out. ) and create or use a few plugins. The development time was pretty quick. Also, I believe that you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel just to get something out there when another product out there. Besides there’s lots of Rails/Ruby developers out there that rock WordPress backed blogs!

This theme was designed as a child theme to the new default theme, TwentyTen. I wanted to play around with creating my first child theme as well as test out the new Google Fonts API. We’ll see how long I keep all these Google Fonts! So please take a look around, provide any feedback you have for me in the comments, and I’ll be back soon with more goodies!!

ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails’ standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-services of any language from the iPhone.

I’ve had a chance to play with it this weekend and have found it to be pretty easy to work with. The developers of Objective Resource have created a pretty good Getting Started Guide you can follow, or you can watch a screencast of it as well. They even offer an example project for you to work with that gives you both the iPhone app (via Xcode) and the Rails app so you can see how everything works together.

One thing the example project does not include is accessing a Rails app that has authentication. Of course I was thinking I was all setup for this, but soon realized that I did not add my Active Resource functions in so that my app would work with XML/JSON requests. Luckily, while I was out in Denver, CO for iPhone Development Training (by Pragmatic Studio) I was able to get my hands on a copy of Advanced Rails Recipes by Mike Clark. I was extremely pleased that Mike graciously gave me the copy he had laying there for free. The particular recipe in the book that helped me was the Authenticate REST Clients. After I rewrote my authentication piece of my Rails app, I was getting data back and into my iPhone app. It was a very good feeling!

I thought I would include the screencast that the Objective Resource developers created. It runs about 6 minutes and is definitely worth a watch if you are looking at using Objective Resource for your next iPhone app backed by a Rails app.

Getting Started with Objective Resource from Josh Vickery on Vimeo.

ruby –version

You should get something like this

ruby 1.8.6 (2008-06-20 patchlevel 230) [i686-darwin9.3.0]

Now you can see that’s I’ve already went ahead and updated my version, so yours might have patch 110 if there was a patch level. To update your Ruby version all you need to do is visit the link above and choose which patch you need to install.?? For us Ruby on Rails developers you’ll need to upgrade to Ruby 1.8.6 patch 230. You can download it here and type the following in your command-line prompt.

curl -O ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p230.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-1.8.6-p230.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6-p230
./configure –enable-shared –enable-pthread CFLAGS=-D_XOPEN_SOURCE=1
make
sudo make install
cd ..

You can then check your version by typing.

ruby –version

If you have any problems, feel free to comment below.

UPDATE: After posting this I was having a hard time keeping an instance of mongrel running.?? I did some searching and found out that the option they have offered us does have a bug still in it.?? So what that means is that we either update and have issues or stay at what we’re currently at and deal with the possibility of denial of service attacks.?? Keep your eyes posted to the Ruby on Rails blog for an update. I’ll post another update here as well once things are figured out.