MVC reading list

An ex-smalltalker* friend always tells me (forgive me if I get this wrong) that MVC is one of the most widely misunderstood programming concepts, and that it gets misapplied and the terms misused, nowhere more so than in web frameworks. Maybe that’s why you’ve got a number of people talking about MVC considered harmful, an anti-pattern. It turns out these authors are really discussing the usage described (I believe) as “Front controller” in Struts (and other web frameworks) not ‘Smalltalk MVC’.

*Hmm. “ex-smalltalker”? Once a smalltalker always a smalltalker.

Having got what little understanding of MVC through web frameworks, and about to embark with another Paul on a major piece of GUI (real desktop, crossplatform GUI stuff), I thought it was about time I (or in fact we) understood MVC properly.

So here’s our reading list to get us started:

1. Section 1.2 of the Design Patterns book (on design patterns in Smalltalk MVC)
2. A Cookbook for Using View-Controller User the Model-Interface Paradigm in Smalltalk-80 -  by Glenn E. Krasner, Stephen T. Pope
3. Applications Programming in Smalltalk-80(TM): How to use Model-View-Controller (MVC) by Steve Burbeck

We’re looking for other suggestions too…

Mail-order customer service

http://swimshop.co.uk sends me different size swimsuit to one I ordered. I ring up. They send me right size AND a prepaid envelope to return original…  Now that’s great customer service - almost better than getting it right first time, and to be frank, makes me feel really good about ordering with them another time.

Todos / Task-tracking: Generic API

Was just talking to Garry idly about how we enjoyed bothNoKahuna and Things and how annoying it was that there was no way of making them work together, and we started building a fantasy API – a generic Task-tracking API which all the task-tracking webservices (RTM, NoKahuna, BackPack, and Mingle, Trac, Mantis, Bugzilla…) might then implement, and all our favourite clients (like Things, Things.touch, but also OmniFocus and others) would also implement (or provide plugin architectures or (open)source-level  access to allow others to implement).

Wouldn’t it be nice?

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Getting mikehale’s drive-thru working for bytemark

Just used Mike Hale’s drive-thru (http://github.com/mikehale/drive-thru/tree/master) to get a rails box up and running. The experience was worth persevering at - it will be much easier next time!

It required some non-documented things to get working out of the box:

some gems need to be installed

• sparkle
• json

If you are not using slicehost (I was setting up a server on bytemark) then you need to disable the slicehost-specific setup_dns task (this seems to be the only one which is specific to slicehost)

• remove 'setup_dns', from the last line of the Rakefile

Also, if you are using the sample in the README for installing passenger (perhaps like me, robotically following them without understanding them (<— bad!)), there are  a few minor (but confusing) typos:

• ‘Create site-cookbooks/applications/templates/default/rails.vhost.erb’ (note this should be .erb not .rb)
• ‘Add an applications cookbook to site-cookbooks’ (this apparently should be at the end  - maybe this would have worked correctly if I hadn’t messed up on the first time)

I also amended the dna.rb to include:

    :rails => {:version=> '2.3.2'},
    :recipes => [
      "apache2", "apache2::mod_rails",
      "passenger", 
      "rails",
      "git::minimal", 
      "mysql::server",
      "mysql::gem",
      'zsh',
      'screen',
      "applications"
     ]

I made my own versions of git::minimal (didn’t want the gitk installed on the server) and mysql::gem (although that weirdly didn’t work, and I ended up installing it manually on the server). I also did some manual stuff on the server (making a /var/www/apps/…/shared/config and shared/system and created the cookie_secret and database.yml - I guess I should have done that in a chef recipe too…

Hmm. Despite what I said, I did end up learning a little bit of chef.

looks like I did some stuff wrong. This sets up ready to deploy as root. This seems like an error, anyway, but additionally you want to make the ownership based on some other file, because Passenger does some clever user switching based on who owns /config/environment.rb (and they ought to be able to write to /log).

Additions within the files:

• add user to sudoers
  I worked out how to do this in the mixture of dna.rb 
  :authorization => {     :sudo=> {:users=>[USERNAME], :groups=>['admin']},
• UPDATE: I worked out how to make the users default directory and ensure the correct perms for it and .ssh:

    directory "/home/#{name}" do
      owner name<
      group name
      mode 0755 #rwx-r-xr-x
    end
    file "/home/#{name}/.ssh/authorized_keys" do
      owner name
      group name 
      mode 0644 #rw-r--r--
    end
    directory "/home/#{name}/.ssh" do
      owner name
      group name
      mode 0700 #rw-r--r--
    end
  

• Other additions (tricky to do in chef):
  add key to deployment user

    sudo cp -pR /root/.ssh/authorized_keys ~USER/.ssh
    sudo chown -R USER:USER ~USER/.ssh