I’ve been doing work on a couple projects integrating Rails with FMP over HTTP. There are a few different FMP features and plugins the FMP developers use to connect to Rails, none of which I truly grok. Notwithstanding my lack of FMP knowledge, I wanted to write-up what I expect from FMP as an HTTP client, and what I think would be neat to see.

A Good Foundation

When I’m integrating with another system over HTTP, I usually provide usage examples for my Rails-based service using the lingua franca of *nix system tools like Bash, Curl, WGet, LWP, and Telnet. I expect an integrating client like FMP to be able to perform the same basic functions those commandline tools perform.

I’ve probably written a hundred render_not_found methods in my life as a Rails dev. Usually they just render a static file under /public, and maybe, if I’m feeling nice, give an XML response. No more!

In my last post I described how to use reverse ssh tunnels and screen -x to setup a remote pair programming environment.

Several people have commented that this works well for sharing a console based editor (vim, emacs) but that there is no way for the remote pair to look at how things are rendering in the browser. Well here’s a super simple way to use ssh tunnels to share your development server too. I’ve seen variations on how to do this (Advanced Rails Recipes: Pragmatic Programmers has one). The advantage to the below method is it requires no server configuration and is very secure from snooping.

There’s a lot of talk about remote pair programming, but the fact is it can be a pain to set up.  Using iChat screen sharing is a popular method, but can feel a little cludgy, and doesn’t work for developers running linux.  Here’s another method using reverse ssh tunnels and screen -x we use a lot at Beezwax.

In my last post, I described my preferred methodology for integrating Rails and FMP. In this post, I’ll discuss an alternative technique using FMP’s external SQL sources functionality. Since IANAFMPD (I am not a FileMaker Pro Developer), I’ll skip the implementational details and just cut to when it’s an appropriate solution.

Here’s a synopsis of my findings on integrating Rails with FMP.

Goals:

• allow two-way data transmission between FMP and Rails
• minimize development time required for both FMP and Rails
• accommodate as many clients (which may be another application written with FMP, Rails, or anything else) as possible

I love git and I love to be lazy, so lately I’ve been playing with git hooks.

Git’s default pre-commit hook is really handy, but today I’m in more of a post-commit kind of mood.  Like all git’s hooks it comes with an example script.

This one isn’t particularly useful.  It evaluates Nothing and returns a successful exit code.  Big deal.

Git’s default post-commit hook.

#!/bin/sh
#
# An example hook script that is called after a successful
# commit is made.
#
# To enable this hook, make this file executable.

: Nothing