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Agile web development

Sprint 0 Completed!

April 6th, 2008

Tonight I finished Sprint 0 on the Ruby on Rails Blog Starter Kit. It’s not much, but it’s starting to take shape. In this sprint I implemented the following features:

There are still many, many refinements to be made across the board, but the initial work is done.

This coming week will mark the beginning of Sprint 1. The features targeted for Sprint 1 are:

These are some pretty big features, but I believe I should be able to tackle them for this sprint. I’m fairly excited about most of them, especially Akismet and Textile integration. Akismet is something I’ve wanted to play with for some time now, just to see how it’s setup & how it works. Textile will be nice because it’s going to make my posts look pretty!

Featured Code Snippet

For this sprint, I have one piece of code that I’m particularly proud of. It stems from the need to render (or do) something different based on the user’s authentication/authorization status. For example, if the user is not logged in, do not give them access to this action. Or, if the user is not an admin, show them this view, otherwise show them a different view. I accomplished this by adding two methods to my application controller: the first deals with authentication, the second with authorization. Let’s take a look:


    def for_admin_only
      unless @current_user
        redirect_to(root_url) 
      else
        yield
      end
    end

    def for_users_by_type
      if @current_user
        yield :admin 
      else
        yield :anonymous
      end
    end

These methods are consumed by the controller like so:


    for_admin_only do
      render :html => @posts
    end

    for_users_by_type do |type|
      case type
        when :anonymous
          render :html => @posts
        when :admin
          render :template => 'admin/posts/index', :html => @posts
      end
    end

In the second snippet, we call for_admin_only first, which says that if the user is logged in, then run the specified snippet of code, otherwise redirect to the homepage (this could also redirect to a 403 page, or whatever else you prefer). Next, we call for_users_by_type, which passes back a type variable saying if the user is anonymous or admin. If the user is anonymous we render the basic view, if s/he’s an admin, we render the admin index view.

So head on over to the official github repository and check out the source! It’s very pretty! (EDIT: Also, you may see a summary of these details on the project wiki)

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