XAOP RSS Blog Feed

Rexcel plugin

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:30:26 GMT

Rexcel is a rails plugin made to create custom and stylish excel files from your applications.

It is inspired by Brian P. Hogan's excel plugin that provides a quick an easy way to export your object collections to an excel workbook.

It worked fine but it didn't have enough functionality for my taste. I was using it in a project when I asked myself: “Ok, but what if I want to merge or collapse some excel cells? What if I want to put some text in color, add a border, change the font-size...?”. This excel plugin just exports your data to an excel sheet in a very basic format. I then decided to make a more advanced plugin that will support most of your requirements in terms of formatting.

Streamtails Video

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:08:04 GMT

Today we published a quickstart video of Streamtails (our web 2.0 proxy server project).

In 4 minutes, we walk through the major features of Streamtails: the topics include how to annotate a section of a webpage via tails and how to track your conversations with rss feeds.

Wath the video

EDN Article

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:41:40 GMT

Today, I published my article on the Ruby ActiveDCTM gem on the EMC Developer Network site.

My article was originally the outline of a demo that I presented last week at a client. During that demo I used a customized web based irb shell (like the hands-on tutorial Try Ruby) to explain a few Documentum server concepts through Ruby.

Rubyconf 2008

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:40:58 GMT

Belgium is known all over the world for its beer, its chocolate and its rain. You gotta love the beer and the chocolate, but the rain just plain sucks. Looks like we are heading for a wet autumn though, and that's why, for one week in November, we of XaoP are fleeing off to Orlando in sunny Florida.

The future of Documentum : XML

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:12:00 GMT

Last year EMC acquired X-Hive an XML-based solutions company.

Today I attended the Documentum 6.5 Briefing at the San Marco Village in Schelle BELGIUM where EMC unveiled their future products.

The 6.5 release is important to XAOP because it will target some extra XML services on the Documentum platform. XAOP is doing Documentum system integration projects with Ruby and Java. With the integration of X-Hive XML database in Documentum 6.5, I believe that it is time to update our XML Docpublisher project.

Rails cycle helper

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:37:29 GMT

You all probably know the Rails helper function ‘cycle’, most commonly used to specify alternating classes when iterating over a collection :


<% for item in @items %>
  <tr class=<%=cycle('even', 'odd')%>>
    <td><%= item.name %></td>
  </tr>
<% end %>

Well, apparently it is even more usefull than I thought, and it was simply a matter of reading the rails documentation ...

Some Ruby Goodness

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:04:35 GMT

Last week, while I was writing the following expression for like the 1000th time, it struck me…


name = Product.find_by_code('code') ? Product.find_by_code('code').name : nil

WTH am I doing writing this crazy, long, duplication bloated one-liner in ruby ? YES, in RUBY ! That ’s just plain WRONG! There just HAS to be some great, DRYer, magic, aaaah’s and oooooh’s generating, no-longer-than-5-characters expression that handles this!

So instead of bashing my laptop against the wall I IM’d my colleague and local ruby-guru Peter.

Simple Windows Active Directory LDAP Authentication with Rails

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:46:31 GMT

In this short tutorial I’ll describe an easy way to make your Rails application even more enterprise-ready ;-)

For our latest project, our customer asked to change the authentication module, they wanted to be able to use their Active Directory credentials to enter the application.

So, we have an existing rails application :

running in production (Windows environment)
using the restful_authentication plugin for the login system.

What do we need :

User should be able to keep using the old login system (at least temporarily, until all users are ‘upgraded’)
User should be able to login with his LDAP credentitals

EC2 at XaoP

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:57:33 GMT

At XaoP, we have recently started checking out Amazon’s EC2. Although the use of virtualization technology is hardly new in hosting technologies, Amazon’s take on it offers extra flexibility for developers to exploit.

Libxml-ruby memory leaks

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:49:46 GMT

Some time ago, we pointed out a serious memory problem when using libxml-ruby. We found a solution, but recently Ben Lam told us about another way to solve this. Details inside.