If you’re reading this blog you’ve probably already heard about Google’s AJAX Library API on many other news sites like Slashdot.
I’m going to describe my simple process for setting up a RoR app to use Google to pull the APIs in a rails friendly way, throughout layouts, views, and helpers.
Polymorphic relationships in Ruby on Rails are great. If you don’t know what they are, check them out here:
Understanding Polymorphic Associations
John and I were curious about the speed of these relations, since the linking between objects searches on both the ID of the foreign object, and a string which is the model name. So if you have two tables, ChildA and ChildB, your parent has a reference to child which is acutally the combination of child_id (the ID in the ChildA or ChildB table) and child_type (equal to “ChildA” or “ChildB”).
The old-school way of doing this involves creating a lookup table and using integer IDs for type, instead of strings. So you’d have another table mapping “ChildA” to “1″ and “ChildB” to “2″, then when you do your query, you are matching against the number “1″ and not the string “ChildA”.
The down side of doing it that way is that you don’t get to use Rails’ snazzy polymorphism, which makes life a lot easier. So we decided to run some tests to see how much faster it would be, and therefore, if it was worth it.
Don’t you hate it when sites say “Please Wait” when you’d rather just come back later? I am always worried my browser will close and it won’t work. Or maybe I want to shut my computer down but I have to leave my task running. Read on!
Read on to learn how to encode videos in to H264 for use by Flash 9, and also to stream to an iPhone in Safari, and be able to sync them onto an iPod.
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