brew manager development blog

Tonight users got inventory’s. I’m not sure why I started working on this. I added it in the account controller the other for some reason. That struck me as ugly so I moved the creation of the inventory down into the user model. I also learned what magic (err not so much magic as you know… passing a parameter) I needed to overload ActiveRecords constructor. Seems harder than it should have been, but I probably wasn’t looking in the right place (google didn’t turn up anything too revealing, should have put Buck on it, mad google skills that one.). If anyone is ever looking for it you want to do:

def initialize(params = {}) #Not def initialize()
    super(params)
    ....
end

So anyway, users now compose inventories. Life is good for them. Still can’t enter recipies, because you know I got side tracked. But eh that’s how it goes.

I’ve got beer to rack & bottle (heff into bottles and racking a brown to secondaries) tomorrow night so I won’t get to work on the site for a day or two. When I get back to it I’ll finish up the recipe stuff and get it out there.

I took this afternoon off work because its slow. Thats a nice change fwiw. I got a chance to get much of the stuff needed setup on dreamhost. I’m using Google Apps for email, that was super easy to setup. Good for those guys. Once again Google pretty much proves they are the bees knees when it comes to these things.

I got the boiler plate webpage up that says “hey I’m going to build something”. I hope to have recipe creation up by the end of the weekend. I’m going with the release early and often approach I think.

In more exciting news, for me at least. I got subversion up and running on a host outside my house. So now it runs on dreamhost. Hopefully I’ll get bugzilla installed and I can stop making notes to my self via google docs.

So far I’m liking dream host a lot. I’ll put up some intelligent and organized thoughts about why I switched over from godaddy hosting later.

Tonight I started to lay out the object model I’ve had kicking around in my head. I generated a lot (if not all) of the scaffolding (models, views and controllers for the non rails crowd). I should probably lay down a real model so I have a design to code to, instead of relying on myself remembering it all. Anyone have any good suggestions for a UML modeling tool? At work we use Borland’s Together Architect but thats a more coin than I’m willing to shell out.

I’ve connected the user and the inventory object… I think for now I’ll leave it at that until I can get a model drawn up somewhere. Paper and pen maybe… lofi.

Much to my dismay I’m going to need some sort of login system. Not because I want to keep anyones credit card, address or even name. I don’t want to know about any of that, and I doubt  there will be a place to enter such information. It irritates me when sites make me login to view regular old content, or do one time things that don’t really require me to have an identity (comments on blogs for example). Epically when I don’t have to pay for it. As an aside, if I haven’t said it before Brew Sessions won’t cost anyone anything. If the bandwidth bill passes 10 bucks a month I’ll add ad words or something maybe… meh cross that bridge when I come to it

Anyway.. for as much as I can manage the site will be login free. My working idea is you will only need a login to use the inventory management, and if you want to save a brew session (there will be some sort of save as feature that exports it to a pdf or html too). Other than that the site will hopefully be login (and thus a slight irritation free).

Tonight I decided to start futzing with the authentication systems available for rails. I’m doing this first because it’s the part I’m least interested in… and in thoery if I get it over quickly I can move onto bigger and better things. After wading through documentation that appears to be out of date (this seems to be the status quo for most things rails) I settled on Acts as Authenticated.
I picked it for two reasons, the documentation appears to be reasonably accurate, and it looked easy. So far so good. I’ve got the mvc for it all generated and it looks like it does what it is supposed to do. I’m able to create an account.

So cheers to the Acts as Authenticated folks for making something I didn’t want to spend any time on a relatively quick and painless task. All in all it took about an hour.

This will be the development blog for Brew Manager. Eventually it will do all the stuff it says it does on the front page. For now I’ve gotten hosting setup and the domain name registered. I’m pretty sure I got a rails app created on godaddy.com. We will see how that works out as the internets don’t have great things to say about people success rate.

Like I said above, its going to be a rails site. I started playing with Ruby about a year ago. I took a rails seminar at school (I’m working on my masters) and thought “eh, what the heck”. It will run of mysql and whatever webserver godaddy puts in front of it. If someone other than me ever uses this… well we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

I’ve been home brewing for about a year now and this seemed like a good idea. There are a lot of tools out there that do some, and possibly all of what I’m anticipating putting on Brew Sessions. I’m not saying those tools are bad (I use a few of em), but for the most part they don’t meet my needs. This is aimed primarily at making me happy, but if you have a feature request feel free to drop me a line (josh at brewmanager.com) and I’ll consider it.

Here’s the feature list in case I get rid of it.

• Inventory Managment
• Brew Session Managment (it does the math for mash calculations, AAU etc
• Recipe Managment (build, save and search)
• Groups/clubs, with all of the above