Wow. I started to get a “real” sense for the state of Rails and the surrounding Ruby-based frameworks on Friday morning. You know what they say about making promises…

Needless to say I don’t have a working geo-client. I did chase about every possible rabbit. There were some promising options including Merb with a generic session captured in DataMapper. Ironically the simplest solution is the Ramaze one. Way unfortunate that they aren’t pushing the OpenID capability. I think if I had the time, I’d debug their OpenID-mongrel problem. But, I still believe we should get the geo-client over to Rails for the sake of continuity across our code/project-base.

The real irony here is that everyone has seemed to go the custom OpenID solution based on the openid-ruby gem. Not necessarily surprised just wondering way the people that put effort into a plugin for Rail 1.x/OpenID 1.x are putting the same effort in to maintaining them for Rail and OpenID version 2s. Strange. This is one of the problems that I think the Java world with its more Darwinian approach to projects. But, due to the Rails defacto documentation being blog posts the old (weak) stuff seems to live off for ever…and not get maintained in the same way as Java-ish projects - it really is self-centered. I supposed this is somewhat due to RubyForge, and the general lack of a true “foundation” to house Ruby projects ala Apache or Eclipse. I wonder why that is. No, not really I know why. It is because of shops like 37Signals…not “getting” the greater good part of Open Source. Don’t get me wrong I’m not necessarily fault them - just saying that they are definitely partly responsible for the state of things Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

ActiveRecord is a terd. I appreciate most of what it brings to the table…but, I’m really struggling with it - and any intuitive understanding. I’ll take the blame for most of it - not all of it. For example, why does this work:

<code>
@openid = UserOpenids.find(:first, :conditions => ["user_id = ?", @user.id])
</code>

And not this:

<code>
@openid = UserOpenids.find_by_user_id(:first, @user.id)
</code>

It took me at least 4 hours to figure this effer out…and I still don’t understand.