Archive for November, 2009

Phusion Passenger on Ubuntu 9.10

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

These notes describe how to run a Rails application on a dedicated port.

Your environment will be different, so some of the following steps will be unnecessary for you and other steps may be missing.
Since we are going to build native extensions, we need to get this module:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

First, we need to install Passenger as a Apache module.

sudo apt-get install libopenssl-ruby
sudo gem install passenger
sudo apt-get install apache2-dev libapr1-dev libaprutil1-dev apache2-prefork-dev
sudo passenger-install-apache2-module

Now edit apache2.conf adding the following:

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.5/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.5
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8

If you want to run your Rails application on a different port, add the following to ports.conf:

NameVirtualHost *:3000
Listen 3000

You need to let Apache know where the Rails application is in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default:

<VirtualHost *:3000>
  ServerName myapp.mycompany.com
  DocumentRoot /apps/myapp/public
</VirtualHost>

The last step is to restart Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Posted in Ruby | No Comments »

Utility functions in Flex

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

I wanted to use some functions that do not belong to any visual component. I did not want to use the Java-style syntax in ActionScript (with classes and interfaces). Since ActionScript is closely related to JavaScript, I created a JavaScript-like object and put the utility functions there. The file is in src/com/mycompany/util/MYCO.as:

package com.myco.util {

	import flash.events.Event;

	public function MYCO():Object {

		this.safeNull=function(instr:String):String {
	    	return instr==null?'':instr;
	    }
}

I can reference methods in this object from other files like this:

 var blah:Function= com.myco.util.MYCO().safeNull;
 var ret:String=blah.apply(this, ['hello']);

Suppose I need access to other functions in the MYCO object, I define a locally visible variable called Myco and assign it to this:

package com.myco.util {

	import flash.events.Event;

	public function MYCO():Object {
		var Myco:Object=this;
		this.safeNull=function(instr:String):String {
                Myco.sayHelloFirst();
	    	return instr==null?'':instr;
	    },

	    this.sayHelloFirst=function():void {
	    	// saying hello
	    }
    };
}

This is because I can not just use ‘this’. ‘this’ could point to some other object, according to the rules of JavaScript.

Posted in ActionScript, Flex | 1 Comment »