Moving to Gemcutter - keeping it clean

It seems the transition from the RubyForge Gems server (http://gems.rubyforge.org/) to the Gemcutter Gems server (http://gemcutter.org/) is nearly complete. The address of the former is now a DNS alias of the later.

If you're like me, you like to keep up-to-date, tidy and clean. In this case that means keeping my RubyGem sources list clean. Here's the quick and simple steps I took on my RubyGem installs to get everything cleaned up.

1. Add Gemcutter Server - $ sudo gem sources -a http://gemcutter.org/
   
2. Remove RubyForge Server - $ sudo gem sources -r http://gems.rubyforge.org/
   
3. Remove GitHub Server - $ sudo gem sources -r http://gems.github.com
   

Note - if you get any errors about the server not being present in the cache, this may be due to a minor difference in the URL used to add the server and the one being used to remove it. For example, a trailing slash. Run sudo gem sources to see all of the servers and the exact URL that's configured.

First Book Review

In the next week or so I'll be doing my first book review. I was sent a request last week by Packt to review the book Apache Maven 2 Effective Implementation. I'm looking forward to it, as I've been using Maven 2 for quite a while and I have plenty of opinions to share.

Full disclosure: I am a member of the Apache Software Foundation, a committer and PMC member of the Apache Harmony project and I have contributed a few patches to the Apache Maven project.

Adding the accept-charset attribute to HTML forms with Rails helpers

An oft unused attribute of the FORM element of HTML is the accept-charset. I'm a bit of a encoding fanatic and someone pointed out to me that I wasn't setting this attribute on a Rails application that I'd hacked up. As I'm always interested in learning something new about Rails, I decided to try setting this attribute in my application.

When using the base FormTagHelper#form_tag, it's pretty simple.

<% form_tag(search_solutions_path, {:'accept-charset' => "UTF-8"}) do -%>
...
<% end -%>

Note the use of the quotes around the symbol accept-charset. This is required because a hyphen requires escaping to be used in Ruby symbols.

When using the RESTful FormHelper#form_for, it's a bit more complicated and not very clearly documented. After some debugging and trial & error, I figured out that you have to add another level of indirection to add HTML options.

<% form_for(@model, {:html => {:'accept-charset' => "UTF-8"}}) do |f| %>
...
<% end -%>