Why is rubygem's "lib" directory not called "src"? - project

I've never had any problem with the basic gem tree structure, namely
bin (executables)
lib (source code)
test
...because I've always developed gems as libraries. However, I recently started to develop an application that ships as a gem.
This application has a "runner.rb" file (lib/mygem/runner.rb), that provides a method to run the application. The application is run from the bin/mygem file.
Now this bothers me. "runner.rb" is a file that is specific to our application, it is not a service or an API or any kind of support class for other to reuse (which is what library should be for, right?), yet its directory is "lib/mygem/runner.rb).
I've been reading a lot of definitions, and libraries are supposed to be support an application, not to be the application itself. We don't say "this is the library of my application", but "this is the source code of my application".
So my question is, why do we put the libraries AND source code in the same folder?
I hope I made my point clear, I'm sure there's a good reason behind this, and I'd be interested to hear your thought and to clear this out.
Thank you for reading this :)

After even further investigations, it turns out 'lib/' is called 'lib/' because it only contains definitions.
'bin' is a script that gets executed, like a 'main' function. Since it gets executed, no application logic should be in it, otherwise it's not easily testable.
Thus, all the application logic belongs to your application's library folder. The bin (main) file's only task is to instantiate your application's runner class and run it.

Related

Is File.Open directory behavior different in x86 vs x64

I am working on a application built in VB.Net that allows a document to be uploaded and saved into a database. I did not build this application, but I do maintain it, put enhancements in it here and there. The target framework is .Net4
One of the functionalities within this process when uploading and saving the document it uses the method File.Open() to access the file and run other methods to compress it. The method that uses File.Open takes in a parameter that passes just the filename, not the entire path of where it came from.
When this application is running on an x64 machine I receive an error (System.IO.FileNotFoundException) when the code hits the File.Open method, complaining that it cannot find the file to open. It is expecting the file to be in the programs executing directory, which does make sense because it is only given the filename to go off, not the entire directory that it came from.
What's getting to me, is that this exact same application (exact same built assemblies) will run fine when run on an x86 system. It does not fail on File.Open() It still passes just the filename, but somehow, it will know the directory information.
How is this possible?
It's worth noting, that the method that contains the File.Open() method is in a different project in the same solution. It's a referenced DLL. e.g. MyApp.exe (Windows Form Application) references MyUtil.dll (Class Library). I have built against x86, x64 and AnyCPU configurations.
I understand that the fix to this would be to just pass the entire directory to the method, but what I need to know is how this is even possible? I want to better understand why this would happen, and hopefully this would help someone else better understand how assemblies may differ between different system environments.
EDIT: Using an absolute path did fix the underlying issue. See the comments below for some good information on this scenario
Windows has special handling for certain folder names on 64bit systems depending on whether you have a 32bit or 64bit process. Notably, the Program Files folder and the System32 folders map differently depending on what kind of process you have.
Note that this is a difference in Windows itself. It's not a behavior that is unique to .Net or Visual Basic. Any program platform that uses Windows native file handling will give you these results.
This is why you should use appropriate relative paths or the SpecialFolders enumeration, rather than hard-coding full path names, and be careful about where you put things you expect to reference later; you might find they end up in a different location than you expected. Often, the AppData or ProgramData folders are the more correct location, instead of the Windows or Program Files folders.

HTTparty in Rhodes

I am using Rhodes to develop android application.
I have installed HTTpary gem in Rhodes. Now when I am writing the statement "require 'httparty' " at top of the application it gives me error like "No such file to load".
What should I do to solve this problem?
From the documentation, scroll down to the section beginning "Adding Ruby Extension Libraries to Your Rhodes Application". It details 3 ways you can include external libraries into your application, summarized below.
Add ruby extension to an individual application
Add ruby library to an individual application
Add ruby library to the Rhodes framework to be built for all applications
The base Rhodes framework only contains things deemed generic enough to be included - so the built application package size can be kept low. Anything not in the base framework can be included in the application through the aforementioned methods.
This is just a guess since w/ Rhodes environment; but if this were a normal ruby script you would need to have require 'rubygems' first (assuming your used rubygems...).
The Motorola documentation is horrendous; allow me to help if I can. Firstly, examine the constant $LOAD_PATHS from your Ruby code to see the entire list of paths that Rhodes searches. Any .rb file in this path is automatically made available to require.
Then you have to decide whether to add this library to the entire Rhodes framework or just your app; personally I opt for one app at a time, because that way it reduces the chances of incompatibilities, and your apps are still provided all the libraries in rhodes-*version/lib/framework
If you want to add a library to your app, the docs suggest plopping it into the directory app/lib, but keep in mind that only this exact path is searched, so if you don't have a .rb file of the same name as your require statement directly under this path, it won't be detected automatically. I mention this because the common structure is a single file with the library name placed directly in lib, and the actual library contents inside a folder of the same name.
Example: the mime-types library is made up of: lib/mime-types.rb and lib/mime/, which are named differently and can lead to exactly this kind of confusion when including in Ruby.

Custom class in DotNetNuke Module

I know this can be done as there are other modules out there that have this, but I'm just not getting it to work.
I have created a custom module for a DotNetNuke site. I want to be able to create a class object within the module to hold the information about that object. I can create the object and everything complies. But when I go to use the object in the code-behind it states that the object is not defined. I'm not really sure where to go from here.
This is the beginning of the View.ascx.vb :
Namespace Modules.VacationForms
Public MustInherit Class View
Inherits PortalModuleBase
This is the object class beginning:
Namespace Modules.VacationForms
Public MustInherit Class Vacation
I'm really not sure why this is not working. I did download another module code to compare and as far as I can tell everything is the same. Any help is appreciated.
Are you using a Web Site Project or a Web Application Project? The Web Application project will allow you to compile all of your code together (the only issue here might be the the Root Namespace setting in your project, but, assuming both classes are in the same project, that shouldn't be it). If you're in the Web Site project (e.g. developing directly in the DNN solution), then your code won't get compiled in the traditional sense, but will be on-demand compiled by DNN. It only does that for code behind files associated with requested controls/pages (e.g. your View.ascx.vb) and code files in the App_Code folder. I would guess that your hangup is that your Vacation class' code file isn't in the App_Code folder.
It looks you are not using the Web Application Project for module development. Easiest thing to do is install module development templates (from dotnetnuke.codeplex.com download starterkit package of your dnn version).
If your module is too simple and you don't want to do that, OR you don't want to install the templates in your pc, you can do following:
If you are using a vs version that is not using WAP by default, get the installation from web.
create a new folder for your dnn module in DesktopModules directory in root
add a new WAP project in that folder.
remove web.config from that folder, go to properties and point build output director to your dnn site's bin directory (../../bin will work most of the time)
Once you are done with that, all your code will start working as expected.
Good thing about this is, all your .vb and .ascx.vb files will be compiled in a single dll that you can distribute as a package easily.
Hope this helps

Using a framework in a PreferencePane

i am currently trying to implement a "third party framework" (FeedbackReporter.Framework) into my preferencepane.
Unfortunately I am getting the following error all the time when trying to launch my preference pane:
16.05.10 23:13:30 System Preferences[32645] dlopen_preflight
failed with
dlopen_preflight(/Users/me/Library/PreferencePanes/myPane.prefPane/Contents/MacOS/myPane):
Library not loaded:
#executable_path/../Frameworks/FeedbackReporter.framework/Versions/A/FeedbackReporter
Referenced from:
/Users/me/Library/PreferencePanes/myPane.prefPane/Contents/MacOS/myPane
Reason: image not found for
/Users/me/Library/PreferencePanes/myPane.prefPane
As far as I read so far, this problem is probably caused because my prefPane is no actual app, but a "plugin" of "System Settings.app" and thus #executable_path resolves to a path within the bundle of this app, instead of the bundle of my prefpane.
But I don't really picked up howto fix this problem. I guess it must be fairly easy since it should be a usual case that people use non-apple-frameworks in PreferencePanes.
Thanks for your hints!
--
Short Update:
As far as I understood tons of docs I read so far, there might be a setting which has to be done in the third-party framework. Obviously the "install path" has to be set to "loader_path" instead to "executable_path" in order to work in a preferencepane.
But since I am using a precompiled framework (FeedbackReporter.framework) this is probably a setting which the author has to change?! and even if i could compile the framework myself, i had no idea where to change this install_path in Xcode.
If you cannot wait for the next release just download the source, change it in
FeedbackReporter.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj
and then open and compile the framework yourself.
Actually, you can change it yourself without recompiling the third party framework. You can use install_name_tool to change where a MachO binary will look for shared object libraries. First use otool -L <binary file for your plugin> to get the paths of where it expects its libraries to be, then use install_name_tool -change ... to change the paths in that file. Repeat for any bundled frameworks.

MSBuild overwriting dependencies

Ok, so I've got a somewhat complicated problem with my build environment that I'm trying to deal with.
I have a solution file that contains multiple C# projects which is built by a NAnt script calling MSBuild - passing MSBuild the name of the solution file and a path to copy the binaries to. This is because I want my automated build environment (CruiseControl.Net) to create a folder named after the revision of each build - this way I can easily go back to previous binaries for any reason.
So idealy I have a folder layout like this
c:\build\nightly\rev1
c:\build\nightly\rev2
c:\build\nightly\rev3
...
c:\build\nightly\rev10
etc.
The problem that's arisen is I recently added the latest version of the Unity IoC container to my project, checking it directly out of MS's online SVN repository. What's happening is I have a Silverlight 3 project that references the Silverlight version of Unity but I also have other projects (namely my Unit testing project) that reference the standard (non-Silverlight) version of Unity.
So what happens is since MSBuild is dumping everything into one single folder the Silverlight version of the Unity assembly is overwriting the non-Silverlight version because they have the exact same assembly file name.
Then when CruistControl runs my unit tests they fail because they don't have the proper dependencies available anymore (they try to load the Silverlight specific Unity assembly which obviously doesn't work).
So what I want to do is:
keep my desired output directory
structure (folder\revision)
I don't want to have to manually edit
every single proj file I have as this
is error prone when adding new
projects to the solution
Idealy I would like MSBuild to put everything into a folder structure similar to this:
nightly\revision1\project1
nightly\revision1\project2
nightly\revision1\project3
...
nightly\revision2\project1
nightly\revision2\project2
nightly\revision2\project3
etc
I can't modify the Unity project to give it a different file name because it comes from another SVN repository I cannot commit changes to. I found a similar question posted here and the suggested solution was to use a "master" MSBuild file that used a custom task to extract all the project file names out of the solution then loop over each one building them. I tried that but it doesn't build them in the order of their dependencies, so it fails for my project.
Help?
Firstly I would always have the build server delete the old working copy and check out a fresh copy to avoid any problems with stale artifacts from the previous build.
Next I would have nant or msbuild build the solutions as before with the artifacts from each build going to their local working output folders.
After that I'd move the artifacts from their working paths to their output paths, this shouldn't require digging through the project files since you can just tell msbuild/nant to copy working\project1\bin\release\**\*.* to artifacts\project1\.
The script that does this should ideally be stored along with the source with the main file, e.g. build.nant or build.proj in top level of the trunk.
For third party libraries I would simple include the DLLs directory in your repository. Nothing worse than writing some code and having a third party dependency break your build because of changes on their end.
Simply document the versions of the libraries you are using, and if you must update them, you'll have a better sense of what breaks the build before you even check it in.
Also, doesn't CC.Net automatically handle the providing of releases based on revision? I'm using TeamCity and it keeps a copy of the artifacts of every build.
I highly recommend reading JP Boodhoo's Automating Builds with NAnt blog series. That's been my starting point and have made lots of changes for my own taste. I also highly recommend checking out the builds of many open sources projects for examples. I've learned a lot from the builds of the Castle/Nhibernate/Rhino-Tools stack.