Hello.
My name is Michal Pokorn and I’m a computer science student from Czech
Republic.
I would like to apply for this year’s Google Summer of Code, and since I
like Ruby, Rails
looks like a good project to contribute to.
The web-based console idea from the ideas page seems really nice. The
ideas
page mentions
the Conductor gem (GitHub - dhh/conductor). It looks neat,
but
unfortunately I couldn’t
get it to run (the last commit is 3 years old, so I didn’t try too hard,
to
be honest).
From the source code, it seems to be able to show annotations, routes
and
code stats (# of controllers, etc.)
and to create scaffolds. In general, it looks like it tries to wrap
common
Rails tasks into
a nice web interface, which would be cool.
However, when I read the project name, I first thought of “a web
interface
to rails console”, in the
command-line, IRB sense. I didn’t think of all the issues this approach
might have yet, but I think
it would be much more universal: not everything a developer needs to do
in
a Rails (CLI) console
is representable with buttons, forms, and so on.
However, I imagine that running rails console instances in the
background
of a development server might turn
into a fragile hack.
I think a “hybrid console” might be the best: common rake tasks,
generators
and so on could be reachable
with a GUI, and browser-IRB might be available for more complicated
stuff.
So, what do you think about this? What features would you want to have
in a
Rails web console?
Is it insane to even consider running code someone writes into a web
page?
Also, if you’re interested, let me tell you a few things about my
background. Most of my experience
comes from C, C++, C#, and (unfortunately) PHP. I have been interested
in
Ruby (and Rails) for some two
or three years now. I have written a few things in Java (mostly for
Android) and Python. I experimented with
others, but there’s not much worth mentioning. I am now a freshman at
the
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
of the Charles University in Prague.
Thanks for your ideas!