Łukasz Badura

I’ve been meaning to move my homepage somewhere else than Wordpress.com for quite some time now. Don’t get me wrong, wordpress is ok, however when it comes to a hosted service, at some point you need more control over your own site. That’s why I moved to MegiTeam. This way I’ll be also able to put up a test instance of MoneyTracker once it is ready for basic use. Stay tuned :-).

I recently decided I would write my very own web application to handle my personal finances since Google Apps Spreadsheet just isn’t cool anymore. The general idea isn’t new, in fact there are a few apps out there that can do the job, but this way I can learn some of the different tools in the Ruby world. I intended to use Ruby On Rails since I’ve gotten to know it over the past year, however then I changed my mind. I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn (otherwise it would be dumb to pick something I don’t know in favor of tools I am familiar with), and picked out Merb as a framework of choice, Sequel as the ORM and Haml to handle the views. The first thing that stroke me, was the lack of documentation, and on top of that, even the comments in Merb code were misleading. I couldn’t get Haml to handle the *.haml files.

The gem was installed, and the dependency was set according to the comments in the ‘config/init.rb’ file:

# dependencies "RedCloth", "merb_helpers" # OR # dependency "RedCloth", "> 3.0"

It actually should have looked like this:

Merb::BootLoader.afterapploads do require 'merb-haml' require 'merb_helpers' end

Somehow I have this feeling it’s going to be a long & rough ride :-).