Two pieces of Clutter development just got a whole lot simpler thanks to the hard work of other Rails developers… all the extra work I put into the tagging code can now be obsoleted and replaced with:
acts_as_taggable
thanks to [a little ActiveRecord wizardry][1]. And file uploads? Just as easy with [FileColumn][2]…
file_column :image
handles the entire upload process. Along with [FeedTools][3] for my RSS needs, more and more of the heavy lifting is handled in incredibly elegant ways.
What’s that they say about ’standing on the shoulders of giants?’ Well, in the fledgling Rails world, we’ve got room for lots of giants to make great contributions. Thanks for those who already have.
_Edit:_ I realized later that I hadn’t quite explained what’s so cool about this. Basically, with one (or a few) lines of code, you get significant boosts in your application’s features ‘for free’, as they say. These are the kinds of things people keep reinventing the wheel for… RSS, tagging, file uploads, etc. Why bother writing one’s own code (often more tightly coupled to a specific situation than necessary) than embrace object-oriented concepts and use the code shared by others?
[1]: http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/archives/2005/08/27/get-taggable-like-all-the-cool-kids
[2]: http://www.kanthak.net/opensource/file_column/
[3]: http://sporkmonger.com/projects/feedtools/api/
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