Nervetree

I’m starting to use Netbeans and Dreamweaver for development of a new ruby on rails site I’m working on. Jruby for all the controllers and code, dreamweaver for design and templates. Netbeans is great for Jruby, it gives intellisense like autocomplete for ruby and easy navigation of your models and classes.

The design part wasn’t so easy. I’ve been using rails since v 0.65 or so, and have come to understand that when people can’t use a tool for a technology, they often say, the tools are for wimps. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for good text editors, just not for graphic design. I can almost hear cave men saying that about the first farmers.

Dreamweaver and the Adobe tools are in my opinion the best tools for web design, and layout of pages. Sometimes, in the wrong hands the code they create is awful. It’s a tool, people misuse tools, get over it.

Dreamweaver doesn’t like rails. Dreamweaver expects sites to follow a certain pattern, Site root, Image directory, files which call the image directory are below the site root.

Rails doesn’t follow this pattern. It has an application root, with an {site-root}/app/views folder for the templates and all images/ stylesheets/ js in {site-root}/public.

As a result of this layout, dreamweaver will not show images / styles / proper links when designing templates for rails sites. In the past I got around this by creating, hack one off sites just for templates, then writing scripts to move all the code to the proper place in the rails app.

Today, I tried a different tack, Dreamweaver wont follow symlinks, it thinks they are a file. Hard linking in pre-leopard osx only works for individual files. But Leopard allows hard linking of directories, it just won’t expose this ability via bash, so a user will not be able to use this feature. OSX needs directory hard links for “time machine”.

Heres what I did.

I found some c code that overrides the osx features against hard links ( they can be bad and create infinite loops if you aren’t careful)

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
   if (argc != 3)
      return 1;
   int ret = link(argv[1], argv[2]);
   if (ret != 0)
      perror("link");
   return ret;
}

save as hlink-dir.c

open terminal navigate to the location of the file and compile

enable root user - look up how to do that

gcc -o hlink-dir hlink-dir.c -Wall
chown root:wheel hlink-dir
chmod +x hlink-dir
mv hlink-dir /usr/local/bin

Now when you are logged in as root from terminal you type

hlink-dir Source-dir link-name

# you just created a hard linked directory

The Directories cannot be in the same folder, or the link won’t work.

Here’s the whole point of the story. From your rails {site-root}

cd {rails-site-root}
hlink-dir `pwd`/app/views `pwd`/public

open dreamweaver, create a new site and set the public directory to {site-root}/public. You are good to go. You can create the templates in dreamweaver, and the images from the site will actually show up in dreamweaver.

Thanks to Greg Miller for the hard link tip