ccjr.name

I’ve been following the Rails development team since they started working on a built-in 118N solution. We’ve just delivered an application that has to support both english and arabic; so, the project was a perfect fit for the new I18N functionality because I needed support for view and model translations.

I’ve decided to write a simple plugin to simplify the code contained in my views, it’s called translated_attributes, and you can grab it now.

In the example above, I created a model call Post, that contains the same content in two languages; for example the title attribute is title_en for english, and title_ar for arabic. In the application, the locale is defined by the path and is always set on a before_filter; this allows me to use call the title attribute, that will return the appropriate attribute making my view code simpler.

Of course, this solution fits well my scenario that specifies that some content is always to be translated in two languages; so, your requirements if this plugin suits you or not. If you need to translate text in more than 2 languages, I wouldn’t recommend the one-field-per-language approach.

I’ve decided to give JRuby a try under Mac OS X 10.5.5, and the ride has had its share of challenges so far. First thing, after I downloaded and extracted JRuby to a folder in my machine, I had to setup the JRUBY environment variable, and make a change to the PATH variable, that looked like this:

export JRUBY_HOME=/Users/junior/code/jruby/jruby-1.1.5
export PATH=$JRUBY_HOME/bin:$PATH

Pretty simple so far, but I was getting errors trying to install the Ruby Java Bridge gem. To my surprise the reason was that I was running the gem executable from JRuby, not my regular gem executable, as I expected. The fix was simple, I just had to change the path variable to look like:

export PATH=$PATH:$JRUBY_HOME/bin

Then, I spent almost one hour trying to find out why the rjb gem wouldn’t install in my machine. I found lots of blog post from people who had issues installing this gem, and presented a few solutions, but none helped me. I kept getting an error saying that the JAVA_HOME variable was not set, which made no sense because this was working fine:

junior@snake:~$ export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home
junior@snake:~$ $JAVA_HOME/bin/java -version
java version "1.5.0_16"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_16-b06-284)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_16-133, mixed mode, sharing)

I got the answers to my problem online from a blog post by Alex Chaffee. Like Alex mentioned, just run “sudo visudo” and add

Defaults        env_keep += "JAVA_HOME"

Pretty frustrating, but now I can jump back into my original task, which is to generate PDF reports from a Rails application using the iText Java library.