Unfortunately Moneytracking has an annoying limitation which prevents you from tracking tags across accounts, so if you’re buying junk food with cash and credit tagging loses it appeal.  Luckily, they provide an API which will allow us to easily get around the tagging limitation programmatically. 

I can imagine some pretty cool analytics and infographics coming out of 6 months of data so I wrote Moneytrackin.rb, a Ruby interface to the MoneyTrackin API.  It exposes easy-to-use methods to interact with your Moneytrackin account. While it only implements the methods exposed by their API but I intend to add more functionality like tag searches across all accounts soon, imagine piping an amounte-weighted stream of tags to wordle!

With two gems, HTTParty and Mash, I was easily able to create the client interface.  I included the HTTParty module within connection class and it gave it a "get" method that retrieves data over HTTP.   Usage is simple:

response = self.class.get(self.class.base_uri + '/listProjects/')

Then I passed the response to Mash which converts the XML response into a hash that acts more like a an object., it also also recursively descends down the response converting hashes into Mashes making it easy to get the transactions and the tags associated with them.

1. download sqlitedll-3_6_18.zip,
2. copy the two files that are part of the archive to your Ruby bin directory;
3. run “gem install –version 1.2.3 sqlite3-ruby” from the command prompt.

Enjoy!

You think “I know there are areas where I could improve, where I could do things in a smarter way, but how?”  Ruby on Rails guides you towards doing the right things with its simplicity and convention over configuration mantra, but what about Ruby, just plain Ruby?

Ruby isn’t perfect, it’s not the easiest language to learn after almost a decade of C/C++ and its cousins Java and C#.  My first Ruby book quickly became obsolete; its code examples illustrate approaches that are out of date, deprecated or just plain wrong.  Suffice to say the pace of Ruby’s development isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.  So what do you do?

Frustrated, I thought to myself “Wouldn’t it be great to see how other people write and use Ruby code? To learn from their technique” Then it hit me like a brick, Unit Testing!  Almost every gem comes with its own unit testing folder.

I must have browsed through every Ruby Gem I have and read the unit tests, not only did I learn new Ruby techniques, I learned more about Unit Testing.  Now, the first thing I do after I download and install a gem is browse over to “C:rubylibrubygems1.8gemsgemnametest” and read the unit tests, there’s no better way to learn Ruby.

I still miss intellisense.

Eclipse/RDT gives me easy access to my all my unit tests and a nice graphical interface, source control, I never have to leave the IDE and RadRails is the BEST IDE for RoR development, nothing comes close. I wish Eclipse was more responsive, you can never have enough RAM for Eclipse, but I can’t complain too much. It’s been a much better experience than Jedit and FreeRIDE, although, I still pop open Notepad++ and a console window and hack out some Ruby code every couple of days

This sounds like a giant Ruby commercial, but there’s more to it than the hype. Software development has come a long way for me from the ‘old’ days (~2002) when I programmed in C++ with KDevelop, when my tools were always getting in my way. KDevelop wasn’t very user friendly, neither is C++ or make, now I don’t spend as much time wrangling with my tools. Things just feel easier.

I still miss Intellisense.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Ever since I started programming in Ruby, I’m forgetting to declare the access modifier in front of my methods and other times I didn’t bother declaring a main method, I just started writing code in the middle of the class wondering why Eclipse is drawing red lines under my code.

I experienced the same problems when I was coding in C++ and Perl at work, and it took about a year to get over it.  At least then I was using a different IDE, lately I’ve used Eclipse for both Ruby and Java development and there’s nothing to remind me that I’ve started coding in a different language.

Maybe this is a sign that I should look into JRuby.