next stop: semantic metaverse

Chad Fowler just finished his presentation on Rails Reflection, telling us how we can dynamically introspect and manipulate Rails objects and classes, such as ActiveRecord objects, routes, etc.

He also showed an app that Bruce and Chad and him developed, which basically allows them to build ActiveRecord models through a web interface (complete with on-the-fly database table generation). They ended up scrapping it because of certain problems with it (I’ll have to find out what those problems were).

One particularly interesting tip was using the Rails console for executing migration statements. It kinda goes likes this:

1. Bring up the rails console
2. Execute ‘irb ActiveRecord::Base.connection‘
3. Now you can call migration statements as you would in the up or down methods of a migration

Another good tip was routes reflection by using this in the console:

puts ActionController::Routing::Routes.routes

Overall, a very interesting talk.

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