Weekly Source Code: Ruby Setting Utility Class

Its a general task to store application settings so I wrote my own for the Ruby programming language

How to use:

Save the SettingUtil.rb file so that your application code can find it.

Add:

require 'SettingsUtil'
include SettingUtil

Save Example:

require 'SettingsUtil'
include SettingUtil

setting = Settings.new # create the settings object
setting.values = {"jabber_notifyme" => "true", "jabber_jid" => "lenniedg@gmail.com", "jabber_password" => "", "jabber_to" => "lenniedg@gmail.com"}
setting.save
puts setting.jabber_to

to save you need to set the values accessor which is a hashset then call the save method.

Load Example:

require 'SettingsUtil'
include SettingUtil

setting = Settings.new
puts setting.values["jabber_to"]

when creating a new object of Settings (remember its in the SettingUtil module) it will load the previous saved settings else you can just call load method directly.

Note:

There are 2x ways to get the settings value:

puts setting.jabber_to

OR

puts setting.values["jabber_to"]

in both cases it reads the setting of "jabber_to" from the values hashset.

If it can't find the setting the first option will return "none" by default where the second option will return a nil reference.

By default it save settings into a settings.config file, you might want to change that if you wish.

The source:

#
# Store application settings
# Settings get marchalled to a file and then loaded, you can refer to settings
# by getting them from the values accessor directly or calling a method
#
# Author: Lennie De Villiers
# Created: 12/03/2009

module SettingUtil
SettingsFileName = "settings.conf" # constant with the file name
attr_accessor :values
class Settings
def initialize()
values = {}
load()
end

def load()
if File.exists?(SettingsFileName)
f = open(SettingsFileName)
temp = Marshal.load(f)
self.values = temp.values
end
end

def save()
open(SettingsFileName, "w") { |f| Marshal.dump(self, f) }
end

def method_missing(method_name, *args)
if values != nil && values.key?(method_name.to_s)
return values[method_name.to_s]
else
return "none"
end
end
end
end

Weekly Source Code: Twitter IM Notification

Twitter has become a very populare social website where you tell the world what your doing in 140 characters.

You can always follow me on Twitter

Since I've started to teach myself the Ruby dynamic programming language you can use this Ruby script to send yourself notification to Google Talk when a friend post a message to Twitter.

Steps:

1) Download Ruby
2) Install Ruby and setup a path to C:\Ruby\bin
3) Install the twitter gem: gem install twitter
4) Install the Jabber gem: gem install xmpp4r
5) Update the script by adding your Twitter username and password, Google Talk username (like lenniedg@gmail.com), password and notification address (like lenniedg@gmail.com)
6) run the script: ruby TwitterIMNotify_share.rb

I love Ruby! :)