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Peter Bhat Harkins
Rewriting My Competitors
It’s really clear that the polls So Play We All are measuring progress. When we have a quiet week, there’s a lot fewer votes. This week, there were 4, evenly split between Luke and I. The SPWA site doesn’t have code to handle ties so it highligted me as winning, which I guess means the bugfix is not my problem. :)
Luke laid down code for cards. I know I’m helping the enemy, but I’ve got to tweak it. His code is:
class CardController < ApplicationController def play play_sym = “play_#{@card}”.intern # PH: this should be .to_sym self.send(play_sym) render :action => play_sym and return end
def pocket pocket_sym = “pocket_#{@card}”.intern self.send(pocket_sym) end # PH: no explicit render here? Feels like a paste error
protected
# plays def play_roland # Play the game to see what happens when you play the Roland card! end
def play_water # Play the game to see what happens when you play the Water card! end
# pockets def pocket_roland # Play the game to see what happens when you pocket the Roland card! end
def pocket_water # Play the game to see what happens when you pocket the Water card! end
end
I’d write this code as:
class CardController < ApplicationController # I’m guessing from usage above @card is just the name for a card as a string # and that it’s loaded from the url by a filter, note that I use it differently. before_filter :load_card after_filter :default_render_card
def play @card.play end
def pocket @card.pocket end
protected
def load_card @name = params[:card] @card = “card/#{@name}”.camelize.constantize end
def default_render_card render :template => “cards/#{request.action}/#{@name}” unless performed? end end
# add in config/application.rb: module Oaqn class Application < Rails::Application config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/app/cards) end end
# and then create app/cards/roland.rb: module Card module Roland def pocket # code for pocketing end
def play # code for playing end end end
So now the cards each get a source file to themselves, templates have their own per-action dirs (better swapped to per-card dirs, if there are more actions), there’s less duplicated code, and it’s far easier to test these smaller pieces. The only thing missing from this example is the fact that Luke may have to pass some game state into the methods. As long as there’s not too much it’s probably worth being explicit about.
2011-07-09: Luke actually used this code and found it didn’t work as written. I found an explanation; either add ‘app’ to autoload_paths instead of ‘app/cards’, or drop the Card wrapper.
Meanwhile, in the past, Jim wrote some PHP, and I’m not touching that language.
No, in seriousness, Jim talked about why he has some identifiers surrounded by __ (which I’d called python poisoning). I haven’t dug into his code (again, PHP), but it looks like it might be an InBandSignal to reuse Events as framework steps.
And then he talks about session fixation attacks, which are have been protected against out-of-the-box on PHP with the session.use_only_cookies setting for a while. I was a bit confused, I’m pretty sure he’s actually describing session capture attacks. Oh, and there was some other stuff about writing code to store sessions in the database. If you’re curious, Jim, here’s the code for a Rails app to do that, which appears commented-out in the stock config file for your editing convenience:
` Oaqn::Application.config.session_store :active_record_store `{lang=”ruby”}
It includes support out of the box for keeping sessions in cookies (encrypted, of course), your SQL database via ActiveRecord, or Memcached. I’m curious, how much of your budget did you spend storing sessions?