daydreaming

Fire Eagle (not fireeagle) is a new location platform from some of my colleagues here at Yahoo! Brickhouse. I’ve put together a simple sample app called whereis which shows off the power of the platform.

What is whereis?

Each instance of whereis lets you share location within a trusted group of people. Whereis does not update location in Fire Eagle, you should do this using other apps (eg. Fire Eagle automatic device updaters, or other sites). This screenshot basically sums it up -

What can I use it for?

• Run it on your intranet to easily share location between your co-workers
• Run it on the internet so friends and family can share location

Who is whereis intended for?

Whereis is intended for developers who have familiarity with Ruby and access to a server.

Why are you releasing it?

It is a simple app (~200 lines of code) built on top of the camping framework. If you understand Ruby and the MVC pattern, it will give you a good idea of how FE works and can be used. I think the code is pretty self explanatory, drop me a line if you have any suggestions.

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If you want to add a call to all the controllers in your Camping miroframework app you can use before or after overrides. These are similar to the before_filter in Rails.

Remember to return the superclass or Camping will throw a “Read error: #<NoMethodError: undefined method `status’ for nil:NilClass>” because it can’t call back into the returned controller. A modification of the above linked wiki page example illustrates -

Camping.goes :YourApp

module YourSession
  def service(*a)
    @session = YourApp::Session.new
    s = super(*a)
    @session.close
    #return s from above after completing
    s
  end
end

module YourApp
  include YourSession
end