I updated rawr with improved option handling. I added in Brian Marick’s user-choices gem to take care of any options and arguments passed to rawr.

I also rolled in an option I had been using in roir: instead of downloading a jruby-complete.jar file for each new project, grab a copy of a local version. Downloading the file is maybe not a big deal for the occasional project, but I foud myself banging out several experimental apps a day and got tired of the wait. Plus I often prefer to use the freshest repo code instead of the current stable release.

user-choices does more than just handle command-line arguments. It lets you set up options in environment variables, a config file, and on the command line. There’s a hierarchy of application, too. In rawr, if you set an environment variable it will be used unless there is a corresponding value in the config file. And anything passed on the command line takes precedence over any other setting.

This way you can configure rawr to copy over a local version of jruby-complete.jar for new projects, but force a download using a command-line option when desired. Very handy.

I also added a small amount of comments to the generated build_configuration.rb file, though more needs to be done.

There’s no gem version of this yet; you need to grab the code from gitub and build the gem yourself. I also haven’t decided what to do about gem hosting. My experience with rubyforge and github motivated me to just host my my own gems up on gems.neurogami.com. That’s fine for code that is really all me. However, I didn’t create rawr, and I’m not the only contributor, and rawr is arguably more popular than any of my side-project apps, so a more mainstream host may be called for.

Now, while drafting this post, I decided that I should just go host the gem someplace, so I decided to use rubygems.org. I needed to create an account. (By the way, what possesses someone to create GIANT FORM FIELDS that consume almost the entire screen? What UX need does this server? )

Sadly, I kept getting “Handle is invalid” messages, with nothing to explain why, or what constitutes a valid handle. At least the error wasn’t in GIANT TEXT. I tried a few times and gave up. ( And, yes, I had a smug, self-satisfied sense of vindication about self-hosting gems.)

So I put the rawr gem up on neurogami.com. See http://gems.neurogami.com/gems/ for details.