Comments on: KZAK: an open source web-based jukebox

By: Trevor

Trevor — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:45:00 +0000

I decided to take a demo down a while back. It’s very easy to install on your own, though. Just look at the readme.

By: Samuel

Samuel — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:37:14 +0000

Hi Trevor,

The demo is down. Any chance you could set it up again ?

Thanks !

By: John

John — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:20:49 +0000

Cool! I’ll check it out.
Thank you!!

John

By: Trevor

Trevor — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:15:40 +0000

John, I’m setting up a demo site here:

http://kzakdemo.heroku.com/

The login and password are both “test”

By: John

John — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:44:00 +0000

Hi,
This sounds interesting – I follow and work with Soundmanager2 quite a bit. But I’m note a real hard-core coder, I’m someone who works more with how technologies get used by end -users… you know, regular folks. To that end, is there anywhere where kzak is running so we can just, you know, try it? It’s interesting to hear about all the technologies behind the scenes and download code and all… but what does this thing do, actually?

With respect,

John

By: Matt Hooks

Matt Hooks — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:42:59 +0000

I’ll second Trevor’s recommendation of Warden/Devise. The most important improvement over Authlogic is definitely the simplicity of the code. I’ve had a lot of trouble debugging Authlogic in the past and the simplicity of Devise is absolutely refreshing.

I am excited to try CarrierWave…

By: Trevor

Trevor — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:52:13 +0000

Daniel, I looked at Uploadify, but I was a little disappointed because it seemed hard to customize the way it looks. I’ll give it another chance, though, because SWFUpload seems to really chug with Chrome.

Mike, I think this is somewhat of a personal choice, and everyone has different opinions about authentication. I started using restful_authentication a long time ago, and I’ve had a lot of experience with it. At this point, I prefer not to use it because it generates a lot of application code, most of which is boilerplate. It also uses some constants that are stored in the plugin folder, so it’s kind of a hybrid generator/plugin, which I also don’t like. It also enforces one kind of authentication, and isn’t based on something like Warden, which is meant to play well with other Rack apps you may be using. Devise also does a great job of staying out of the way, while still being very customizable. Devise also lets you have multiple “user” models (e.g. “user” and “admin” can be different and have different authentication methods).

I tried Authlogic a couple of times, and I immediately didn’t like it. Primarily, I found the source difficult to follow, and I didn’t like that it enabled model validations by default. I also saw a few tweets from people I respect saying that they ran into problems with it, and ended up finding it difficult to debug. I think the Warden/Devise combo is extremely easy to understand, and the source is easy to follow. So, if you run into a problem, you should be able to figure out what’s going on.

Finally, it’s a an actively maintained project with some really good and responsive people working on it. It’s using the new style Engines, works nicely as a gem, and they say they’re working on Rails 3 support as we speak. I’d say you should give it a try – I really doubt you’ll be disappointed.

By: Mike H

Mike H — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:53:49 +0000

Can you talk a little more about why you recommend Devise so highly over the other solutions? I’ve been using Authlogic and have been 90% satisfied with it, but i’m very open to another solution.

Mike H

By: Daniel Schierbeck

Daniel Schierbeck — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:25:57 +0000

very cool!

Regarding SWFUpload; I’ve recently switched to Uploadify, which is an awesome and very flexible jQuery plugin. You should try it out.