This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Guy Naor. Original Post: A World Time Server In One Line Of Rails Feed Title: Famundo - The Dev Blog Feed URL: http://devblog.famundo.com/xml/rss/feed.xml Feed Description: A blog describing the development and related technologies involved in creating famundo.com - a family management sytem written using Ruby On Rails and postgres Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Guy Naor Latest Posts From Famundo - The Dev Blog

First, sorry for the delay in posting more on the XMPP/Jabber serie. I was a bit busy. So until I write the next instalment, here's a small piece of rails coolness.

Want to know the exact tiem anywhere in the world? Including daylight saving taken into account? How about doing it in one line of rails code?

1. Create a new rails application: rails .

2. Install the tzinfo plugin: script/plugin install tzinfo_timezone

3. Edit app/controllers/application.rb

4. Add to it the following method (ok, it's 3 lines if we count the def and the end and not try to squeeze it into one with ; ):

def get_time
   render :text => TzinfoTimezone[params[:id]].utc_to_local(Time.now.getutc).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') rescue render :text => "ERROR - check your time zone", :status => 500
end

Now run it: script/server

Browse to: http://localhost:3000/application/get_time/Tokyo or http://localhost:3000/application/get_time/London. Check out the tzinfo plugin for the names of the supported time-zones. And you can add more to the mapping there.

You can improve performance a bit by turning sessions off completely. Do that either in the configuration or by adding session :off to the application controller class.

If you keep your computer clock accurate with ntp, you will get a pretty accurate time. The request is processed at a really high speed, so that shouldn't be a problem. And if the round trip to the server and back is quick, you will have a 1 second accuracy. Not bad for one line of code.