The Ruby and Rails community linklog
Made a library? Written a blog post? Found a useful tutorial? Share it with the Ruby community here or just enjoy what everyone else has found!
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Rails and iPhone web apps, part 3
Part 3 of Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails has been posted. It covers panels, forms, and capturing when the user turns the phone. Also see Part 1 and Part 2.
Matz loves Python?
Matz love Python (and why not I ask?). ;)
Sexy Forms in Rails
An easy way to override the default Rails form output to generate sexy forms. Automatically provides labels for input tags (great for screen readers) and visual cues for required fields.
Cookie handling in multi-domain applications in Ruby on Rails
If you are developing a multi-domain application (e.g. with many national domains) and also want to use many subdomains (e.g. for content language), you may run into problems with cookies. Cookie handling in multi-domain applications in Ruby on Rails show how to use a little known trick (or an obscure hack, if you will) to do it properly.
New release of BackgroundFu
New release of BackgroundFu: This is mainly a maintenance release. I have updated default views, removed some depreciations, fixed some minor bugs. Enjoy! I’d like to invite anoyone who would like to work with me on a spec suite for BackgroundFu. Just fork the project and go along the usual route.
Centostrano 0.1 - deprec 2 port to CentOS released!
Centostrano 0.1 - deprec 2 port to CentOS released! Also I wrote blog post how to use it.
How to read web feeds (RSS, Atom)
Gerald Bauer published a mini tutorial on “How to read web feeds (RSS, Atom) using the standard Ruby library”.
Using jQuery with Rails
In this extended example, several types of JavaScript interaction are shown using jQuery as the JavaScript toolkit within a Rails project.
Better caching for Rails with version_cache plugin
Caching helps alot with improving performance of your rails application but it can be a real pain and source of troubles if not done right. version_cache plugin tries to solve this problem by caching pages based on model versions. Whenever a model’s version changes, the associated page is considered to be expired. It saves you the trouble of expiring your cache which is almost the worst thing about caching.
method_cache plugin
Do you have methods on your active record objects that are expensive to calculate? Want to cache the results and save yourself the cost of evaluation every time you invoke that method. Here is a plugin that helps you solve this problem easily.
How to use Gmail to send emails with Ruby
Gerald Bauer published “How to use Google’s SMTP server and Gmail to send emails with Ruby”. Works for Google Apps for your Domain hosted accounts too!
BackgrounDRb - 1.0.4 released
An updated version of BackgrounDRb rails plugin has been released, which contains changes for fault tolerant clustering of BackgrounDRb servers, persistent job queue and tons of fixes for stability.
This Week in Ruby and Rails
This Week in Ruby and This Week in Rails have been published.
Faster IO for Ruby with Postgres
Care for up to 40% speed up on database IO? Here is a guide and a library to help you exploit PostgreSQL’s non-blocking API from Ruby. And as a bonus, you get to develop in the normal blocking style.
Rails TakeFive with Jacques Crocker
FiveRuns has posted this week’s Rails TakeFive interview with Jacques Crocker of RailsJedi.com.
New release of FiveRuns TuneUp
FiveRuns has released a new version of its TuneUp Rails application profiling developer panel and service. Now, you no longer have to register to start profiling your Rails application. Registration is only required if you want to publish your run to the TuneUp service and collaborate with others. Enjoy!
Testing is overrated?
Is developer testing overrated? I think developers focus on it to the detriment of other things that improve code quality. Read my post and let me know what you think so I can improve my RubyFringe talk.
Useful flash messages in Rails
How to create useful flash messages in Rails that direct the user to an appropriate action, without polluting your controller with view logic.
Writing a compiler in Ruby part 10: Mangling text
In the 10th part of my series on writing a compiler in Ruby I use the language to bootstrap a simple “parser” (and I use the term VERY loosely) for test purposes that will take a Lisp-like syntax and turn it into a tree of Ruby arrays to compile.
New FiveRuns Contest - Win tickets to RailsConf Europe!
FiveRuns has launched a new contest. We’re giving away tickets for 2 to RailsConf Europe, Sept 2-4 in Berlin. Details here. Try FiveRuns TuneUp to profile the performance of your Rails app and submit a run. Winner will be drawn from all runs submitted between today and August 8. Good luck!
rubyjs_on_rails plugin: ARAX w/out silverlight
I put out a rails plugin to make rubyjs super easy to use in a rails app and let you run ruby in yer browser. Tutorial is here.
Project Website
One of the frustrations of trying to learn any programming tool is the lack of well-described real-world examples of how to use the tool in practice. Although open source tools make the underpinnings of successful software more explicit, documentation that combines a real example with a description and rationale of the choices made is still rare. And so: Project Website, an attempt to provide such an example on a small, real-world site. Check out Part Zero and Part One
Introducing DataFabric
FiveRuns has released a database sharding library for ActiveRecord that we call DataFabric. Details here or on Github.