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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random_data v1.3 released
random_data v1.3 is a gem that provides a variety of methods for generating realistic seed data for Ruby applications, including names, mailing addresses, dates, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and text. This release includes support for generating random sentences from a simple grammar and generating random bit vectors.
Everyday Active Record
Everyday Active Record: Learn how to get the most out of the Active Record features that you use on a day-to-day basis from a popular Rails developer and screencaster. In these screencasts, Ryan Bates incrementally builds the models for a Rails application and refactors them over time to address new features. All the code is based on Rails 2.1 features. [more inside]
Upgrading to Rails 2.1rc1
Chris Peterson of the AssayDepot walks you through upgrading a 2.0.3 app to 2.1rc1 in this highly detailed blog post
Routing in Rails 2.0
Routing in Rails 2.0 (with REST) - Part 5 of n
Developing with mod_rails on Leopard
Want to try out mod_rails (AKA Passenger) in your development environment? Of course, you have multiple Rails apps and you set up new ones all the time. Here’s my recipe for developing with mod_rails on your mac.
Does Ruby's support for XML suck? I need your input.
Robert Fischer posts about his issues with the lack of commitment for XML on Ruby. He doesn’t like REXML too much either. [more inside]
Simple Acts_As_Ferret Tutorial
Simple and usefull Acts_As_Ferret Tutorial by Railsenvy.com
Free Rails Book Giveaway
Noel Rappin is giving away free copies of the book Professional Ruby on Rails, both at RailsConf and via the web. Details here.
Hands on tutorial on Ruby EventMachine (the speed demon)
Hands on tutorial / look at Ruby EventMachine (the speed demon).
Groovy syntactic sugar, compared with Ruby
The Groovy Language has a few scoops of syntax sugar that we just don’t have in Ruby. I wrote out a couple of these examples in the hopes that Ruby might pick some of these up.
BackgroundFu is now also a gem!
BackgroundFu makes running long background tasks in Rails dead simple. – I’ve just pushed a few changes to BackgroundFu and now it is also a gem. Some say that Rails plugins will die in favor of gems and I want you to be well prepared for that day :) Also, Rails 2.1 will have (check the Edge) great support for ‘vendorizing’ gems.
Support for international domain names in actionmailer
I’ve just created a small gem that patches actionmailer to support sending mails to domains with non-ascii characters.
RSpec-1.1.4 released
RSpec-1.1.4 was released today.
Datamapper 0.9 Released
Finally, your new favorite ORM has grown up to adolescence with the 0.9 release. Learn more at Datamapper.org.
21 Ruby Tricks
21 Ruby Tricks that you should know about (or at least recap).
Rails 2.1 features
Rolling with Rails 2.1 - The First Full Tutorial - Part 1 - Part 2
Coding font lineup
A coding font lineup has been posted on :ski_on_rails. Check it out if you’ve been looking for a nicer font to code in :)
Ruby autoload tip for just-in-time configuration of a Rails app
Quick tip describing how to use Ruby’s autoload facility to defer configuration of certain parts of a Rails app.
JRuby with Open Terracotta
Clustering JRuby with Open Terracotta (open source software that clusters the Java Virtual Machines)
rails-widgets
“Rails Widgets is a collection of UI widgets for RubyOnRails that you can put in your own application at the speed of light! With them you can add tabbed navigation, tables, tooltips in a snap.” (It’s the cleanest way of doing tab navigation that I’ve seen.)
Organised bioinformatics experiments
Bioinformatics Zen explains how bioinformatics experiments are using DataMapper and Rake in their workflow.
The AJAX Head Design Pattern
The “The AJAX Head Design Pattern” is the name for the design philosophies driving the rewrite of the HomeMarks.com application for Rails 2.1. In short the pattern forces the view and controller to work in isolation with the most minimal coupling possible. Kind of like a web service. Long, but videos are included.
Writing a blog in Rails 2.0.2 (not quite in 15 minutes)
A new ‘blog in 15 minutes’ tutorial by Olafski on :ski_on_rails