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!
Submit a post
Post Preview
Note: Only the first pargraph is shown on the front page and overly long paragraphs may be broken up.
Jump to method definitions in gems with ctags
Vim and Emacs users can easily jump to any method definition in a project using ctags. You can also configure ctags to let you jump to any method in your bundled gems; this quick post shows you how… Using ctags with bundled gems in Vim
Auto-retry transactions on deadlocks in a db-agnostic way
I recently published transaction_retry gem. It’s like good old deadlock_retry but works across all major databases, is well tested against Rails 3.x and supports all isolation levels (not only the default REPEATABLE READ). The gem was extracted from a large financial application and comes with good test coverage. Give it a try if you see errors like these: [more inside]
Rails Testing for Zombies
We just launched Rails Testing for Zombies. Play the first level free (you don’t even have to make an account). If you’re unsure about Rails testing, or just want to solidify your knowledge – this course is a blast. Enjoy!
Fun with Rock, Paper, Scissors
Fun with Rock, Paper, Scissors. Today on Rake Routes we dive into Ruby Quiz #16: creating player strategies to win at rock, paper, scissors. We start with the simplest of strategies and work all the way up into players that rewrite the game logic itself to guarantee a win.
Wizard-ify Your Rails Controllers with Wicked
Use Wicked to turn any Rails controller into a step-by-step wizard. To get started read the post or watch the screencast.
Too LESS? Should You Be Using Sass?
As the author of less-rails and less-rails-bootstrap, I would love to explain why you should not be using LESS and Sass instead.
Global Hack Day #2, Thursday 3/8
The idea of having weekly or monthly hack nights has worked great for Ruby users groups all over the world, but the folks at Mendicant University feel like the internet deserves a similiar kind of event. Our next gathering is on Thursday 3/8 from 19:00 - 03:00 UTC. Please join us if you can! You can bring your own project to share and work on, or you can help others by offering code reviews and patches to their projects.
Life in a shade of ruby
I just posted an article about my rendition of Conway’s Game of Life in Ruby, you should read it here.
TDD’ing a Ruby refactor: “Module Extraction”
A simple example of how you can extract some logic from a model into a module that is reusable..
Aggresive caching with nginx and the Rails asset pipeline
In this post, I explain how to cache your Rails assets properly using nginx. This is one of the easiest and most effective performance optimizations you can make for you app, and can reduce page load times by seconds(!) on high latency connections.
New gem: rack-allow-from - white listed hosts can connect to your app
I just launched rack-allow-from, white listed host controls. Add hosts, like config.allow_from += ["1.2.3.4", "8.8.8.*", "example.com", "*.example.com"] to your application.rb. One caveat, using hostnames requires the client send the header X-Remote-Hostname (see the docs). Everyone else gets 403 unauthorized access… Tests and some docs to boot.
Go-powered web-services with Rails
Hey folks, my new blog post about Go-powered web-services with Rails is out. Enjoy!
Transaction isolation with ActiveRecord
I just launched transaction_isolation gem. It allows you to set transaction isolation level in a database agnostic way. [more inside]
Faye 0.8: new WebSocket and Redis libraries, and performance improvements
I just shipped version 0.8 of Faye, the pub/sub messaging toolkit for the Web. It splits the WebSocket support and Redis backend into new libraries, and makes it possible for 3rd parties to implement their own pluggable backends. Everything you need to know is on the blog.
Strict Validations in ActiveModel
Rails v3.2 has added the concept of strict validations. I briefly explain how they work and how to configure them.
Command Line Reporter 3.2 Released
The latest version of Command Line Reporter now supports unicode drawing characters for better looking output if your ruby version supports unicode. Check out the wiki to see examples of nicely formatted tables. As always The gem is available on rubygems.org with source on github. For those not familiar with “the reporter”, it provides a ruby DSL for writing reports with built in features for progress reporting and table formatting. It is very handy for system level and data reporting scripts.
How to extend the Redcarpet 2 Markdown library?
Redcarpet is a nice lib for parsing Markdown and rendering HTML (or other formats) from it. I explained how to extend it to generate an HTML tailored for your special needs.
Mutation testing with Mutant
I just released a new version of Mutant, a mutation tester for Rubinius, and blogged about it.
Command line Pow wrapper
I just launched pow-client, a simple command line wrapper for simplifying Pow workflows.
RailsApps starter app with Devise "Confirmable" and "Invitable"
Not such a big thing, but the rails3-devise-rspec-cucumber example app is popular and now it offers an option for including the Devise “Confirmable” and “Invitable” modules when you use the application template to create a starter app. Devise once included the “Confirmable” module by default; since it was removed there have been questions about how to set it up. The starter app does it for you and includes Cucumber tests as a bonus. It’s all in an update to the rails_apps_composer gem that I use to build the application templates.
Yahoo Placemaker
I just launched yahoo-placemaker which is a gem that simplifies the process of interacting w/ the Yahoo Placemaker API so you don’t have to!
Documentation: ARel with ActiveRecord
I really like ARel, but I find its lack of documentation an unreasonably high barrier to using it… And since no one I work with was willing to read their code and tests, to figure out how to use it, I wrote a coupla things about it. For a nice cutsey scenario see this post or for a simple reference see this slideshare.
Add some spell check to your view tests
I just created merimee, a gem that gives you some nice macros to add automatic spell checking to your view specs… Make your specs red if there’s a spelling error in your views ! Full tutorial available there.
AJAX Pagination - The easy way to add AJAX to site navigation
I just launched AJAX Pagination. It is specifically designed to make it easy to add AJAX functionality to your site, so that when navigating pages with AJAX, only the specific content will reload. It is so easy to use, you don’t have to touch a single line of javascript. [more inside]