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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The Ruby Rogues discuss Databases, SQL, and NoSQL
The Ruby Rogues (this week, Charles Max Wood, Aaron Patterson, Peter Cooper, James Edward Gray II, and Fernand Galiana) have a new episode of their podcast up where they discuss databases, key value stores, and the SQL/NoSQL debate.
Campfire Handler for Chef
I just launched the Campfire_Handler gem. Sends Chef Exceptions to a Campfire room.
Released cucumber-websteps 0.9.0 gem
I just launched cucumber-websteps - advanced collection of web steps, based on cucumber-rails’s web steps.
Deploying a Rails 3.1 application to production (the gotchas)
I’ve just published a blog post about the gotchas I encountered while deploying a Rails 3.1 application to production that might prove useful with the pending Rails 3.1 release.
RubyGems is not a BattleField: Part I
For the last several days I’ve been collecting feedback from RubyGems users and contributors to try to get to the heart of what is causing so much drama. On May 25th, I spent a long time on the phone with Eric and Ryan talking about what they can do to help make things better. Here are the notes from our meeting, I think it’s a good start.
Rails 3.0.8 RC1 Released
Aaron ‘tenderlove’ Patterson has written a highly stylized announcement of Rails 3.0.8 RC1’s release:
Powder: Making Pow Even Easier
Powder is a gem that makes using 37signals’ handy Pow server even easier. It turns adding a project to your Pow setup down a simple powder at the command line, powder open to load the page in your browser, and that’s it.
A perspective on MacRuby from a Rails coder's POV
The MacRuby framework is a fresh and exciting way for us Ruby developers to build native Mac OS X applications. As you work your way through MacRuby’s undocumented areas you’ll need to wield a lot of patience and creativity. That’s the price you pay for being on the vanguard of the MacRuby movement. [more inside]
Render QR codes easily from your Rails 3 application
After reading José Valim’s first chapter on custom renderers in Crafting Rails Applications, I put together a quick QR Code renderer. Supports SVG (print!) and PNG. [more inside]
HireFire - The Heroku Worker Manager
A while back I released HireFire, an open source RubyGem which allows you to auto-scale your Heroku workers, which saves you money and enables faster job processing. This went fine for a while, but unavoidable issues occurred due to Heroku’s platform limitations. [more inside]
An inside look at how heroku handles downtime with Mark Imbriaco
Sit back and learn how heroku works, what technologies they use, and how they handle a downtime situation.
Abuse your SQL server as KeyValue store (+HandlerSocket)
With key_value its easy as KeyValue[‘config’] = {:foo=>:bar} to persist e.g. configuration into your Sql store. And if you want to go 750k-qps-crazy you can activate MySql-HandlerSocket support! check out key_value on github
Testing with Sunspot and Cucumber
After having some headaches testing with sunspot, we brainstormed a pattern to launch a sunspot instance while testing. After successfully using it for a while, we decided to release the pattern as a gem so you can enjoy it. Check out sunspot_test and our blog post http://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2011/05/25/testing-with-sunspot-and-cucumber/ describing it.
Simple Database Export and Import With Character Encoding Conversion
There is a gem called ydd that offers really simple import and export of smallish databases. It exports to YAML and then imports to whatever database Rails can connect to. After using YDD a few times I’ve found it easier to pinpoint the cause of problems that occur using taps. [more inside]
Capify-ec2: Generate capistrano namespaces using ec2 tags
Capify-ec2 is a little plugin for capistrano that generates namespaces based on your ec2 tags. Check it out on github: https://github.com/forward/capify-ec2
Using CoffeeScript with nanoc static site builder
If you want to build your web page in plain html, but program in ruby/erb/haml etc., you can use nanoc builder. Also, if you dont work directly with javascript, use coffescript (as partial or asset). Here are step-by-step instructions of how to do this.
Protecting you paperclip downloads
Paperclip download protection.
Release Candidate for Radiant 1.0
We’ve just released the first release candidate for Radiant 1.0; the last Rails 2 version. [more inside]
Vim for Rails developers: Recursive macros and Ack.vim
I just published recursive macros and ack.vim in my vim for rails developers series.
A voting extension from scratch for Rails 3 (Part 5)
Part 5 of the blog series about developing the MakeVoteable is an introduction to writing migration generators the Rails 3 way and testing them with RSpec using the generator_spec gem.
Rails + Backbone.js app that works offline
I just made a simple web app with Rails and Backbone.js that works both online and offline.
Mending the RubyGems Fences
Yesterday I wrote an unsurprisingly controversial appeal for folks to stop raging against the RubyGems maintainers. Today, I’ve written a followup about how we can mend fences and make things better. If you’re someone who’s frustrated with RubyGems, I want to hear from you!
Screencast on how callbacks work in Rails
BigBinary just published a screencast on How callbacks work in Rails .
Making Migrations Faster and Safer
Baron Schwartz outlines the importance of reviewing migrations to ensure all ALTER TABLE are combined into a single one.