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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Terminitor Termfiles
Terminitor is a great tool for getting your development environment setup so that you can get to work faster. If you don’t know about it read up on it here. With the potential of people making awesome Termfiles we though it be great if they could be shared for others to use so we created the Termfile project, which is inspired by Chris Wanstrath (aka defunkt) gitignore project. Check it out and send us some of your Termfiles so others can use them.
Save Capistrano output on deploy
If you ever wanted your Capistrano output saved in case you need it, here’s a few lines of code that will fit nicely in your deploy.rb.
Benchmarking TorqueBox
TorqueBox goes to 11, but how does it compare to Trinidad, Unicorn, Passenger, and Thin? See how the top JRuby and MRI servers perform for Rails and Rack applications. http://bit.ly/tbbenchmark
Syntax highlighting in the terminal with ruby
I made a little script to read ruby files and spit them out coloured in the terminal. It can be used to replace cat eventually so that you can see the line number and highlighting. It only highlights ruby at the moment and highlights in aweful hard coded colours, but that’s easy to change. Future features could also include highlighting search strings passed through the second parameter.
Optimising Phusion Passenger for a VPS
We explain how we tuned one of our Virtual Private Servers with some basic configuration changes to Phusion Passenger. Click here to read the article.
Cucumber plus ad-hoc apps to test Rails 3 generators
An article explaining how to test Rails 3 generators using integration-like tools such as Cucumber, Aruba and generated ad-hoc apps.
Handle static list in your database (enums-like functionnality)
So, sometimes, In your application you may want to handle things in your User model like sex (female, male) or other static lists. You don’t like ENUM. You want these lists to be handled using ‘textual keys’ in your application but stored in your database using codes in an integer column. You don’t want to join other tables to display these information. You want these lists to be easily ordered, localized and translated using Rails i18n.You want view helpers to display these lists localized and validations helpers to validate the values in the ‘receiving’ model. That’s why we wrote static_list. It’s just a gem install away !
Authlogic gotchas
I know, nobody uses Authlogic anymore. But for those few who do, here are two tips which can save you a massive headache.
Ruby concurrency explained
I just wrote a blog post explaining concurrency in Ruby, the difference between concurrency in PHP, Java and Python/Ruby. What are the different ways to achieve concurrency and their pros/cons.
friendly_digest a Gem to reduce typos in ID strings
The friendly_digest gem tries to reduce user mistakes when they are referring to an ID. It removes 0,O,1,L characters and jumbles things up to make them look non-sequential. It also removes case sensitivity. Optionally, you can add an extra character as a checksum so that can be more confident there was no typo.
Ruby on Rails workshops in Boston
If you’re a developer in the Boston area looking to sharpen your skills, Fairhaven Capital and thoughtbot have teamed up to offer training courses in Boston at 50% off regular price ($600 for 2 full days of training, intro and advanced levels). Details
Introduction to Sass (7 Minutes)
We’ve just released the Introduction to Sass as a follow up to the popular Haml screencast which Peter Cooper posted on Ruby flow a week ago. We cover all the goodness of Sass, including variables, mixins, nestings and selector inheritance, as well as how to convert your existing CSS to Sass in a flash. Check it out.
Cucumber Testing Tips
Neeraj Singh discusses a few handy cucumber testing tips. Learn an easy way to debug using cucumber as well as how to run just a single feature.
Setting up your custom Hoptoad Notifier endpoint for free using Errbit on Heroku
A step-by-step guide on setting up Errbit with SSL on Heroku to use it as your own, free hoptoad_notifier endpoint for exception tracking.
ENUMs in Rails
I just wrote an article on using ENUMs in Rails - I describe why and how to get them into your rails applications and some potential problems
Programming Homework Help
Go and check AssignmentExpert.com. These guys are doing great job and can help you with every programming problem online! (Ed: Careful here..)
Productive development environment with ZSH, Vim and Git
A brief article describing our development environment at Codegram, and the tools that make us productive :)
Optimizing Ruby on Rails applications with NodeJS
A blog post by PerfectLine describing how NodeJS helped to ease the load on a Ruby on Rails application, by leveraging the evented HTTP handling on a costly and frequently used AJAX query.
Rubinius: What's next? (Plus.. a look at its Ruby-based internals)
Some interesting Rubinius blog posts in the last couple of days. First, Brian Ford showed us what’s next for Rubinius (including scarily good concurrency, Windows support, JIT fun and more) and then Yehuda Katz decided to get us comfortable with Rubinius’ pure Ruby internals. There’s a lot of great stuff to pick up from both of these posts if the nitty-gritty of implementing Ruby interests you.
Introducing the Developing Rubyist
I just started a blog detailing my experiences with Ruby and chronicling the development of a dominos-based game I’m working on called 42.
Phusion Releases REE 1.8.7-2011.02
Phusion (the Passenger guys) have released Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2011.02 (try saying that quickly) in response to the recent Ruby security vulnerabilities. It gives you an up to date Ruby 1.8.7 with all of Phusion’s memory and performance tweaks along with RubyGems 1.5.
How do I increase user registrations using Rails and Gigya?
Do you already have a web-portal running for years and you want to use different social networks to increase user registrations? Can you afford to keep integrating newer social networks and deprecate older ones? The blog post shows how to use Rails and Gigya widgets to achieve the same.
Ruleby (Episode 89 from the SD Ruby podcast)
Chris McCann demonstrates Ruleby, a Ruby implementation of a rules engine based on the Rete algorithm. Watch episode