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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Screencast: Watch Me Patch Some Rails Code
I contributed a little patch to Rails tonight, and decided to record myself as I was doing it. Check out the screencast.
Searching With Solr (Episode 87 from the SD Ruby podcast)
Get up and running in no time with enterprise-grade search powered by Solr. Nick Zadrozny shows you what Solr can do, how it works, and how you can make the most of it in production. Watch episode
CSS3, HTML5 and how to degrade gracefully
A collection of tricks and resources we use on Codegram’s website to enable beautiful and gracefully degrading front-ends.
Travis - a distributed build server tool for the Ruby community
Travis is an attempt to build an open distributed Ruby build system that allows open-source projects to register a repository and have their test-suites run on demand as well as contribute build capacities by connecting a VM that runs a build worker on their underused servers. [more inside]
Acceptance tests with Cucumber, Devise, Omniauth and Twitter
We just published an article about Twitter authentication with Rails 3, BDD style!
Interview with John Nunemaker
An interview with John Nunemaker, a Ruby on Rails developer best known for RailsTips, MongoMapper, and Harmony.
A Unit Testing Framework In 44 Lines Of Ruby
Have you ever wondered what it would take to write a unit testing framework in Ruby, I did, which in turn led me to wonder what the smallest possible viable framework would be. Turns out, it’s even smaller than I thought.
Rails Tips: Using Class Variables as Cache
Looking for a fast and easy way to persist data across requests? Class Variables as Cache might be your answer
Using Sinatra with Bundler to deploy on Heroku
I wrote a short article on using Sinatra and Bundler together on an app that is being deployed on Heroku.
New logging gem
I have recently launched lumberjack, a simple, powerful, and very fast logging utility that can be a drop in replacement for Logger or ActiveSupport::BufferedLogger. It can put more information in the log files and can be configured to log to different devices such as syslog or mongodb or to automatically rolling log files based on size or date.
Rails Test Prescriptions out of beta and shipping
Rails Test Prescriptions is out of beta, and will start shipping in the next day or so. It’s a comprehensive guide to testing Rails applications, covering Test-Driven Development from both a theoretical perspective (why to test) and from a practical perspective (how to test effectively). It covers the core Rails testing tools and procedures for Rails 2 and Rails 3, and introduces popular add-ons, including RSpec, Shoulda, Cucumber, Factory Girl, and Rcov. Thanks to all of you that have been supportive!
Mobile Web Apps Using jQTouch (Episode 86 from the SD Ruby podcast)
Patrick Crowley dives into the world of mobile app development and shows how to use the jQTouch framework to quickly build awesome mobile-optimized web apps. Watch episode
The challenge of asset packaging on Heroku
An overview of the current approaches to packaging CSS and JS files in Rails applications and the challenges we face using them on Heroku.
Firewool, a firewalling gem for rails 3
I just published firewool, a rails 3 firewall in sheep’s clothing. It lets you specify IPs you want allowed and blocked with a filter. So you can restrict IP access to controller actions and therefore, URLs. There are more ideas of usage in the README.
RSpec best practices
I’ve just created an article, where I make some summaries on the best practices on using RSpec. Its based on articles, books and my experience. For now the document is editable from everyone, so whoever have any suggestion, just put them in.
Lazy load your heavy work through dunder
To increase performance typically one might want start multiple heavy tasks concurrent. This is already solvable with threads or the reactor-pattern but setting this up could be cumbersome or require direct interactions with threads etc. What inspired me was the quest to run concurrent database queries within a single request in rails. I just released dunder which tries to solve that problem. For a working example app check this one out: dunder-rails-demo
Magic Ruby Roundup
Last week, I attended the MagicRuby conference in Orlando. In this blog post, I tell you (a) where to find slides/video, (b) who would be most interested in each talk, and (c) what I think the most important points are.
Contributing to Rails 101: Your first patch
I created a screencast to help new Rails developers get their first patch into Rails. Check it out!
rails_best_practices 0.7.0 released
I just released rails_best_practices 0.7.0, it adds remove trailing whitespace check and use multipart/alternative as content_type of email check support, I also did some refactorings and added better html output support. See more changelogs here.
Ruby Enumerables: Operation on hashes
I wrote the second post about Ruby Hashes: Ruby Enumerables: Operation on hashes.
Real Web Based Console
Couple weeks ago I worked on making a web based shell. Before, I started googling web based shell, but couldn’t find what I was looking for. Later, I decided to start build my own with my own view. I picked Sinatra Web Framework for its ease of use for building APIs. And here I talk about the concept of it.
Introduction to Haml Screencast (6 minutes)
Screencasts.org has released Introduction to Haml, a (free) screencast that introduces you to a popular (but somewhat divisive) Ruby templating library. If you already love/hate Haml, this isn’t going to sway you but if you’re new to it, check it out.
New RubyGems search using Picky
I’ve written a new style RubyGems search. It adds author, version and dependency searches (i.e. who uses your gem). There’s examples to try on the gemsearch page. Blog post on the whys and hows.
Slice and dice Cucumber run-times
Inspired by The road to faster tests and Crank Your Specs, I decided to apply the delayed/enforced garbage collector technique to a fairly large Cucumber test suite that I have.