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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Using Facebook callbacks with Rails
Robert Shedd wrote a blog post on how to use Facebook’s post-authorize and post-deauthorize callbacks in a Rails-built Facebook app to track which users have added and removed the application.
Shoulda Macros for Testing (Not) Logged-In Filters
A new blog article: In any Rails app with a user system, certain actions are likely to have a before_filter to ensure that a user is either logged in or not logged in before accessing those actions. With Shoulda, we can easily create a few macros which make testing this behavior as simple as adding a single line to the test context for each action that uses one of these filters.
Efficient, Immutable, Thread-Safe Collection classes for Ruby
Started as a spike to prove a point, Hamster has since morphed into something usable with Persistent Data Structure implementations of Hash, Set, List, and Stack. My primary concern has been to round out the functionality with good test coverage and clean, readable code. It’s still a work in progress but as I said, definitely useable now.
Rack::Rewrite 0.2.1 Released
I just released Rack::Rewrite 0.2.1. Rack::Rewrite is a web-server agnostic rack middleware for defining and applying rewrite rules. In many cases you can get away with Rack::Rewrite instead of writing Apache mod_rewrite rules. To install, simply run gem install rack-rewrite.
Oracle PL/SQL unit testing with Ruby
I created screencasts showing how to do Oracle PL/SQL unit testing with Ruby using ruby-plsql and RSpec.
Fat Free CRM 0.9.9b released, adds support for localization.
Fat Free CRM is Ruby on Rails-based customer relationship management platform. Check out the release notes and fork the source at Fat Free CRM project page on Github.
BirdWatch: MacRuby Twitter Search App Released
An open-source twitter search client written in MacRuby, using the apple PubSub framework and the twitter search atom api. read more here
gem install woot
Scrapes woot.com sites: http://github.com/shuber/woot. Also allows you to receive live updates from woot’s twitter streams.
A name-your-own-price Rails Workshop (SE Michigan)
Totally appropriate in the state hit hardest by the economic downturn. More info on registering.
Ruby Tips from Evan Phoenix: Numeric Classes
A short post by Evan Phoenix on the Engine Yard Blog.
The Ruby Reflector
The Ruby Reflector is a Social News website for the ruby and rails programming community. It’s purpose is to promote quality content from great authors. Articles are scored and ranked based on data from the social web, and marked up with tags that allow for wiki-pedia style navigation through the content, and pivoting around interesting people, companies, products, and projects.
Cramp - Asynchronous framework for the web
Cramp provides model and controller layers for writing asynchronous web applications. Check out my introductory post for more.
flyerhzm-metric_fu = metric_fu + rails_best_practices
I have forked metric_fu and add rails_best_practices to it. rails_best_practices is a great gem to check your rails app codes and give you some good suggestions for better rails codes. Check the flyerhzm-metric_fu for your rails app.
Geektool + Twitter updates on your desktop using ruby
Here is a small ruby script to display the latest tweet in your timeline on your Mac OS X desktop with Geektool. Just make the script a executable. Click here This could be modified using oAuth so your not exposing your login infomation .
Driving Large Scale, Multi-Language Development With Cucumber
We use Cucumber to drive the development of our entire stack. Currently, this consists of 3 Java applications and a Rails application that interact with MySQL and a HDFS data store. Every single time we check in new code we build the entire stack in TeamCity and run our entire suite of functional tests against it.
Mocking and Stubbing are evil
A blog post about the pitfalls of using mocks and stubs in your functional testing.
Flow Analysis & Time-based Bloom Filters
Working with large streams of data is becoming increasingly widespread, be it for log, user behavior, or raw firehose analysis of user generated content. Time-based bloom filters are just the tool for the job & the bloomfilter gem now implements a Redis-backed, counting, time-based bloom filter!
Sending secure passwords without SSL
Post describing how to use jQuery and OpenSSL HMAC to keep passwords secure, without needing SSL.
rate and tag MongoMapper objects in Rails!
Just released two new Rails plugins for apps using MongoMapper: acts_as_mongo_rateable adds classic rating support plus weighted rates and bayesian averages… and acts_as_mongo_taggable adds standard tagging functionality with some roundup and statistics methods to help build tag clouds and ranked lists. Both have pretty thorough tests, but there are still likely bugs to shake out. Please fork, contribute, and send pull requests if you fix bugs, improve performance, or add new stuff.
Rails and Merb Merge: Performance (Part 2 of 6)
Yehuda Katz wrote a great article on merging rails and merb which includes great examples and some benchmarks.
Which Ruby CMS Should I Use?
I am evaluating some of the CMS projects in the Ruby world. If you are interested check it out at and I hope the information there is helpful.
Easily accelerate your Rails tests under Ubuntu
Quick post about optimizing Ubuntu mounting options in order to accelerate your test suites. (read the post). It worked for me and accelerated my tests by 55%.
Multiple sets of independent validations with validation_scopes
I cooked up ValidationScopes to expose the full power of ActiveRecord validations to more than one set of errors. Useful if you want to display different sets of errors in different contexts and still be able to save the object regardless of the additional validation sets’ state. It is about as loosely coupled as possible to ActiveRecord::Validations which means you can expect a smooth transition to Rails 3.
Learn more about MongoMapper
This article will help you during your MongoMapper learning phase by explaining a few features not yet documented.
Gem webhooks on Gemcutter
Get notifications of gems as they’re pushed to any URL you want. Read more here and check out an example app that uses this new feature.