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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Amazon SimpleDB and Rails. BDD style.
I just wrote a quick description on how can you run M/DB to replace SimpleDB for development and testing.
It's time for a new BDDCasts episode
If in the previous episode we saw how to create search terms for a Brand, in this one, we’ll see how to remove them. Also, there’s a bit of refactoring of “Manage Brand” feature and an interesting way to add ‘special’ Cucumber steps. Towards the end of the episode, you’ll see the helpfull Git.tmbundle. And, you’re welcome to post your thoughts or suggestions in the new comments section.
RailsBizCast - Because writing good rails code is just one part of equation
I just launched RailsBizcast. This blog is collection of my daily learnings and reflections on marketing, client interactions, general productivity and strategy while developing ruby on rails applications.
Rails Geopositioning with Google Maps
A common problem when building a Rails web application that deals with addresses is geopositioning. This article teaches you how to validate an address and geoposition it (latitude & longitude) on a map.
counter_cache as an optimization step
I had a debate with a programmer friend of mine once about optimization. I argued that once you get past adding indexes to a relational database, every attempt at increasing its speed or scaling is an act of denormalization. Whether its double storing information in the database in such a way that it can be read more efficiently by different queries or its adding in a cacheing layer—be it key-value-esque or page/fragment caching your view layer—it’s all essentially doing the same thing: making your DBA’s head explode
Kicker: A lean, agnostic, flexible file-change watcher, using OS X FSEvents.
After a few months of building and collecting recipes we use on our development machines, I have now finally released Kicker 2. It comes with recipes for rails and javascript testing, and best of all, it’s still usable for absolutely anything besides testing. The gem is now hosted on http://gemcutter.org, which was a breeze to use. Now start writing them recipes and send me pull requests! :)
Easy Breezy Sinatra Development
Have a great app idea but not much time to develop it? Shoes and a Shotgun was created for the web developer short on time. It uses Shoes for Ruby / Gems Support, Thin for the web-server, and Shotgun so you don’t have to restart the server to see changes. Shoes and a Shotgun makes developing apps for Sinatra or any other Rack-enabled framework a breeze.
Request-Log-Analyzer 1.4 Released
Request-Log-Analyzer, a command line tool that analyzes logfiles and generates performance reports has lots of great stuff in the 1.4.0 release. Support for more log formats, standard deviation reporting, speed improvements, and more.
Fork support for RubyGems
We’ve been talking lately in #gemcutter about how we can deal better with “namespaced” gems. Check out this wiki page and let us know which solution (or come up with your own!) you’d prefer.
Videos from WindyCityRails 20009 posted
The videos from WindyCityRails are up on the WCR site.
StackOverflow cool Ruby questions series
I’m announcing in this post an endless series called Stackoverflow cool Ruby questions which will target cool Ruby questions on stackoverflow. I strongly recommend that you visit Stackoverflow on daily basis and try to participate if you have the time, but if you don’t, then I hope that you will enjoy this educational series.
Send and receive faxes via efax
The latest release of efax now supports receiving faxes via http://efaxdeveloper.com. It already supported sending faxes, but you knew that already, you clever thing you. sudo gem install efax
Ruby Inside Redesigned! (Search, iPhone styling & more added)
Long overdue, the redesign of Ruby Inside is live! There’s now a search function, featured posts, an extended “popular Ruby links today” section (though to be improved further), an iPhone stylesheet, and a bunch of other fun. Rails Inside has picked up a new design too in a more controversial purple colorway..
Cookie-based Sessions in Sinatra
A guest post by Julio Javier Cicchelli on how to use Cookie-based sessions in Sinatra.
MemCache and expire_fragment
expire_fragment and regexp key = failure, for those who weren’t aware. Read more
Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-20090928 released
Release announcement here. Twitter is already using it and they’re experiencing a 30% boost in throughput.
Ruby gem for pen balancer
If you use the pen balancer in one of your ruby or rails projects, this will come in handy. With penctl-ruby you can add and remove servers to a pen server list and to change settings without the need to restart the pen balancer. Without the need for a penctl binary.
Euruko 2009 videos are now available
The Euruko 2009 team has uploaded all the talks’ videos on euruko blip.tv account. The official announcement is here. If someone is interested in the slides and other materials for the talks, they can be found at the talks site.
ActiveRecord Oracle enhanced adapter version 1.2.2
New version of ActiveRecord Oracle enhanced adapter is released with many new features - add foreign key constraints and synonyms, access tables over database link, logging from PL/SQL procedures etc.
NeverBlock saves Alsaha.com
NeverBlock helps a big Rails site overcome a surge in traffic.
Configurable Rails Flash Message Helper
I am in no way the first person to create a flash message plugin, but the plugins that I did come across lacked any type of configuration or flexibility. I ended up creating my own configurable flash_messages_helper.
Testing On Different Ruby Versions / Interpreters with rvm
Quick and simple trick to test that your gem/app runs properly on different rubies (1.8.x, 1.9, jruby, etc) using rvm
RubyMine 2 Beta, new features, discounted Beta price
The most intelligent and rapidly developing Ruby/Rails IDE JetBrains RubyMine goes 2.0 Beta. Read and see more about the new features and download RubyMine 2.0 Beta. RubyMine 2.0 will be available in mid-October and, according to the licensing policy, free for all existing users. During the Beta period you can buy RubyMine for only $79!
New Tutorial On Writing ExtJS/Rails Components With The Netzke Framework
Check out the new illustrated tutorial, which leads you trough the process of creating a complex widget (with shiny ExtJS as front-end, and Ruby-on-Rails as backend) with several lines of code. Learn how to use new powerful features of the Netzke framework introduced in the latest release. The results of the tutorial are presented as live demo.
Using Nginx with Passenger to run Rails apps with script/nginx
A guide to installing Nginx and Passenger, and then adding a script/nginx file to your Rails app as an alternative to script/server. The instructions are written for Snow Leopard, but should be useful for other Unix operating systems.