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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Web Scrapers with the upcoming scRUBYt!
There’s been another bundle of changes added to the latest edge version of the scRUBYt! web scraping toolkit. This article is likely to be the last in the introduction to web scraping series. Next will be getting into the nitty gritty with more complicated data manipulation within the scraper, and the new and very exciting scRUBYt! plugins.
Rails, meet Drupal
If you’ve been considering integrating (or replacing) your Drupal application with a Rails application, then Drupal Fu may come in handy.
Two great screencast sites for learning Ruby on Rails
Just wanted to pass on two sites that I have been utilizing for learning different aspects of Ruby on Rails. Learning Ruby On Rails, one step at a time
Have fun with Ruby and Shoes
After the runaway success of the first two batches of Ruby with Shoes, RubyLearning has just announced the third batch with an early bird offer. You will have fun all the way solving the new exercises with Shoes!
The power of JRuby
It’s true that I’m not the qualified guy to talk about Java’s power,as it has been 2 years since i last practiced it, but i feel like i have to communicate my thoughts to the people that didn’t give JRuby a trial yet, and why they should do so. If you never worked with Java before, then don’t panic, cause in these article i would list several reasons why JRuby is so powerful even if you don’t know anything about Java. So let’s start…
New gem for graphing gem dependencies: Gemviz
Gemviz is a new gem available on RubyForge. It takes as a input a list of gem names and outputs a graph per gem of each gem’s dependencies as reported by gem dep [gem_name], including a transitive reduction. See <a href=http://davidrupp.blogspot.com/2009/01/gem-is-born-announcing-gemviz.html>the official announcement</a> for more details.
message_block: An error_messages_for replacement for showing flash messages and validation messages
message_block handles showing ActiveRecord validation messages on (potentially multiple) models and flash messages (of different types: error, confirm, warn, etc.) in one helper. Messages are grouped by type and shown in “message blocks” with some default stylization and icons.
Acts As Teapot - Rails plugin
No, it’s not April Fools yet but we thought we’d get in early this year. Acts As Teapot is a Ruby on Rails plugin that ensures your Ruby on Rails applications conform to RFC2324. Our assumption here is that your application is not a coffee pot and does not understand the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0). Thus, if ever a BREW request or any other request with the Content-Type set to “application/coffee-pot-command” is received, the server will respond with 418 I’m a teapot.
CloudKit 0.10.0
Just released, CloudKit 0.10.0 supports this week’s Rack 0.9 release and batch URI resolution. More details on the blog.
Automatically wrap your Ruby on Rails actions in a transaction
restful_transactions is a Ruby on Rails plugin that, once installed, ensures that any controller action invoked using POST, PUT or DELETE will automatically be wrapped in a database transaction.
When ActiveRecord isn't quite enough
What do you do when your query logic is more complicated then ActiveRecord? Here are some ideas.
radarb - Use the outside.in API from Ruby
A ruby gem that makes using the outside.in API simple. http://github.com/vigetlabs/radarb/tree/master. Take a look at the blog post on Viget Extend to get a good description of what you can do with this gem and how to use it.
subdomain_account
A gem/plugin for rails that allows applications to scope resources to accounts by subdomains like basecamp does. http://github.com/shuber/subdomain_account. Plays nicely with http://github.com/shuber/authentication and subdomain-fu.
authorization
A simple and very flexible gem/plugin for rails that handles authorization. It requires you to write your own “authorized?” method on your User model (or whatever class you’re authorizing) which allows it to work with ANY type of permissions architecture. http://github.com/shuber/authorization.
Your opinions on the Rails / Merb merger are needed!
Someone I know is writing a feature on the Rails / Merb merger for the 2nd issue of The Rubyist (Ruby magazine). He/she will be interviewing several people but also wants to get a general community feel for the opinions surrounding the merge. So, say anything you want here on RubyFlow, get it all off your chest (extreme, intelligent, thoughtful, or otherwise) and you could be quoted and get your name in a shiny magazine article! (If you don’t want to be quoted, make sure you make that clear in your comment..)
Remarkable 2.1.4 - Simplifying tests for trivial things!
“For a long time I was evangelizing Shoulda at Surgeworks and used it in my personal projects. The fact is, I didn’t have much success in convincing my co-workers to adopt Shoulda. On the other hand, they managed to convince me to learn and use RSpec. I got to like RSpec more and more, so I decided to adopt it as my official testing framework from now on. But I can no longer live without the resources that Shoulda offers me. So I decided to scratch my itch.” Remarkable
Custom Passenger Error Templates
Passenger is a popular way of deploying a Ruby on Rails website, but have you ever wanted to change the error templates that Passenger provides?
Remove leading and trailing blanks from attr vals in Rails models
Somewhat like nillify_blanks, stripper converts blank field values to nil. However, it also removes (ie strips) leading and trailing blanks from the value first. Another distinction is that it performs this stripping whether or not the column allows nulls–I’m from the school that believes an empty string makes no sense as the value for a column marked as NOT NULL :).
How to use Sinatra (and other band members) to build an iPhone message tracker
There’s an article over at Technetra demonstrating how to use Sinatra, Ruby and other tools to drive a mobile client like the iPhone, and integrate it with a live data source. The client side is JavaScript and CSS customized for iPhone’s Safari (but playable for testing on a desktop browser like Firefox). The server side is all Ruby and Sinatra. Sinatra sings a simple but complete Web interface tune while core Ruby plays a drum beat with the live data feed – in this case the Bluez D-BUS message stream on Linux. The article is also notable because it’s presents a good example of how to write a module on top of ruby-dbus to monitor Linux’s Bluetooth subsystem.
Installing Git on Mac OS X Leopard and setting up a public repo on GitHub
Yes, I know, very basic and easy, but that’s the point, this is my blog about learning Ruby on Rails. This post explains the basics of installing Git on Mac OS X Leopard, getting a public repo setup on GitHub and communicating with it. Check it out at Learning Ruby on Rails, one step at a time
Screencast : How to Create a File Upload Progress Bar in Rails
An upload progress bar is one of the best ways to improve the usability of file uploads in your application. This screencast will show how to create a file upload progress bar using Rails, Passenger, Low Pro and the upload progress bar Apache module.
attr_encrypted
Generates attr_accessors that encrypt and decrypt attributes transparently. It can be used with ANY class, although you get a few more features if you’re using it with ActiveRecord. Its plugable encrypting backend makes it very flexible. http://github.com/shuber/attr_encrypted
DaemonKit - Create Ruby daemons in no time
Daemon Kit aims to simplify creating Ruby daemons by providing a sound application skeleton (through a generator), task specific generators (jabber bot, etc) and robust environment management code. Using simple built-in generators it is easy to created evented and non-evented daemons that perform a multitude of different tasks. The first version, 0.1 sports a jabber generator, with the evented jabber generator coming soon. The code is still pretty much rough around the edges, and it lives over at GitHub.
Take control of your field values with nilify_blanks
Hate how NULLable columns end up as empty strings in the database when models are used in conjunection with Rails forms? If you would prefer to keep the field NULL when the user doesn’t provide a value, nilify_blanks lets you do this automatically.