Building Web Apps

Phusion Passenger 3.0.0 final released

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 20:53:05 GMT

Passenger 3 adds a lot of performance improvements, plus compatibility for Rails 3, Ruby 1.9.2, RVM and Bundler

Application Mashing with Rails, Sinatra & Rack

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 05:23:51 GMT

jQuery in Action, Second Edition

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 21:36:18 GMT

Probably the best jQuery book ever gets a second edition for jQuery 1.4 and jQuery UI 1.8. Excellent "labs" help you experiment with jQuery while reading along. Both a learning guide and reference resource you'll want to keep handy.

jQuery: Novice to Ninja

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 21:34:24 GMT

Gentle introduction from almost complete novice to intermediate level jQuery developer.

Agile Web Development with Rails (4th Ed)

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:50:21 GMT

The original, must have Ruby on Rails book gets a worthy update for the new Rails 3 world.

The Well-Grounded Rubyist

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:47:53 GMT

An extremely clear introduction to the Ruby programming language.

Joe Celko's Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:45:20 GMT

Excellent resource for intermediate and advanced SQL developers (regardless of DB) who want to understand a variety of strategies for representing networks, trees, and other hierarchical data structures in a relational database.

Metaprogramming Ruby: Program Like the Ruby Pros

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:41:15 GMT

Metaprogramming is a technique every Ruby programmer should have in his repertoire of tools. This book walks through the Ruby fundamentals required to fully understand and learn metaprogramming.

Riding Rails: Ruby on Rails 2.3.9 Released

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:26:17 GMT

Rails 2.3.9 continues bug fixes in the 2.3 branch and acts as a transition bridge to 3.0.

Riding Rails: Rails 3.0: It's ready!

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:24:00 GMT

Official Rails 3.0 Release post by DHH

Railscasts - Upgrading to Rails 3 Part 3

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:19:30 GMT

Railscasts - Upgrading to Rails 3 Part 2

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:18:52 GMT

Railscasts - Upgrading to Rails 3 Part 1

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:18:09 GMT

BuildingWebApps now on the latest Webvanta platform

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:40:01 GMT

We've just completed a rebuild of BuildingWebApps to move it to the latest Webvanta platform. It is now just another Webvanta site — which means that everything you see here you could build yourself, without any programming.

From your perspective, there should be virtually no difference, but it's a big deal for us. BuildingWebApps is the very first site that we built, as the company that was originally called Collective Knowledge Works and evolved into Webvanta.

Originally, we built a full-custom Rails application. Then it evolved into a multitenant application that could host multiple information portal sites. And then it evolved into a general-purpose content mangement system that can built information portals and just about anything else.

As Webvanta evolved, there was a lot of legacy code that was needed just for the old BuildingWebApps site, which was built before many of the general-purpose mechanisms that are now part of Webvanta existed. With the recent release of Webvanta 2.0, we've purged all that old, special-purpose code, and entirely rebuilt BuildingWebApps within the current Webvanta environment. (Thanks to Matt Meyers who did the majority of the work.)

Another piece of this was moving this blog, which until now ran on Mephisto, a separate Rails application. Now that Webvanta has a full-featured blog, we were able to move the blog into the main site.

In the process, there have been some broken links, broken feeds, and missing images. We think we have those all fixed up now, but if you spot any problems, please let us know.

Versions

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:31:01 GMT

Nice little utility library for managing multiple versions of libraries on the same page (jQuery in particular).

LearningRails Sample App Update

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:50:32 GMT

Rails marches on, and the LearningRails screencast sample app was getting a little creaky. Sorry for that!

I’ve updated the application on github so that you can run the tests and the application itself using the current Rails as of this writing (2.3.2).

In the future, I’m looking at providing alternate versions of the intermediate steps of the application that are built and are compatible with Rails 2.3.x.

I’ll announce any updates here in this Blog as well as twitter: @chaupt

Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:38:22 GMT

Discusses both technical aspects of optimization (mostly front-end), and SEO (search-engine optimization) and SEM (search-engine marketing) concepts.

jQuery in Action

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:35:49 GMT

Very easy introduction to jQuery, though a little out of date _already_ as it focuses mostly on 1.2, and 1.3 makes some important changes. Still good for general concepts. (See 2nd Edition for newer doc)

Top 50 Ruby on Rails Websites

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:15:39 GMT

Good list of high-profile Rails sites.

Skipping ActiveRecord Callback Methods

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:37:15 GMT

Web 2.0 Expo: Social Media

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 04:32:09 GMT

The conference sessions at Web 2.0 Expo had a major emphasis on social media. I only attended a couple of these talks, about which I have brief comments below; at the end of the article, I have links to several others.

Social Media Marketing - why it fails and how to fix it

This one felt somewhat remedial to me, with the essential points being:

Be authentic. You need to be a person, not just a representative of a company.
It's hard to change the marketing culture in an organization to deal well with social media. (A point that I was glad to gloss over, being in my tiny organization that doesn't have this sort of problem.)
It's a conversation. (If in doubt, go read The Cluetrain Manifesto.)

The Whuffie Factor

Taking a completely different approach to similar material, Tara Hunt gave what I found to be the most inspiring and engaging talk of the conference: The Whuffie Factor.

Since both the slides and the video have been posted, I'll let her speak for herself.

Slides

Whuffie at Web 2.0 Expo

View more presentations from Tara Hunt.

Video

The Whuffie Factor: The 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities (Tara Hunt) from Steffan Antonas on Vimeo.

Other Social Media Talks

Web 2.0 Expo: Web Developer Tools

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:39:08 GMT

Ben Galbraith and Dio Almaer of Ajaxian and the developer tools group at Mozilla gave a wide-ranging talk on web developer tools. They noted that the web often seems more like a hack than a platform — it's amazing that developers are able to make web apps do the things they do. This is especially true with Ajax raising the bar for interactivity, and sites turning into applications instead of documents. They're out to make the web a better platform.

Some future technologies that have them excited:

HTML5 canvas
Fast JavaScript — kicked off by Chrome, Firefox's TraceMonkey
Web workers, giving web apps the ability to have background threads
Desktop integration, such as Fluid, Prism, Adobe Air, and Titanium

As part of its efforts to improve the web as a platform, Mozilla is working on an open web tools directory, as well as a variety of development projects.

Ben and Dio noted that Firebug blew away existing tools and set a new standard for web development tools, providing a comprehensive set of tools in the browser itself. Other browsers have followed with IE8 and Safari 3.0 both providing good tools.

Mozilla Labs has a relatively new project called Bespin, a web-based code editor that is intended to be a showcase for HTML 5. This project is still young, and it won't run on an flavor of IE for a while, but it looks very promising.

Mozilla Labs is also working on a grid-based layout system using JavaScript and HTML5 canvas; so far, there's not much on the web site about this project, but an announcement is due soon.

Web 2.0 Expo: TV and Radio with an API

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:41:55 GMT

National Public Radio (NPR) is changing what it means to be a news organization. While traditional news organizations want to keep their content close, NPR has taken the approach of making content widely available via an API – an approach they call "brand and release." They've made 250,000 stories, going back 13 years, available through their API.

Zack Brand from NPR said that the NPR API is getting about 2 million requests per month, and there are 1,300 registrants (you have to register to get access to the API). Content is available in a variety of formats; so far, 51% of requests use XML, 20% RSS, and 23% widgets.

(Another notable new organization that has been making some content available via an API is the New York Times, which has an article search API, among others.)

Also participating in this session was Robin Sloan from Current.tv. Current made interesting use of Twitter streams as part of its presidential debate coverage. The hash tag they created for people to tag their posts, #current, was the third most popular Twitter tag during the debates, bested only by the tags for the candidates themselves.

Current built an application to provide a mash up of various data sources, including Digg, on election day. In true agile fashion, they made multiple software updates even after the show began broadcasting!

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco Spring 2009

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:02:46 GMT

March 31 - April 3, San Francisco

Last week's Web 2.0 Expo seemed like a successful event, with a good-sized crowd despite the economic malaise – due in part, no doubt, to unusually aggressive discounting and promotion. With multiple tracks across four days (one day of workshops and three of conference sessions) there was much more to see than any one person could possibly attend.

Here's a few articles that we've written about talks at the conference:

Many of the presentations are available online, as slides and/or videos:

And to go beyond the presentations and get more flavor of the event:

Ruby in Practice

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 06:44:15 GMT

A cookbook of a variety of techniques and solutions to common development problems.