Ruby on Rails: Web Articles
- Riding Rails: Ruby on Rails 2.3.9 Released
David Heinemeier Hansson
Rails 2.3.9 continues bug fixes in the 2.3 branch and acts as a transition bridge to 3.0. - Q/A: What Thread-safe Rails Means
Charles Nutter
Discusses the upcoming Rails 2.2 changes around thread-safety and some of its implications. - Rails 2.1: Now With Better Integrated Caching
Rob Anderton
Great walkthrough of the new support in Rails 2.1 for Memcached as a first class caching solution. - WOW! Very Huge List of UpComing Ruby/Rails Books in 2008
Like the title says, this is an amazingly long list of Ruby books coming up in the second half of 2008. - Code Between Lines: A RSpec matcher for ActiveRecord validation
Rodrigo Kochenburger
Handy matchers to make checking for Active Record errors in specs even easier. - Chatting with Blaine Cook (Twitter)
Akita on Rails
Interview with Blaine Cook, after his departure from Twitter, which discusses some of the issues that Twitter struggled with. - Ruby on Rails expert: Rails scales; Twitter shouldn't taint Ruby
Larry Dignan
Interview with Ezra Zygmuntowicz discussing where typical scaling problems really occur (in the database layer) and that the Twitter blame game is a red herring. - Ruby on Rails: scaling to 1 billion page views per month
LinkedIn’s “Bumpersticker” Facebook application delivers more than 1 billion page views per month and is written in Rails. - acts_as_ferret not working at all
casual
Work-around for using STI with acts_as_ferret and ferret Gem - Patch your rubies
Steven Bristol
How to apply back-ported security patches to Ruby 1.8.6 p111 so Rails still works. - Searching Beast and WordPress from a Rails app
Scott Patten
How to implement search (using Ferret in this case) on a non-integrated data source. - AUTO_INCREMENT MySQL
Conrad
Work-around to problem of adding an alternate starting value for auto increment if IDs in your tables. Bug exists in MySQL. - Rails All-In-One - RightScale Support Wiki
Step-by-step instructions for deploying a Ruby on Rails application on Amazon’s EC2 using the RightScale service. - Observe Field and Radio Buttons in Rails
Vince Wadhwani
How to get an effect like observe_field to function on radio buttons. - PDF::Writer and Ruby on Rails 2.1
Michael Simons
Patching up PDF::Writer for compatibility with Rails 2.1. - The Mega RailsConf 2008 Round Up
Peter Cooper
A great summary article with links to dozens of other sources of videos, presentations, and blog posts about RailsConf 2008. - Rails on Rubinius << evan.musing << current
Evan Phoenix
Announcement of Rubinius running Rails for the first time. - Is twitter still the biggest rails site?
An excellent discussion of the scale of various Rails sites, with some useful data in the comments from people involved in the various sites. - Riding Rails: Rails 2.1: Time zones, dirty, caching, gem dependencies, caching, etc
David Heinemeier Hansson
Announcement of the Rails 2.1 release. - Helping ActiveRecord finders help you
Jamis Buck
Modifying the find method to deal with special attribute values. - HasFinder -- It's Now Easier than ever to create complex, re-usable SQL queries
Nick Kallen
HasFinder is a plug-in that simplifies the creation and use of custom finders. - BBCode with Ruby on Rails, Part 1
Jamie Conlon
Implementing the BBCode markup in a commenting system for Rails. - Advanced Rails Caching.. on the Edge
Aaron Batalion
Using edge side includes (ESI) for advanced caching in Rails applications. - A Rails HOWTO: Simplify In-Place Editing with Script.aculo.us
Coda Hale
Building our own in-place editor helpers to gain more control than with the standard Rails helpers. - editable_content_tag: The in_place_editor for Rails 2.0
Describes an approach to creating an in-place editor that is compatible with RESTful controllers, using JSON to transfer data. - Rails Asset Cache
Derek DeVries
Using the Rails 2.0 asset cache option to improve page load times by combining css and JavaScript files. - Textile (markup language)
This Wikipedia article includes links to Textile implementations in many languages. - Restful Authentication with all the bells and whistles
An extensive tutorial on setting up restful_authentication, going far beyond the basics to include all the additional code needed to turn it into a complete user management system. - Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support: An Overview
Geoff Buesing
Rails 2.1 will have major improvements to time zone handling. This article explains all. - Pagination in Ruby On Rails using will_paginate plugin
Nasir Jamal
How to convert from legacy Rails 1 pagination to the Rails 2 compatible will_paginate plugin. Unlike classic pagination, will_paginate works from a model, so you can keep writing fat models. - Install Ruby on Rails using MacPorts
Setting up Ruby on Rails for Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) using MacPorts - Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots
Ned Batchelder
A lengthy description of various “reverse captcha”/honeypot techniques for preventing automated form submissions. - Better Redirects in Rails
Connor McKay
A nice set of actions for handling a variety of common redirections. - Rapid Rails Part 1: Command-line mastery
Alex Young
Rapid Rails is a series of articles containing succinct tips to increase your productivity when working with Ruby on Rails. This is the first part, and shows you how to make the most of the command-line tools that come with Rails. - Feeds for Free
Utilizing microformats (hAtom) to kill two birds with one view utilizing the mofo plugin. - Starling and Asynchronous Tasks in Ruby on Rails
Rany Keddo and Bjorn Wolf
Workling is a wrapper around asynchronous task runners such as Starling and Spawn. - Welcome to El Dorado!
Trevor
Open-source community web application. Includes a forum, community event calendar, and shared files. - Acts As Taggable Tag Cloud
Walk through of how to visualize acts_as_taggable content as a tag cloud with CSS. - Rails on the Run
Matt Aimonetti
Interesting write-up about a mad dash to get GumGum ready for a mention on TechCrunch. - Ruby on Rails Security Guide
Nakul Aggarwal and Ritesh Arora
A great list of issues to pay attention to, and techniques to use, to improve the security of your Rails application. - Be Dee Dee and Me
PJ Hyett and Chris Wanstrath
Nice general overview of Behavior Driven Development (BDD), the tools available (test/spec, rSpec), and then an introduction to actually using test/spec within your code. - Cookin' with Ruby on Rails - Integration Tests
Bill Walton
Tutorial on writing Integration Tests using Rails 1.2.6 (though still useful for Rails 2). - 15 TDD steps to create a Rails application
Andrzej Krzywda
A simple tutorial that gives the flavor of using Test Driven Development in a basic Rails application. - Introduction to Test Driven Design (TDD)
An essay that explains what Test Driven Development is, how it works, and various myths and misunderstandings about TDD. - autotest-rails
Geoffrey Grosenbach
Autotest runs continuously and watches for files to change (when you save). It then runs any associated tests automatically. - Autotest with verbose flag on
Mike Subelsky
Hints on how to configure ZenTest’s autotest to be less verbose on various messages and other configuration suggestions. - Mocking and stubbing in Ruby on Rails
Bruce Tate
A walk through of the techniques of mocking and stubbing in Rails with an emphasis on how to use Mocha. - Instant Rails with NetBeans
Brian Leonard
Installing Ruby on Rails via the Instant Rails distribution(which includes Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, MySQL, and Apache) for Windows XP (and Vista). Details how to hook everything up to work with the Netbeans IDE. - Ruby on Rails routing demystified
Obie Fernandez
Article on Rails routing, excerpted from the excellent book The Rails Way. - Book Review: Pro Active Record
Josh Susser
An insightful and detailed book review, which points out some of the unfortunate errors in this otherwise useful book. - An Attachment Walked Into A Bar. Was That U, Fu?
Sarah Gray
A walkthrough using the attachment_fu plugin, including some testing and various useful links. - Logging in Ruby on Rails
Marty Andrews
Brief intro to Ruby on Rails logging, and how to switch from the default logger to log4r. - Ruby on Rails: RSpec Tutorial
A series of articles introducing Behavior Driven Development and RSpec. Provides an overview, basic examples, discussion about Mock Objects, and advanced tips. - Mocking and stubbing in Ruby on Rails
Bruce Tate
Understand the basic foundations behind stubbing and mocking techniques and strategies with this hands-on walkthrough using the three most popular mocking frameworks for Ruby. - Data Noise: Tutorial on ruby-debug
An introduction about ruby-debug and its basic operation from the command line. - Chad's Blog - ruby-debug in 30 seconds (we don't need no stinkin' GUI!)
Chad Woolley
A very condensed how-to use ruby-debug from the command line. - Maintainable Software: Rails Logging Tips
Mike Naberezny
Ruby on Rails comes prewired for logging using Logger from the Ruby Standard Library. This article demonstrates how to use the Rails logger, how to create your own logs, and offers some tips for debugging with console logging - Autotesting Javascript in Rails
Dr Nic
A getting started article on how to test Javascript, including useful plugins, tools, and hints for TDD in Javascript. - Netbeans 6.0, Leopard and "fast debug"
Briefly describes how to get Netbeans 6 to work with the native install of Ruby and Rails on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). In particular, provides important hint on pointing to the GEM installation path. - Restful Authentication with all the bells and whistles - Rails Forum - Ruby on Rails Help and Discussion Forum
activefx
Nice tutorial that walks through using Restful Authentication with Rails 2.×. Read through the message thread for various improvements and tweaks. - Consolidating your app's constants
Tim Lucas
How to create a module that can consolidate all of your constants into one easy to maintain place in your app. Also explains how to make it fully configurable from environment setup files. - rcov: code coverage for Ruby
eigenclass
Overview and discussion of rcov, the Ruby code coverage analysis tool. rcov can be useful for testing, optimizing and understanding Ruby programs. Available as a gem or installable from source. - Introduction to BackgrounDRb
Ezra Zygmuntowicz
An introduction to the Rails Plugin written by Ezra Zygmuntowicz. BackgrounDRB utilizes DRb to offload long running tasks from a Rails application. This article explains its design and use. - Rails Envy: Ruby on Rails Caching Tutorial
Gregg Pollack
Part one of a two part tutorial on caching strategies in Rails. Covers Page Caching, which is currently the fastest caching approach. - Rails Envy: Ruby on Rails Caching Tutorial - Part 2
Gregg Pollack
Part two or a two part caching tutorial. Covers Action Caching, Fragment Caching, and ActiveRecord Caching. - Sake Bomb!
PJ Hyett and Chris Wanstrath
Using rake system wide with the sake gem. Also includes a variety of useful rake tasks. - Inverse Captcha Anti-Comment-Spam Technique: Now A Regular Mephisto Plugin
Sven Fuchs
A very clever technique that traps spam robots but tricking them into filling out a field that users don’t see because it is hidden with CSS. Article describes it in the context of a Mephisto plugin, but the technique has general applicability. - fieldWithErrors
Graeme Nelson
How to fix Rails’ form markup so that error fields are wrapped in a span, as they should be, rather than a div, as the Rails code does. - Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures
Roy Fielding
The seminal document on REST, written as a PhD thesis. - Best Practices that Improve E-Mail Deliverability (Part 1)
Ralph Wilson
Not Rails-specific, but a good overview of the many factors that affect email deliverability, which is critical for any application that sends mail. - The Rails Way: AssetsGraphed: Part 3
Jamis Buck
Another example of moving code from the controller to the model. - The Rails Way: Tracks: Part 1 (Premature extraction)
Michael Koziarksi
Better alternatives to extracting simple extension as ‘acts_as’ modules. - The Rails Way: Skinny Controllers
Jamis Buck
An example of refactoring to move code from the controller to the model. - OpenURI, Exceptions and HTTP Status Codes
How to retrieve HTTP status codes and handle errors from on open-uri request. - Rails Forum / Ruby on Rails Help and Discussion Forum
Both a set of tutorial and a discussion forum. - 19 Tricks Most Rails Coders Don't Know
Peter Cooper
Great collection of Ruby coding tips for Rails developers. - Vendor Everything
Chris Wanstrath
Explains how to use gem unpack to put all your gems into the vendor directory, so other developers and your test and production servers are sure to have the same gems. - Key adoption factors and key characteristics of companies using Ruby on Rails
Michel Barbosa
Bachelor of Science thesis report on they key adoption factors for Ruby on Rails. - Updating Select Controls with Ajax
Kevin Olbrich
Simple method for implementing dependent select controls, using the KRJS plugin. - Skinny Controller, Fat Model
Jamis Buck
This is one of the most widely cited blog posts in the Rails world, and it is well deserved. Rails core team member Jamis Buck explains how and why to move code from the controller to the model. - JavaScript Image Cropping with jsCropperUI and Rails : powered by Doodlekit
Ben Kittrell
How to create a crop widget using JavaScript. - Ruby on Rails Caching Tutorial
Gregg Pollack
Excellent tutorial on the various forms of caching in Rails and how and when to use them.
