Ruby on Rails: Articles
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Enhancing Conditional Routing in Rails
By Christopher Haupt, Posted 08/27/08 01:21 PM
Rails’ routing infrastructure supports the concept of conditional routes: preconditions that must be satisfied before a particular route will trigger. Rails 2.1 supports one built-in condition, HTTP method checking, which is of some use but rather limited. What I needed was to be able to limit certain routes to only trigger when a particular host-name was used to access the application. I show one implementation in this article.
Related Topics: Routing
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Lab 8 (Bonus): A Page Model and Cleanup
By LearningRails.com Staff, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
Useful documentation on testing ActiveMerchant can be found in the PeepCode ActiveMerchant PDF.
Related Topics: Ruby on Rails
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Lab 1. Set-Up and Static Pages
By LearningRails.com Staff, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
To access any of these files, right-click (or control-click on a Mac) on the links below and choose Save Link As…
Related Topics: Ruby on Rails
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Lab 2. Building a Simple CMS
By LearningRails.com Staff, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
Agile Web Development plugins directory
Related Topics: Ruby on Rails
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Lab 3. The Resources Page, with Ajax
By LearningRails.com Staff, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
Related Topics: Ruby on Rails
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Lab 4. Contact Form, Mailer, and an Anti-Spam Web Service
By LearningRails.com Staff, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
Related Topics: Ruby on Rails
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Lab 5. Subscriptions and Credit Card Processing
By LearningRails.com Staff, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
You’ll need to create a free account to view the API documentation.
Related Topics: Ruby on Rails
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Lab 7. Deployment
By LearningRails.com Staff, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
This link contains a zip archive of the deploy.rb, accelerator, and quickstart Capistrano files you will need to drop in to your project if you are not working from the lab source code. Right-click (or control-click on a Mac) on the link below and choose Save Link As…
Some useful web resources:
Joyent Accelerator Wiki
Joyent Solaris Wiki
Subversion Book
Capistrano
UnfuddleRelated Topics: Ruby on Rails
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Setting up Rails on Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4)
By Christopher Haupt, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
This guide walks you through setup instructions for preparing a Mac OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger) development machine to be used for general Ruby on Rails coding. This baseline setup is what we use for our LearningRails online course.
Related Topics: Configuration, Techniques
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Setting up Rails on Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)
By Christopher Haupt, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
This guide walks you through setup instructions for preparing a Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) development machine to be used for general Ruby on Rails coding. This baseline setup is what we use for our LearningRails online course.
Related Topics: Configuration, Techniques
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Podcasts and Screencasts on Ruby on Rails
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
There’s a variety of screencasts and podcasts available for Ruby on Rails developers. Here’s a quick rundown of the major ones, and how they differ.
Related Topics: Ruby on Rails
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The Rebuilding and Scaling of YellowPages.com
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
John Straw, chief software architect at YellowPages.com, gave an excellent talk at RailsConf about YellowPages’ conversion to Rails. John’s talk covered the scaling issues, but the talk was just as much about the process of successfully doing a big rewrite of a critical application at a large company.
Related Topics: Performance Tuning, Servers, Business
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New Crop of Rails 2.0 Books
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
In 2007, more than a dozen Ruby on Rails books debuted — only to be almost instantly made out-of-date by the release of Rails 2 toward the end of the year. There are now some great Rails 2.0 books out, making life a lot easier for new and experienced Ruby on Rails programmers.
Related Topics: Ruby on Rails
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Easy Text Formatting with Textile
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
HTML is rather verbose as a markup language, and having to include closing tags is messy and error-prone. We’re all pretty much stuck with delivering HTML code from our web sites, but that doesn’t mean we have to write in it. There are various markup approaches that are superior to HTML when it comes to content creation, and which can be used as source code from which to create HTML. Two that are widely used are …
Related Topics: Textile
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Tim Bray: Ruby is the Leading Language for Web Applications
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
In his keynote talk at the recent Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, Sun’s Tim Bray asserted that “PHP and Ruby are the languages of choice for new web apps.” Coming from most people, this wouldn’t be a remarkable comment, but given that Tim is Sun’s director of web technologies, it is worthy of note.
Related Topics: Ruby on Rails, Conferences
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Setting up Rails on Windows XP
By Christopher Haupt, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
This guide walks you through setup instructions for preparing a Windows XP development machine to be used for general Ruby on Rails coding. This baseline setup is what we use for our LearningRails online course.
Related Topics: Configuration, Techniques
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Setting up Rails on Windows Vista
By Christopher Haupt, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
This guide walks you through setup instructions for preparing a Windows Vista development machine to be used for general Ruby on Rails coding. This baseline setup is what we use for our LearningRails online course.
Related Topics: Configuration, Techniques
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Selling Friends: Scaling a High-Traffic Rails Application
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
At the recent Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, Friends for Sale developer Alex Le outlined the approach they’ve taken to scaling up to deliver an impressive 300 million page views per month for their Rails-based Facebook application.
Related Topics: Conferences, Performance Tuning
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Validating Email Addresses with Ruby
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
In any application in which a user enters an email address, there is the very real possibility that the user will make a typo and your application will end up with an invalid address. You can have them enter it twice, but this seems clunky. And you can, of course, send an email with an activation link, which …
Related Topics: Sending and Receiving email
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Understanding Ruby on Rails
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
If you’re new to Ruby on Rails, you may be struggling to understand just what Rails is, what it can do for you, and what you need to learn to use it effectively. In this article, we’ll explain just that.
Related Topics: Ruby on Rails
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Using Yahoo's User Interface Library Treeview in Rails
By Christopher Haupt, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
Our BuildingWebApps.com site organizes much of its information by assigning one or more categories from a domain specific taxonomy to each article, link, or other piece of content. A site visitor can browse the information in several ways, but one quick approach is via a category browser widget that appears on most content pages. The hierarchical tree view is implemented by embedding Yahoo’s Open Source User Interface Library Treeview (aka YUI treeview, or just treeview here) into our RHTML.
Related Topics: Widgets, Widget Libraries
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Exception Handling and Old URLs
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
Whenever I deploy a Rails site, I install the exception notification plugin so I get an email if a user provokes a bug I hadn’t found. It’s a piece of cake to install …
Related Topics: Routing
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Silicon Valley Ruby Conference
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
Last week’s Silicon Valley Ruby Conference was perhaps the year’s largest local gathering of Ruby enthusiasts, with 130 attendees. Here we present notes from a few of the presentations, on topics including Pivotal’s Desert framework, IronRuby, Rubinius and Merb, and IBM’s use of Rails.
Related Topics: Ruby on Rails, Conferences
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Using SSL in Rails Applications
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
If your web application manages any private information, you should be using SSL (https://) for pages where that information is entered or displayed. Fortunately, implementing SSL isn’t too hard, once you know what you need to do.
Related Topics: Rails Application Servers, Security
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Can Rails Scale? Absolutely!
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
There’s a persistent chatter about scalability in discussions of Rails, especially among people who aren’t actually using it. When we talk with people considering Rails for new sites, concerns about scalability often come up. In reality, while Rails is not the world’s speediest framework, the supposed scalability issues are very unlikely to be a legitimate reason not to use Rails.
Related Topics: Performance Tuning
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File Upload Form Testing Fixtures
By Christopher Haupt, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
Recently, I needed to write my first set of functional tests for a form that is used to upload image assets into our Content Management System. I wanted to find something as easy as fixtures for testing this part of our program.
Related Topics: Fixtures
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2007: The Ruby on Rails Year in Review
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
Ruby on Rails had a very good year in 2007, continuing to gain traction as one of the leading web development frameworks and making progress on many fronts.
Related Topics: Ruby on Rails
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Better Rails Scaffolding
By Michael Slater, Posted 07/24/08 01:00 AM
One of the things that created a lot of early attention for Rails was the scaffolding, which makes it possible to create an instant admin interface for your database tables. While the built-in scaffolding was interesting two years ago, it clearly has received no attention from the core team, which …
Related Topics: Scaffolds
