Editorial
How To...
There are a few dozen common capabilities in many web applications. In this section, we provide resources to help implement many of them.Setting up Rails on Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5)
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. continue...
Setting up Rails on Windows Vista
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. continue...
Articles
New Articles
from around the Web
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Installing Sphinx on OS X Leopard
Building latest Sphinx on Mac OS 10.5.
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Searching Beast and WordPress from a Rails app
How to implement search (using Ferret in this case) on a non-integrated data source.
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Chatting with Blaine Cook (Twitter)
Interview with Blaine Cook, after his departure from Twitter, which discusses some of the issues that Twitter struggled with.
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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.
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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.
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PDF::Writer and Ruby on Rails 2.1
Patching up PDF::Writer for compatibility with Rails 2.1.
- Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support: An Overview
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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.
- Plugins - Seamless Database Pool
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Announcing Palmist
A tool for finding and fixing MySQL bottlenecks in Ruby on Rails applications
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Rails Asset Cache
Using the Rails 2.0 asset cache option to improve page load times by combining css and JavaScript files.
Books
Related Books
Practical REST on Rails 2 Projects
How to create and consume web services using Ruby on Rails 2.0 and RESTful design. Includes client examples in JavaScript, JSON, and for ...
List: $42.99 Amazon price: $25.79 Buy
Solaris(TM) Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris (Solaris Series)
While the primary focus of the book is performance analysis on Solaris, this book's coverage of DTrace, a very powerful low level analysi...
List: $54.99 Amazon price: $43.99 Buy
Deploying Rails Applications
A Step-by-Step Guide
Everything from source control and migrations to Capistrano, rake tasks and beyond. How to deploy your applications to multiple productio...
List: $34.95 Amazon price: $23.07 Buy
Links
Links by Type
Documentation (7)
- Installing RMagick on OS X using MacPorts
Instructions for installing RMagick on Mac OS X, including how to use MacPorts to get ImageMagick running. Part of the larger documentation set for RMagick. - Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X
Step by step instructions for installing a full Ruby and Rails stack (with Mongrel and MySQL) on a Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) system. These instructions have you compile almost all of the code and install a copy of the applications into /usr/local. This process does not disturb Apple installed software. - Ruby on Rails Manual TMail::Mail
- Rails performance tip - using YSlow
Handy guide looking at the results of the Yahoo yslow FireFox plugin and how to handle some of the performance issues using Ruby on Rails or web server (nginx) configuration tricks. - Hpricot HTML Parser
- acts_as_ferret
acts_as_ferret plugin enables simple integration of the Ferret search engine into a Ruby on Rails project. - SolRuby - Solr Wiki
Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library. SolRuby is dedicated to information about integrating with Solr from Ruby.
Groups (2)
- Ruby on Rails: Security
Announcement-only list for issues relating to Rails security. - Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)
Screencasts (20)
- Railscasts - Sending Email
- Benchmarking with httperf
- Railscasts - Generating RSS Feeds
- Railscasts - Time in Text Field
- Railscasts - Formatting Time
- Railscasts - Time Zones in Rails 2.1
- Railscasts - Super Simple Authentication
- Railscasts - Restricting Access
- Railscasts - OpenID Authentication
- restful_authentication
- Railscasts - Cross Site Scripting
- Railscasts - Hackers Love Mass Assignment
- Railscasts - SQL Injection
- Railscasts - Filtering Sensitive Logs
- Railscasts - Filtering Sensitive Logs
Are you accepting sensitive user data? Passwords, credit card numbers, etc. By default, Rails stores all submitted parameters in plain text in the logs. This episode will show you how to filter this sensitive input so it doesn't show up in the log file. - Railscasts - Model Name in URL
- Railscasts - Pretty Page Title
- Railscasts - will_paginate
- Railscasts - Adding an Environment
- Railscasts - Generating PDF Documents
FAQs & Resource Lists (1)
- Best of Google Tools & Tips for Internet Marketing Resource Center
Great list of tools for analyzing and optimizing your site's search engine rankings, and for learning more about how search engines see your site and how people search for it.
Software (39)
- glTail.rb: An Open-Source Rails Log Analyzer
- production_log_analyzer
Gem for analyzing Rails production logs to find the slow parts of your code. - Blazing fast page loads through bundled CSS and Javascript
Plugin that bundles multiple CSS and JavaScript files into a single pair of files to improve page rendering times. - How to Stress or Load Test in Ruby on Rails
Listing of stress and load testing tools that are useful with Ruby on Rails (and other) web applications. - Rails Analyzer
Doesn't appear to have been updated in a while, but still lots of logging/analysis tools to check out. - MOle: Project Info
Mole is a gem that instruments your application and stores usage and performance information in the database. - Log Juicer - Squeeze something from your Rails logs
- Railsbench
Set of scripts for doing benchmarking and performance analysis of Rails apps. - ruby-prof
ruby-prof is a fast code profiler for Ruby. - RubyRun Performance Diagnostic Tool
A stand-alone performance diagnostic tool from Rubysophic, which plans to introduce a hosted service to complement the software. - httperf
Httperf is a tool for measuring web server performance. It provides a flexible facility for generating various HTTP workloads and for measuring server performance. The focus of httperf is not on implementing one particular benchmark but on providing a robust, high-performance tool that facilitates the construction of both micro- and macro-level benchmarks. - FeedFetcher plugin
The FeedFetcher plugin locates RSS feeds, given the URL of a site. - Combustible
Rails plugin for accessing the FeedBurner API. - calendar_date_select : Ruby on Rails Datepicker Plugin - Ruby on Rails: Talk | Google Groups
- Datetime Toolbocks - Intuitive Date Input Selection
Plugin that provides a JavaScript widget for entering dates in a mini-calendar, and also parses many common text versions of dates -- even things like "next Tuesday". - Multiple File Upload with Flash and Ruby on Rails
Tutorial on uploading multiple files to a Rails application using a Flash-based UI. - Arti (Rails Documentation Generator)
An exploratory project to automatically produce better documentation for Rails applications. - GeoKit: a plugin for location-based Rails apps
Plugin for building location-based apps; provides geocoding, location finders, and distance calculation. - Map Rails Kit
A $199 package the provides all the code for incorporating maps into a Rails application - FlexImage2 Image Upload and Rendering Plugin for Ruby on Rails
- Sitealizer Web Stats plugin for Rails
Plugin lets you track visitors, referrers, robots, search terms and more. - Google Analytics Plugin at Notes from a messy desk
A simple plugin that inserts the google analytics tracking code in your layout. - Tabnav: Plugin for tabbed navigation
- Substruct - Ruby on Rails E-Commerce / CMS Project
- Active Merchant
The most widely used payment processing library for Ruby on Rails. Provides interfaces to more than 30 gateways with a single, abstracted API. Extracted from the Shopify hosted service. - Spree Online Commerce for Ruby on Rails
Spree is distributed as both a Rails plugin as well as a Ruby gem (requires Rails 2.0.2). You use the gem to create your application which automatically installs the plugin in your project. The newly created project is actually a fully functional store. All that remains is for the developer to customize and style to taste. - Software as a Service Rails Kit | Rails Kits
Rails software bundle for creating recurring billing using the Braintree gateway. This is commercial software, not open source. - Spree -- Open Source Commerce Plaform for Ruby on Rails
- ActsAsIndexed
- codefluency's keyword_search-1.3.1 Documentation
Add gmail-like keyword search (using keyword:value pairs) to your application. - WhooTube: Ruby on Rails video streaming
Flash video streaming platform built on Rails. - Prince: What's New
A high-quality, but not inexpensive, package that translates HTML/CSS files into PDF. - Rails PDF Plugin
Plugin that provides a cleaner interface to the PDF::Writer gem. - comatose-plugin
A "micro-CMS" (content management system) Rails plug-in. - Rubricks - CMS on Rails
An open-source content management system written in Rails, developed in Japan. - Radiant CMS
- XSendFile
Rails plugin to support the X-Sendfile protocol, which enables you to use Rails to do authentication while having the web server deliver the file. - mod_xsendfile
Apache 2 module that enables your application server to tell Apache when to send a static file. Use with Rails Xsendfile plugin. - PullMonkey Projects: Open Flash Chart Plugin for Ruby on Rails - Graphs
Presentation Slides (4)
- Email on Rails
Excellent, detailed presentation on the finer points of sending and receiving email from Rails applications - A Small Talk on Getting Big
Talk from RailsConf Europe 2007 on scaling Rails applications, based on the Twitter experience. - Httperf Presentation
Presentation slides, recording, and quick reference for Httperf talk at www2007 conference. - EXPLAIN Demystified: MySQL Conference & Expo - Co-presented by MySQL & O'Reilly Conferences, April 14 - 17, 2008, Santa Clara, CA
Good overview of what EXPLAIN is, how its results are calculated, and what all of the data is presents means.
Cheat Sheets (1)
- Ruby on Rails Cheatsheets
Nice cheatsheets for various aspects of Rails, including Active Record validation errors, migrations, form helpers, and Action Mailer.
e-Books (5)
- Using memcached
Guide to using memcached, an in-memory object caching system. - Rails Security Audit PDF | PeepCode Screencasts for Ruby on Rails Developers
Detailed ebook on keeping your Ruby on Rails application secure. - Integrating the PayPal API with Ruby on Rails
Includes a complete sample application that shows how to integrate PayPal's Direct Payment API and PayPal Express Checkout. The Direct Payment API, when used with a PayPal account approved for Website Payments Pro, allows you to capture credit card information at your site rather than redirecting your users to the PayPal site. Integrating the API for PayPal Express Checkout allows you to immediately get transaction details when sending users to the PayPal site to complete payment. - ActiveMerchant PDF
A $9 e-book from the publishers of the PeepCode screencasts, written by one of the ActiveMerchant developers. - ActiveMerchant PDF | PeepCode Screencasts for Ruby on Rails Developers
Extensive description of how to use the Active Merchant payment gateway.
Hosted services (4)
- New Relic RPM (Rails Performance Management)
Ruby on Rails plug-in and hosted service for performance analysis. Can be used in development and in production. "Lite" service is free; more features available on paid plans. - Five Runs TuneUp
A new socially networked application profiling tool for Ruby on Rails applications. You can view the performance details for your application, and if you want help, you can upload your performance data to the FiveRuns site, where colleagues or the Rails community at large can offer help. - FiveRuns Manage
Hosted service for monitoring the performance of your Ruby on Rails application, as well as all the software components of your hosting infrastructure. - Scout Ruby on Rails Monitoring
Ruby on Rails application monitoring tool. Installs as a gem on your server. Supports plug-ins for extending its monitoring functions. Limited free plan with 30-minute monitoring interval for a single server, plus a variety of paid plans for multiple servers, more plug-ins, and more frequent monitoring.
Blogs
Top Blogs
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RailsExpress.blog
Blog on Rails performance tuning, from the author of the railsbench gem.
- dormando
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New Relic Blog
From the creators of the New Relic Rails Performance Management system.
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Five Runs Blog
Includes interviews with a variety of folks from the Rails community.
- MySQL Performance Blog
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Ruby on Rails Security Blog
Exploring the Security of Rails and associated technologies.
- Moves On Rails : Rails Security
- CSRF - An underestimated attack method
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Gadgets, Google, and SEO
Blog from Google's go-to guy on site rankings.
