Rails Reading - Oct 20, 2009
Jetpack Flight Log » High Quality Ruby on Rails Example Applications
Sometimes to best way to get up to speed with a new technology is learning by example. I have compiled a list of fully featured, production ready example applications that I consider to be of very decent quality.
Most are RESTful and all have good-great test coverage. I listed components like the authentication, templating, and testing frameworks they employ – perhaps useful if you are looking for examples of say cucumber stories, or maybe how to use haml markup. Also listed are some of the gems and plugins they leverage which I think are either useful or popular and worth checking out if you are not already familiar with them.
Easy Stubbing in Rails Functional Tests | Webficient
I discovered a simple, concise approach for stubbing models inside Ruby on Rails controller functional tests. It relies on David Chelimsky’s excellent Stubble gem. It’s a shame it took me 5 months to discover it, even though I sat in on his RailsConf presentation in May, “Don’t Mock Yourself Out.” (doh!). First the why…
BBC - Glow Documentation - What is Glow?
Glow is a JavaScript library which aims to make working with JavaScript and the DOM easier. It tries to do this by abstracting common tasks, hiding cross-browser issues, and providing a set of user interface widgets.
I’m not sure what everyone’s conventions or views are on handling the removal of data in the app that is no longer used, so here are some of the guidelines I follow to help promote sharing and consistency.
Install ruby 1.9 on Windows using zip binary | Orange Cabin
Ruby has “all-in-one” installer for Windows, but it is outdated. As of May 2009, Ruby 1.9.1 is released, the installer is still 1.8.6. If you want the latest version, you need the zip package. But the zip package is missing zlib.dll, libeay32.dll, ssleay32.dll and readline.dll . Here is how to install it on windows.
Beta Blog: Kill Your Signup Form with Rails
Even though the gradual engagement meme has been around for a while, and everyone just hates signup forms, they just seem to keep popping up like a bad habit. My site, Newsforwhatyoudo.com was one of the guilty parties. We saw users coming back to the site repeatedly, but not signing up. The percentage that looked at the signup form and then bolted was uncomfortably high. It was time to kill the signup form. This blog post documents how we implemented gradual engagement using Ruby on Rails and restful authentication.
Yet another simple app built using Sinatra + deployed on Heroku « Nepcoder
I have been fooling around with building mini web apps with Ruby lately. The latest toy being a web app to check the weather by entering the zip code utilizing Yahoo’s weather service. As usual the project resides on Github and deployed on the lovely Heroku.
fundamentals: TDD a date helper - GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS
Deploying the git way | Viget Extend
Let’s start with this: Git is mind-blowingly amazing and simple. We’ll get back to this later.
Moving on though, a while back I was combing through my feed reader and found a post that leapt up at me: Deployment Script Spring Cleaning by Chris Wanstrath over at Github. It amazed me that no one had thought of doing this before. That is, using git as the deployment strategy for Capistrano.
Small CSS trick: Debug your HTML and CSS
Today, I’ll be showing you a neat little CSS trick to Debug your HTML and CSS. Take note that this will not be actual debugging, but it can help you find the element depth on a web page. Also, when you didn’t properly close a tag, this piece of code will expose it for you.
Labnotes » Using a badge to distinguish development and production environments
I’m currently working on a new and exciting app, and one issue I ran into is using the app in three different environments.
There’s development where I get to — nay, have to — do all the crazy stuff. The only way to catch bugs is to act like one. There’s staging, experimental but other people also accessing it. And there’s production. Production is for the well behaved.
In the Woods – Vertical Centering With CSS
There are a few different ways to vertically centre objects with CSS, but it can be difficult to choose the right one. I’ll show you all the best ways I’ve seen and also how to create a nice little centered website.
Vertical centering with CSS isn’t an easy thing to do. There are many different ways that may not work in some browsers. Let’s review 5 different ways to vertically centering objects, as well as the pros and cons of each method. (You can see my test page briefly explaining all of them.)
Wait till I come! » Blog Archive » Introduction to Yahoo Open Applications
Last week I was in Paris for a Yahoo Developer Network evening and Paris Web and one of the talks I gave was an introduction to Yahoo Open Applications. These are applications that you can embed in the Yahoo homepage or My Yahoo and thus allow you to reach millions of users – or extend the Yahoo homepage with your own personal app. Here are the slides and the audio recording of the talk delivered by Sophie Davies-Patrick (aka “my boss”) and me at La Cantine in Paris:
Have you ever wished you could start out your Rails application with all of your gems installed and all of your standard setup items completed? Well, wait no longer. You can now do it with Rails Templates. Pratik covered it pretty well, so I’m not going to repeat what he’s done. Rather, I’m going to share a template of my own and explain why I included what I did.
jasondew.com : Named instances for ActiveRecord
For a project that I’m work on at my day job, we have a governmental client for which we are building a pretty large and complicated online/offline Ruby on Rails application. As part of this app there are tons of data-specific rules. For example, if a client with HIV is being assessed then certain fields may have to be displayed/hidden and there are rules that get applied differently.
What I’ve Earned (And Learned) From Writing “Beginning Ruby”
As the author of Beginning Ruby, I make money for every copy sold in print and electronic formats (as well as some miscellaneous income I’ll cover later). It’s not much money – but that wasn’t the motivation for writing the book.
In this post I’m going to show you how it all works from my point of view including sales figures, pictures of my royalty statements, information about my advance, and similar gruesome stuff.
Lookin’ on Up…To the East Side // RailsTips by John Nunemaker
I am currently reading the Well-Grounded Rubyist by David Black. It is a great book and reading it reminds me of things I was confused on when I started in Ruby. One of those things was the path Ruby uses to figure out which method to call when inheritance and mixins are in play.
In this talk from FutureRuby, Joseph Wilk gives an introduction to the BDD framework Cucumber and gives valuable tips for getting it adopted and used by customers and developers.
OO Design Patterns that can make a difference | Pathfinder Development | Software Developers | Blogs
There are several patterns I have used/implemented in my projects that I think are awesome. I ll touch upon how I used some of them and why every Object oriented programmer needs to master them.
Teach Me To Code - Rails Shell Application in 10 easy steps
In this screencast you will see how to make a rails application capable of parse and execute shell commands using the ruby function %x
The screencast start with basic shell commands, creation of a ruby script demonstrating the concept and finally follow the recipe of 10 easy steps to build your rails shell application.
We Just Undid Three Months of Dev work. Here’s What We Learned.
We’ve been deleting a lot of code from Scout. We’re ripping out major infrastructure, and in doing so, pulling the plug on functionality which, just six months ago, we believed would be crucial to our business. Most importantly, we’re simplifying the most complex, error-prone, and poorly-performing parts of the application. At the same time, our revenue and sales pipeline is growing at a faster rate.
Functioning Form - Case Study: Fewer Input Fields Increases Conversions
A recent case study published by Imaginary Landscape highlights one example of how much better things can get. The company performed a comparison of an 11-field Contact Us form with a 4-field Contact Us form. They found contact form conversions increased 120% when the number of fields was reduced from 11 to 4 (a 64% decrease). Furthermore, the fields removed had no impact on the quality of the conversions. You can can access the full case study at: Fewer fields in a contact form sharply increases conversions (PDF).
Django for Rails devs at ronin coder
I’ve recently made the transition from full-time Rails development to a mix of technologies including, in large part, Django. Since I was a Python guy before I ever started using Ruby, the transition has mostly been an easy one, but there are some fairly significant differences in design and philosophy between the two frameworks that are worth thinking about if you’re picking a platform for a new project. Given that most of the comparisons out there on the Intertubes seem to be woefully out of date — the first page of Google results is mostly populated by articles that are 3-4 years old — I thought I might toss out some of my own highly-subjective observations out there anyone else trying to evaluate both stacks.
Ruby Daemons and Angels [Article] « elc technologies
Queues is a big topic. Very interesting, go google it. Today I want to talk about the other, often neglected part: the workers.
When decoupling the web tier from the processing tier you often end up with code that all in all is pretty simple and straightforward. Throwing together a worker script is pretty easy, especially if you already have a working version of it to steal bits and pieces from.
Reduce Image File Size Without Any Loss of Quality | Web Resources | WebAppers
punypng is a free tool that dramatically reduces page load times by reducing the file size of an image without any loss of quality. punypng uses several web optimization techniques to reduce the file sizes of your images. It first analyzes the content of your image and figures out the best image format to use.
Dr Nic ’s Install any HTML theme/template into your Rails app
So I’ve started to try and make any “HTML Template” into a “Ruby on Rails Template” with the helper app install_theme.
How to Gemify your Rails Plugins | opensoul.org
Ever since Rails added support for declaring gem dependencies, there is really no (good) reason to use plain ol’ plugins. We’ve been slowly gemifying all of our plugins as we need them. There’s a few hoops you have to jump through to get Rake tasks and Capistrano recipes working, but it’s fairly straight forward.
First, you need something that will help you generate the gemspec and build the gem. You can do this by hand, but there’s several great plugins out there that make it easy. We recommend Jeweler. Follow the directions in the Jeweler README for “Using in an existing project”.
auxesis’s visage at master - GitHub
a web (interface | service) for viewing collectd statistics
bloopletech’s webstats at master - GitHub
Monitor server CPU/Memory/Disk Usage/URL Loading, so that you can view those statistics on a web page, as well as providing an interface to client prorams to read those statistics.
InfoQ: Turning on a sixpence - No excuses: Concept To Cash Every Week
This session takes an inside look at successfully delivering from concept to cash, showing the technical aspects of what’s required to iteratively build a robust product that always performs, and the skill and discipline needed to deliver high-quality software to production every week. We know this because we wrote one of the busiest entertainment Web sites in the UK from scratch.
Cropping Images
Present a slick user interface for cropping image attachments using Jcrop and Paperclip.
Tender Lovemaking » Blog Archive » Cross Compiling Ruby Gems for win32
While I was developing nokogiri, I had to learn how to cross compile gems for win32. I don’t have a compiler on windows, so I had to do this on OS X. I just want to dump a few notes here so that other people might benefit, and so that I won’t forget in the future.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Ruby on Rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
