3 Weeks in Rails (October 29, 2008)

Posted by Gregg Pollack October 29, 2008 @ 09:16 PM

It’s been 3 weeks (I know I’ve been slacking). However, it’s time to write out another summary of information that any Rails developer might want to know about. Detailed audio versions of these notes can be found on the Rails Envy Podcast #51, #52, and #53.

You may already be aware that Rails 2.2 RC1 was released last Friday. For a glimpse at the new features you can read through the Release Notes. However, if you’re looking for something more comprehensive check out the Envycast on Ruby on Rails 2.2^ or the What’s New PDF by Carlos Brando.

Rails 2.0.5 and Rails 2.1.2 were also pushed in the last few weeks, mostly just plugging up a few small security concerns. If you’re on 2.x, you should probably take the time to upgrade.

If you’re taking advantage of the localization features of Rails 2.2, there are two libraries you should probably be aware of. First, Diego Carrion recently created a fork of restful_authentication where he added full support for i18n. Secondly, Karel Minarik recently released a plugin for doing localized_country_select so you can display countries the appropriate language.

If you need your Rails application to receive emails, one way to do it is to use gmail IMAP. John Nunemaker wrote up a nice walkthrough showing all the scripts need to parse email out of gmail.

Hosting, Performance, and Tuning

With Rails 2.2 thread safety, you might assume that brings a performance boost for everyone. However, this is not always the case and Pratik Naik explains why.

Ilya Grigorik wrote a blog post about Scaling Rails with MYSQL Plus where he uses the Non-Blocking MySQL driver from Neverblock to get some increased performance out of ActiveRecord which is quite impressive.

If you need to implement full text search in your Rails application, and you are already thinking Sphinx, you may want to check out the Thinking Sphinx PDF by Pat Allan over on Peepcode.

Library News

If you’re a fan of resource_controller (skinny REST controllers) and Shoulda you shoulda definitely check out the starter app by James Golick called Blank.

The next time you need to build a “Software As A Service” website (like basecamp), check out Service Merchant. This gem sits on top of Active Merchant and gives you everything you need to do Subscription Billing.

Do you ever forget your Rails routes? There’s always the “rake routes” command, but that’s not very user friendly. You might want to check out Vasco. Vasco is a Route explorer for Rails which provides a nice web interface to browse through and test all your Rails routes.

If you ever need to build a Rails application which is accessible on multiple domains or multiple paths (like foo.com or bar.com or a.com/foo) then take a look at the Rails Proxy Plugin by Sean Huber. This plugin allows you to dynamically respond to proxied requests by detecting the incoming path and properly setting the session domain, default host, and relative url root.

If you need an easy way to test your plugin which extends ActiveRecord, check out acts_as_fu, which aside from it’s unfortunate name, is pretty slick.

If you came over from PHP, you’re probably familiar with phpMyAdmin. One of the Rails Rumble teams made a Ruby version of phpMyAdmin that’s definitely worth checking out if you’re missing a quick web interface to your db.

Event News

The Rails Rumble is over and you only have 3 more days to vote (voting closes on Midnight November 1st). Cast your vote! It’s good practice for next Tuesday (least in the US).

If you’re over in London, Ruby Manor is taking place November 22nd. Looks like it’s going to be a fun unconference type of event.

Lastly, Rubyconf is next week here in Orlando, Florida where it’s been kinda chilly lately. Definitely pack something warm just in case, and see you next week!

Image Credit: Blue Sky on Rails by ecstaticist, Analog Solutions 606 Mod by Formication, RailsConf Europe 2006 by Paul Watson, Rainbow by One Good Bumblebee
^ In the interest of full disclosure, I do produce Envycasts, and profit from the sale of the screencasts.

Posted in General  | 36 comments

2 Weeks in Rails (October 10, 2008)

Posted by Gregg Pollack October 10, 2008 @ 03:05 PM

Welcome to yet another edition of this Week in Rails where we summarize some of the most interesting stories of the past two weeks. If you’d rather listen to these stories with additional detail check out the Rails Envy Podcast episode #49 and #50

Michael Koziarski recently removed country_select from edge rails. Apparently Rails was using the ISO 3166 Long Names standard list of countries, but some people don’t think this list is politically correct. For instance it lists “Taiwan” as “Taiwan, province of China”. Rather then change this one and have to deal with other debatable country names, country_select has been moved to a plugin, so you can fork your own friendlier list of countries.

Rails built in REST support is great, but if you’ve really spent time making your API usable, you’ve probably found that you had to make tweaks to what gets rendered to the page when a user wants xml or json. Chris Heald wrote up one solution on his blog this week, which shows you how to use xml builder to produce xml which gets translated for your xml, json, and maybe even yaml output formats.

If you ever find yourself needing to add role-based authorization to your Rails app, you should check out a blog post this week by Ernie Miller. He gives a unique implementation worth taking a look at.

Hosting, Performance, and Tuning

If you use Slicehost as your ISP for websites, Mark Reynolds wrote up a script that will install and fully configure your slice to get up and running with Rails, Mysql, and Thin.

We all should probably be load testing our applications more then we do, but this isn’t something that’s done easily. Luckily our favorite Ruby Hero, Ilya Grigorik recently wrote up a tutorial which serves as a great guide to accurately benchmarking our Rails apps.

If you’re looking for additional tools to help fine tune your Ruby code, Dan Mayer wrote up a great overview of just about everything available.

Databases

Alexander Lang recents wrote up a blog post entitled A CouchDB primer for an ActiveRecord mindset. He gives a simplified introduction to Couch db, goes over a few Ruby libraries that interface with it, and lastly introduces his new Ruby library called CouchPotato.

A few weeks back Rama McIntosh published a really useful script on his blog if you ever need to convert your application from one database to another using ActiveRecord.

Library News

Is your rails app pre-Rails 2.1 and you’re envious of those readable named_scope methods? Ken Collins has back-ported named_scope to Rails 1.2.6 and 2.0.4 so you can take advantage of using this method.

If you’re using RSpec to test your Rails app, you may be interested to know that the RSpec Story Runner (where you do your integration tests) is going to be replaced by a Cucumber. Although it’s typically not a good thing to be replaced by a Cucumber, this particular one is a library written by Aslak Hellesoy which should bring some increased organization and additional benefits to your integration tests. If you want to get a head start on consuming the cucumber, then check out Aslak’s blog post.

Talking about Testing, Shoulda 2.0 was recently released witch includes a few improvements and bugfixes. If you’d like an overview of everything Shoulda has to offer, Kyle Banker wrote up a great shoulda cheat sheet you should take a look at.

Noel Rappin, the same guy who brought you Rails iui, recently released TankEngine, a new rails plugin for targeting the iPhone and Mobile Safari. It uses a jQuery based javascript layer and it’s much more flexible and has better helpers then the original Rails iui.

Marc-Andre Cournoyer recently released Thin 1.0, the ultra fast Web Server. There’s quite a few people that have moved to thin from mongrel in their production environments.

Tog 0.2.1 was recently released, which is a collection of plugins that together form a social networking app. What’s great about Tog is that you can pick out just one plugin, like messaging, blogs, or CMS and bring that part into your existing Rails app.

Workling 0.3 was released last week, which serves as a great way to deal with background tasks in your Rails app, no matter what messaging queue service you’re using.

The Weather Channel provides a great API to pull down the current weather and forecasts around the world. Jared Pace recently created a Gem called WeatherMan which allows you to take full advantage of this data.

Jan De Poorter has recently revived the RailsXLS plugin which uses a java bridge and jakarata to let you use ruby to create excel spreadsheets.

Event News

The Rails Rumble is taking place October 18th and 19th. It’s a 48 hour contest where you get one weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web app you can, using Rails.

If you didn’t make it out to the WindyCityRails conference, Josh Symonds wrote up a nice overview.

If you live in the Great Lakes Area, you should check out the Great Lakes Ruby Bash, taking place October 11th in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Scotland on Rails is being held in Edinburgh March 26 through 28th. Tickets aren’t available yet but the call for proposals are open if you’d like to speak.

Image Credit: Blue Sky on Rails by ecstaticist, Analog Solutions 606 Mod by Formication, RailsConf Europe 2006 by Paul Watson, Rainbow by One Good Bumblebee.

Posted in General  | 12 comments

This Week in Rails (September 24, 2008)

Posted by Gregg Pollack September 24, 2008 @ 04:43 AM

Welcome to the sixth addition of This Week in Rails, where we’ll take a look of the past two weeks of innovation in the Rails community. If you’d rather listen to this content on your ipod with additional Ruby news, check out the Rails Envy Podcast #47 and #48.

The Rails Guides Hackfest is in full swing, improving the Rails documentation by leaps and bounds. Rails Routing from the Outside In by Mike Gunderloy is a great read if you’re ever confused by Rails Routing. If you want to help with the Guide hackfest, there are several guides up that you can help review.

If you ever need to build a website which allows users to upload videos and then needs to encode them, definitely check out Panda, an open source video encoding application which uses EC2, S3, and SimpleDB. The application itself is written in Merb, but it’s designed to run separately on ec2 and can easily integrate with your rails app on the front end.

If you’d like to ensure your Rails application is well written, Matt More wrote up a Rails Code Quality Checklist which serves as a great guide to Rails best practices. Also, if you need help discovering where your code might need a little re-factoring check out Roodi a new gem by Marty Andres that gives you instant feedback about your Ruby code by examining a few metrics including cyclomatic complexity, method length, bad method names, and blank blocks or loops. Lastly, if you’ve been following the “skinny controller, fat model” best practice, you may have found yourself with really fat models (not so good). Paul Barry suggests one way to deal with this using concerned_with.

If you’re about to start a new Rails application then you might consider using Bort, a Rails starter application from Jim Neath. Bort contains RESTful Auth, Will Paginate, Exception Notifier, Asset Packager, a Capistrano Recipe, and everything is tested by RSpec. If you’d rather start your system with email login instead of username, Matt Hall put together a fork of bort for this.

Implementing a page with multiple file uploads in Rails is no easy task. Luckily, Brian Getting wrote up a tutorial which makes it look easy.

Clemens Kofler wrote up a Guide to Memoization which walks through all the details of this convention and looks at the new “memoize” helper in Edge Rails ActiveSupport. If you don’t know what this word means, please do take the time to read his tutorial.

If you’ve ever developed a plugin, you may have just decided to manually run your tests every time you change your code. Last week Ken Collins recently put out a new library called Autotest Railsplugin which makes it dirt simple to run autotest on plugins you’re developing.

Lastly, if you’re looking for other Ruby/Rails podcasts, check out the Rails Podcast which recently featured Jim Weirich at erubycon, Rubyology which recently interviewed Avi Bryant, the Learning Rails podcast which recently covered how to deploy your rails app, Railscasts which recently covered starling and workling, and the Rails Brazil Podcast if you speak Portuguese.

That’s all for now. If you create or discover any notable tools or blog posts this week, feel free to send me an email (Gregg@RailsEnvy).

Image Credit: Still on the right track by janusz l

Posted in General  | 9 comments

This Week in Rails (September 10, 2008)

Posted by Gregg Pollack September 10, 2008 @ 02:32 PM

Welcome to the fifth edition of This Week in Rails, a weekly report with highlights from the Rails community. Antonio Cangiano (the original author) has been pretty busy, so I figured I’d step in this week.

As you probably already know, Rails 2.0.4 and Rails 2.1.1 were released this week. Both are mostly bug fixes, but checkout the changelog if you want all the details.

If your Rails app has alot of heavy duty SQL Queries you may want to take a look at a plugin by Fernando Blat called Query memcached. This plugin overwrites Rails default query cache functionality, storing all database queries in memcached for use by sequential requests.

Have you ever implemented an advanced search page for a Rails application? If yes, you may have ended up with bloated controller code. One solution to the problem is Searchgasm by Binary Logic which helps you do object based searching, and keep your search code clean and simple.

Ryan Daigle told us about some great new features in Rails Edge, including Connection Pooling, Shallow Routes, and Mailer Layouts. We should be getting a Rails 2.2 beta any day now, so stay tuned for that.

If you have any Java friends who use Apache Derby who are looking to try out JRuby, Michael Galpin wrote up an introduction to Rails using JRuby and Derby.

Last week Mark Imbriaco from 37 Signals put together a great blog entry and screencast which shows how they use HAProxy in their server setup. If you’re not familiar with the benefits of using HAProxy over the apache round robin load balancer, you need to watch his screencast.

Perhaps you’ve started using jQuery instead of Prototype for Rails. You might have used a plugin for this (ex. jQuery on Rails), but if you started from scratch you might have run into that problem with sending authenticity tokens with your AJAX requests. Lawrence Pit posted the jQuery code you’ll need to take care of this.

Neverblock is a library that allows you to use Ruby Fibers to write non-blocking concurrent code. This project recently released a non-blocking PostgreSQL adapter, a non-blocking MySQL adapter, and most recently got their Fiber library running on Ruby 1.8 with Rails with some amazing benchmarks! It’s still a very young project, but it’s one more step towards a safely multi-threaded Rails stack.

Lastly, I’ve got some events to tell you about. Ruby DCamp is taking place October 11th-12th in Arlington, VA, the Rails Summit Latin America is taking place October 15th and 16 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the South Carolina Ruby Conference is on October 18th in Columbia, SC.

Thanks for reading! If you would have rather listened to this information (with slightly more detail), you should check out the Rails Envy Podcast #46 which came out today. It’s no mistake that it’s covering the same material (I help with the podcast).

Posted in General  | 7 comments

Twitter account

Posted by pratik August 29, 2008 @ 01:40 PM

We have a twitter account for Rails at http://twitter.com/rails. You can follow it to receive regular updates about the framework.

Posted in General  | 4 comments

This Week in Rails (July 26, 2008)

Posted by Antonio Cangiano July 26, 2008 @ 04:15 AM

Welcome to the fourth edition of This Week in Rails, a weekly (and occasionally fortnightly) report with highlights from the Rails community.

David broke the news of the availability of confirmed and scheduled talks at RailsConf Europe which will be taking place this coming September. As you can see there will be a lot of exciting material this year, too.

The e-book Ruby on Rails 2.1 – What’s New is now available in 7 languages: English, Portuguese, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Italian and Korean. A Spanish version is coming as well. Olé!

A couple of weeks ago I took a close look at three Rails 2.1 database related bugs. On the same day, Phusion Passenger 2.0.2 was released. This edition backports a few bug fixes, including one for a small memory leak, and as such it’s highly recommended for anyone using Passenger 2 (aka mod_rails).

Kawaii is a web-based utility like script/console. The output of the inserted expression is visually appealing when compared to the one we’re used to in the shell. Speaking of shiny things, version 2 of the Open Flash Chart plugin was released. This page shows a few wicked cool, professional looking charts (and their code) that can be generated with it.

The article Mulling Over Our Ruby On Rails Full Text Search Options discusses a few possible options for performing full text searches in Rails applications. When it comes to Sphinx, there are then two prominent plugins: UltraSphinx and ThinkingSphinx. Rein Henrichs from Hashrocket, compares the two approaches in his post titled A Thinking Man’s Sphinx.

The team behind Rails-Doc.org added a few more functionalities, including the ability to document the API for multiple versions of Rails.

Other noteworthy articles were the following:

• Mobilize Your Rails Application with Mobile Fu.
• The complete guide to setting up Starling, which includes installing and configuring workers, and how to monitor the services through god.
• Rockstar Memcaching, which is a presentation from the recent RubyFringe conference in Toronto.
• Using Emacs for Rails development – The perfect setup.
• Making SWFUpload and Rails work together.

Ryan Bates was interviewed by FiveRuns and his insightful answers are reported in Rails TakeFive: Five Questions with Ryan Bates. He also published a couple of new railscasts on Liquid safe templates and on Session Based Models.

Rails Envy podcast number 39 was published this week. Check out also their hilarious video about Outdated HTML. And if you haven’t done so already, don’t miss the funniest voicemail and remix the Rails community has heard to date: We ain’t got no RSpec.

If you’d like to read more updates from the Ruby side of things, please head over to This Week in Ruby.

Posted in General  | 5 comments

This Week in Rails (July 11, 2008)

Posted by Antonio Cangiano July 11, 2008 @ 10:05 PM

Welcome to the third edition of This Week in Rails, a weekly report with highlights from the Rails community. My apologies for the delay of this post, the past two weeks have been pretty crazy, so this edition covers the most interesting articles and news from the past two weeks.

Let’s kick off this report with a couple of maintenance releases by Jamis Buck. Both Capistrano 2.4.3 and Net::SSH 2.0.3 were published two weeks ago. If you use them, consider upgrading.

Rails 2.1 has been out for a while now, but in case you didn’t have a chance to catch up yet, this post collects several links to useful resources which will help bring you up-to-date.

The Pathfinder Development’s blog put out three highly interesting posts. The first is More Named Scope Awesomeness by Noel Rappin, while the second and third ones are Pretty blocks in Rails views and DRYing up Rails Controllers: Polymorphic and Super Controllers, both by Josh Symonds. Another good (and quick) recent read about controllers, was MVC: How to write controllers.

The same Noel also published the second part of “Developing iPhone applications using Ruby on Rails and Eclipse” for DeveloperWorks (part 1 and 2).

FiveRuns released a valuable gem called data_fabric which adds support for sharding and replication to Active Record. The same company also has a contest up and they’re offering two free tickets to RailsConf Europe in Berlin. Speaking of conferences, Fabio Akita announced that there will be a Rails Summit Brazil 2008 this coming October in São Paulo. This will be the first event of its kind for the Rails community in South America.

An improved version (i.e. 1.1.1) of the Oracle enhanced adapter was released, as well as version 0.9.5 of the IBM_DB adapter for DB2 and Informix, which adds support for Rails 2.1.

In purely chronological order, I found the following articles to be worth pointing out: Speed up slow Rails development in vista – a handy tip for developers using Vista, Adding Google Maps To Your Rails Applications, Live fulltext search in Ruby on Rails and Useful Flash Messages in Rails.

The Railscasts website published two new episodes, one on testing through Selenium, and another on semi-static pages.

Finally, let’s close this edition on a lighter note. The next time you are about to create an acts_as_an_evil_genius plugin or other imaginatively named one, think about this post. ;-)

If you’d like to read more updates from the Ruby side of things, please head over to This Week in Ruby.

Posted in General  | 7 comments

This Week in Rails (June 26, 2008)

Posted by Antonio Cangiano June 26, 2008 @ 12:45 AM

Welcome to the second edition of This Week in Rails, a weekly report with highlights from the Rails community.

Ruby Vulnerabilities

As previously reported by Jeremy Kemper, serious vulnerabilities have been discovered for the main Ruby implementations. The official advisory suggests an upgrade path, but there have been several reports of segmentation faults when using Rails with the patched Ruby 1.8.5 and 1.8.6 versions. The Phusion team has published a patch for Ruby 1.8.6-p111, but as things stand now, it hasn’t been included by the Ruby core team (yet).

If you are using Rails 2.1, Ruby 1.8.7-p22 seems the way to go. Unfortunately, Ruby 1.8.7 is not compatible with previous versions of Rails. If you decide that it’s time to upgrade your applications to Rails 2.1, this article features some handy tips, while this other one warns you about a few gotchas.

Those of you who’re running a version of Ruby that shipped with Mac OS X should wait for the next Apple’s Software Update.

Ajax

Rails is opinionated software, but its support for plugins clearly demonstrates a certain openness to diverging opinions on non-core issues. So while most of us mainly use Protoype, it is fairly common to see folks adopting other JavaScript frameworks as well, particularly jQuery.

Last week Jim Neath published a nice overview which compares jQuery with Prototype, and provides information about using jQuery with Rails through the jRails plugin.

Whatever your Ajax framework of choice is, you may be interested in the new Google Ajax Library API to improve the performance of your applications. Thanks to the tutorial Using Google Ajax Libraries API with Ruby on Rails (soon to be incorporated into a plugin) you can start adopting the API with Rails right now.

MVC

Rails 2.1 adds named scopes, which greatly simplify writing “find logic” within your Active Record models. It’s an extremely useful feature which is well explained in this write-up aptly titled, Named Scopes Are Awesome (we agree). Checkout also Ryan Bates’ railscasts on the subject: named_scope and Anonymous Scopes. You may also be interested in this week’s railscast about Caching in Rails 2.1.

Three other compelling Active Record related posts were, Smart Model, Dumb Controller, Bulk insertion of data with ActiveRecord and Timestamped Migrations on how to make “classic migrations” an available option (see ticket).

Michael Bleigh published a tutorial about dealing with subdomains in Rails applications through the SubdomainFu plugin (which appears to be flexible and very straightforward to use).

XP programming practices such as Test-Driven Development are very popular within the Rails community, but there are still many developers who see testing as a chore. Josh Nichols wrote an overview called A walk through of test-driven development with shoulda that shows you how easy it is to apply TDD to your Rails projects. In this specific case, he adopted the Shoulda plugin which seamlessly adds some assertions, helpers and macros on top of the Test::Unit framework.

Documentation

Aside from api.rubyonrails.org there are many alternatives for quickly visualizing the documentation of the Rails’ API. Last week a new one was launched: rails-doc.org. The current version features rapid searches and user annotations. This last feature in particular has the potential to become truly useful.

Deployment

If you are using Apache and mod_rails, you may want to read this article which provides information about a newly released module called apache-upload-progress.

Finally, Jason Crystal wrote a tutorial for packaging Rails applications for offline use on Mac OS X 10.5.

We’re done for this week. If you’d like to read more updates from the Ruby side of things, please head over to This Week in Ruby.

Posted in General  | 19 comments

Multiple Ruby security vulnerabilities

Posted by Jeremy Kemper June 21, 2008 @ 01:57 AM

Drew Yao at Apple uncovered a handful of nasty security vulnerabilities affecting all current versions of Ruby. The details are still under wraps because an attacker can DoS you or possibly execute arbitrary code—holy crap! Better upgrade sooner than later.

According to the official Ruby security advisory, the vulnerable Rubies are:

• 1.8.4 and earlier
• 1.8.5-p230 and earlier
• 1.8.6-p229 and earlier
• 1.8.7-p21 and earlier

Those of us running Ruby 1.8.4 or earlier must upgrade to 1.8.5 or later for a fix. Those on 1.8.5-7 can grab the latest patchlevel release for a fix.

(Please note: Ruby 1.8.7 breaks backward compatibility and is only compatible with Rails 2.1 and later, so don’t go overboard!)

Posted in General  | 79 comments

This Week in Rails (June 16, 2008)

Posted by Antonio Cangiano June 16, 2008 @ 10:40 PM

This is the first edition of This Week in Rails. As announced by Gregg Pollack a few days ago, this weekly column will cover highlights from the Rails community. My aim is to provide you with a status update as if you’d gone on holidays for a week. I will try to be consistent and publish once a week on Sunday or Monday. Being my first shot, I’ll rely on your feedback to verify that I’m on the right track and that this is useful to you; so please feel free to express your opinion in the comment section below.

With Rails 2.1 out, most developers are looking forward to upgrading their skills (and projects) to the latest release. If you’re one of them, I strongly recommend that you check out the second edition of Carlos Brando’s Ruby on Rails 2.1 – What’s new free e-book, which is available in both English and Portuguese, with an Italian translation currently in the works as well. You can also read Rob Anderton’s excellent overview of Rails 2.1’s improved caching capabilities, as well as its built-in support for memcached.

Last week, Phusion announced the first release candidate of Passenger 2.0 (aka mod_rails). This release introduces support for Rack, opening the door to alternative web frameworks as well. In the same announcement, Ruby Enterprise Edition was formally released. Despite the “Enterprise” label, this is a fully Open Source version of Ruby whose main claim is a reduced memory footprint on Linux and Mac OS X.

Speaking of Enterprise, Dr Nic has released version 1.0.2 of his Composite Primary Keys gem. Starting from version 1.0.0 it finally catches up with Active Record 2.1. Erubis, the fast alternative to ERB, has rolled out support for Rails 2.1 as well, in their 2.6.1 version. A week later, version 2.6.2 was released and it includes support for Ruby 1.9 as well. You can install it by running gem install erubis or by downloading it from RubyForge.

Last week Ryan Bates put out another two Railscasts. The first is about how to contribute to Rails using Git and is, needless to say, highly recommended. The second one is in regards to substituting pagination with the effect of endless scrolling, like DZone does. As pointed out, there are plugins that do this, but Ryan’s approach builds it from scratch and is definitely worth checking out.

Other interesting articles were: a concise guide to using the Thinking Sphinx plugin (along with the pre-requisite Sphinx primer), Easy and Flexible Breadcrumbs for Rails even though they are clearly not everyone’s cup of tea, and lastly GemPlugins: A Brief Introduction to the Future of Rails Plugins.

In conclusion, two announcements were previously reported in this blog, but they are both worth repeating. The first is the release of Capistrano 2.4 and the second is that registration has opened up for RailsConf Europe 2008. The conference will be held in Berlin, Germany from the 2nd to the 4th of September. By registering before July 15th, you can save up to 150 euros.

That’s it for this week. As you can see there is no shortage of material, given that we’re such an active community. If you’d like to read more updates from the Ruby side of things, please head over to This Week in Ruby.

Posted in General  | 13 comments

Two New Weekly Columns

Posted by Gregg Pollack June 10, 2008 @ 04:30 AM

I’d like to introduce two new contributors to the Rails blog.

First up is Chu Yeow. Chu has been putting together weekly Living on the Edge blog posts where he covers what’s been going on in Edge Rails. It seemed to me like it should be on the official blog, so expect to see his weekly updates showing up here shortly.

Secondly is Antonio Cangiano. Antonio started doing blog posts entitled This Week in Ruby a few months back which, as you might expect, cover all the significant events of the prior week. Antonio has agreed to move his weekly “Rails” stories over here, so we can all benefit from getting a summary of what’s going on in the neighborhood.

Then I should probably say a word about me, it’s not like I’m on the core team or work at 37 Signals so why am I here? I’m Gregg Pollack, one of the Rails Envy guys, and I’m here to help cover stories and help shape up the RubyOnRails.org website so the real core team can focus on coding.

So if you have any Rails stories that belong on here please email me (Gregg at RailsEnvy). Worst case scenario I’ll cover it on the next Rails Envy Podcast.

Posted in General  | 9 comments

Pratik joins core, retired members go alumni

Posted by David March 26, 2008 @ 09:33 PM

We’re shaking up the Rails core group a bit. First, please welcome Pratik Naik as the newest member of the group.

He’s been doing great work all around the framework and has been spearheading both the documentation branch in git and a thorough cleanup of Action View internals. We’re really happy to hand him the commit keys to the repository.

Second, we’ve created the Rails core alumni for all the proud members of the core group who are no longer in the day-to-day improvement of the framework itself. All of the alumni are still busy working in the Ruby on Rails ecosystem, but either have their hands full with their business or has dedicated their open source time to other initiatives.

We’re incredibly grateful for all the works you guys have done for Ruby on Rails over the years. And you’re all welcome back in the active core group any time you decide. Thanks guys!

Finally, this means that the current active core group is about half its former size. We’d like to add a few more to that, so hopefully we can pick a few more people who’ve been doing varied work on the framework for a sustained period of time soon.

Posted in General  | 26 comments

Rails Rumble 2007

Posted by rick August 15, 2007 @ 01:37 AM

It’s that time of the year again: time for another Rails coding competition. In the spirit of the previous Rails Day contests, Rails Rumble challenges teams of up to four to create the best application possible in just 48 hours. This year’s competition is a little bit differently this time around, so checkout the rules. Judging is now performed by the community, allowing anyone to signup and choose their favorites. Also, your app will be provided a VPS to host the application through the end of October. How cool is that?

If you want to compete, you need to organize quickly, the contest runs on September 8th and 9th.

Posted in General, Sightings  | 8 comments

#rails-contrib and rubyonrails-stacks

Posted by David May 22, 2007 @ 04:11 PM

RailsConf gave birth to a number of new outlets for sub-communities within the Rails family:

#rails-contrib is a new IRC channel on freenode for contributors to Rails. The Rails core team will hang out there to answer questions, discuss patches, and generally interact with anyone doing implementation work for the Rails framework. It's not meant for general chatter, though. Or for how to use the framework. It's strictly for implementational issues and the contributors working on those.

rubyonrails-stacks is a new forum to discuss how we can get standardized set of images going for Rails that can be deployed on any Xen host or even EC2. I posted a welcome with more details on the forum.

Posted in General  | 3 comments

Javascriptian REST

Posted by rick April 02, 2007 @ 05:34 PM

Eric Mill went ahead and created Jester, a library that lets you manipulate your Rails-style resources with javascript models. I think it’s great that we’re seeing implementations in other languages. This python port of Routes implements map.resources, can a python port of ActiveResource be far behind?

Posted in General, Sightings, Tricks  | 14 comments