Ruby on Rails
Rails is a hugely popular web development framework, implemented in Ruby.
The first version of Rails was released back in 2004. Embodying the idea of "convention over configuration" it grew rapidly, attracting followers who had become weary of repeating the mundane tasks required by other frameworks. Combined with the highly dynamic nature of the Ruby programming language, the Rails conventions made for a very productive development environment.
Rails Resources
There is a plethora of useful documentation, tutorials and blogs for you to read, but these sites stand out as being worthy of note:
- The official guides are where I tell programmers who are new to Rails to start; the quality is very high. See http://guides.rubyonrails.org/.
- If you fancy giving yourself a full tutorial, the Pragmatic Programmers have it covered in their book Agile Web Development with Rails.
Once you've got started, these are very useful:
- railsapi.com -- JavaScript enhanced copies of the Rails API (can be viewed online but best downloaded to your computer).
- Railscasts -- regular screencasts from Ryan Bates demonstrating how to achieve specific tasks in Rails.
- Rails Recipes -- a book by Chad Fowler that contains plenty of worked examples, covering many common tasks encountered by the practicing Rails developer. Updated for Rails 3.1.
- News from the edge of Rails -- Rails moves fast, and Ryan Daigle's blog is a great way to keep up with the latest developments.
Oh, and if you're not yet familiar with Ruby get acquainted before you start learning Rails (I've listed some useful resources on my Ruby page). If you don't understand Ruby syntax you'll have trouble separating the language from the framework, and that really slows you down.
Articles on Ruby on Rails
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Automating bundle exec
Bundler is a great way to control the versions of the gems that are used in your Ruby application, but it requires you to run Ruby scripts and tools (such as
rakeandheroku) by prefixing them with an extra command (e.g.bundle exec rake). This is a pain, can be easy to forget, and can cause no end of subtle bugs if the script that you're running can be found outside of the bundled application, in your shell's PATH. -
Searching Haml and SASS with ack
If, like me, you've recently discovered the wonderful speed of the
acksearch tool, you may be frustrated to find that it ignores some of your source code. Files that you know should be appearing in your search results just don't show up, asackdoesn't consider.hamlor.scssfiles to be worth searching. Well, we can fix that. -
Finding performance problems
A user recently reported poor performance on one of our Rails apps. I pulled up New Relic's performance graphs and checked what was happening around the time that we received the email. Sure enough there was a massive spike over a 10 minute period in the time taken to serve a request.
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Testing Rails with Rack::Test
The biggest news in Rails 2.3 is its support for Rack, the WSGI inspired Ruby web server interface. Of all the Rack goodness that has come along lately, the one that has me the most excited is Bryan Helmkamp's Rack::Test library, of which Bryan said "Basically, I extracted Merb’s request helper code into a small, reusable, framework agnostic library."
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Sharing CSS between Rails and PHP
Many web sites are built using a variety of web applications, using different web frameworks. These sub sites share the same branding and ought to re-use the same CSS and images. How do you re-use these files within your Rails application, without the maintenance overhead of copying and pasting the code into each new application?
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Configure the Expires header for Rails under nginx
The images, CSS and JavaScript files served up by your Rails application can usually be cached by the web browser, rather than being downloaded every time the browser loads a page on your site. Rails gives you some help here, but it doesn't happen automatically -- you need to configure your web server to set the HTTP Expires header.
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database.yml should be checked in
It's generally acknowledged to be good practice to keep your production
database.ymlfile away from your version control system. Why? So that people snooping around your version control system don't find your database password. There are plenty of examples out there that tell you how to set your production password with Capistrano, but I'm talking about thedatabase.ymlfile used during development. -
Easy git-svn for Rails (or "git-me-up")
I've been trying to persuade
git-svnto work properly with Rails plugins that are installed viasvn:externals. Whilst working out how to do it I stumbled across several great articles, but I couldn't get any of the solutions presented to work perfectly.After a bit of head scratching I got it sorted, and wrapped the process up in a little utility called git-me-up.
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Monitoring BackgrounDRb with God
God is a very neat piece of software, frequently used by Rails developers to monitor mongrel servers, and restart them if/when they crash or use up too many system resources.
Its use isn't limited purely to monitoring web servers though; you can monitor pretty much anything you like. Read on to see how to configure it to monitor the Ruby job processing daemon, BackgrounDRb.
