Advice on using Ruby, RVM, Passenger, Rails, Bundler, … in development (via Jérémy Lecour)

This article is the english version of “Conseils pour utiliser Ruby, RVM, Passenger, Rails, Bundler, … en développement”, originaly written in French. If you have a better translation, I’d be happy to use it (full or parts) and credit you. Introduction : Why this advice The dev team I’m working in is composed of 3 people who use Ruby. Besides me, who’s is spending the most part of my time on Ruby and became “the one who knows” about this stuff, m … Read More

via Jérémy Lecour

Rails Startup App – Basecamp (with Rails 2.3)

A lot of GitHub projects are dedicated to creating a Rails Start-up application that should have the most used functionalities in any web application, like:

• user authentication
• profile management
• user roles
• users management
• integration with other authentication systems (OpenID, FacebookConnect, etc)

Some of the most well known are listed below:

Design Patterns: Ruby and Ruby on Rails

I am creating a new page on my blog, regarding Ruby and Ruby on Rails Design Patterns links.

Regarding Ruby Design patterns, there are (in my opinion) 2 major resources: The “Ruby Design Patterns” book of Russ Olsen and the Ruby Best Practices Blog. The Design page is about the rest of them :).

A first link: a slideshow regarding common design patterns (Observer, Decorator, Factory, Command) implemented both in Java and Ruby. Enjoy.

SEAM: Entity Inheritance

I will make a comparison on how the SEAM (Hibernate) framework and Rails framework handles model inheritance.

This first article is about SEAM.

Products in multiple categories. Find similar products.

This is a draft

– product model

– product can be in  more than one categories, on multiple levels of the tree (i can attach the product anywhere i want); no restriction on this what so ever.

– categories are organized as a nested set (logical organized as a tree)

Problem: need to find similar products based on this taxonomy; sorting from ‘most similar’ to ‘least similar’

Major sites developped in Rails

http://rails100.pbwiki.com/Compete+Rankings Enjoy 🙂

Of course, as expected, the Rails stars are twitter, yellow pages, scribd. I only wonder why doesn’t LinkedIn appear on their top 😕

Searchlogic plugin: ActiveRecord search on Steroids

Searchlogic is everything you would ever wish from AR search and you could not find.

The brilliant ideea is that the search itself is seen as an object, so you can add/remove conditions very easy.

search = User.new_search
search.conditions.hour_of_created_at = 5

Google Calendar + Thunderbird / Sunbird / Lightning

We all love Google WebApps. Simple, light, fair features, available anywhere anytime.

What about sync between desktop software and google apps? Well, we are mainly speaking about:

• sync between Calendar and an email/calendar application.
• sync with Google Docs (offline availability and editing) 

This post is about the first one.

Mongrel freezing – monitoring tools

My Mongrel staging server ‘freezes’ after 2-3 days of uptime. Nothing in the logs, of course. No abnormal memory usage increase.

The first sollution was: Supervize +  bash script that restarted the server if a http request received a timeout. However, this is an ugly sollution.

Below are some of the monitoring/debugging tools i have found after a little bit of research.

Mootools and prototype on the same page

Prototype and Mootools are 2 of the most used JS frameworks on the web. The bad thing about them is that each of them add/extend objects in the global scope so it is impossible to include them in the same html page. The ‘solutions’ i have found are not reliable since the mootools library is ‘modified’ to

For a Rails project, the first natural choice is Prototype, since you get native support from Rails libraries.  What if you want to use a shiny glamour multi-featured JS gadget writted on top of Mootools on your project? 😀 Something like Slideshow 2 ..