Elsewhere

From http://rails.co.za/articles/2006/06/03/using-railscron:

Inspired by the legendary (amongst Perl programmers anyway!) Perl Cookbook, comes the Ruby Cookbook. It has the equivalent examples from the Perl Cookbook but in Ruby form, of course. The basic sections are mostly complete, although some of the later sections are barely covered yet. Still, if you want to see the basic recipes for dealing with strings, numbers, dates and times, arrays, hashes, file I/O, process management, and so on, it's a cute little resource.

This cool Ruby cheat sheet quickly runs you through.. reserved words, syntax rules, escape characters, regular expression characters and formats, file mode strings, special variables, expressions, operations, built in classes, and more. Extremely useful to beginners and advanced Rubyists alike.

Pagination in Rails is good, but it can lack flexibility in many situations. At that point it's time to roll your own. However, Phil Bogle and Laurel Fan came up with a solution they call paginate_by_sql that can solve some of the custom pagination problems. This needs to become a plugin.

You might have noticed this blog has nice, syntax colored code excerpts, as does Code Snippets. Jim Morris looks at how you can pull this off in a few different ways. One quick and easy way is to use syntax.carldr.com, a Web site that converts any Ruby code you paste into the correct syntax colored HTML. Currently I use TextMate and an external script using the syntax gem, but might use that site instead as it's easier!

The forum set up for the Rails Recipes book has a section where readers can write their own Rails recipes. Some of them are pretty good and would have been good contenders for the book. Here are some of them:

Rail Mail is a Rails plugin by Scott Fleckenstein that stores copies of any mail that your Rails application sends, and provides an interface to view it.

Aidan Finn has written what may be the most comprehensive walkthrough of developing an authentication system in Rails. He starts from the migrations and covers every step of the process, right through to the tests. If you want to see how a Rails developer produces an entire block of functionality from start to finish, this is worth reading.

RailsTidy is a plugin for Rails, by Damien Merenne, which validates your RHTML templates, the HTML output from your functional tests, and tidies up the HTML generated by Rails.

It's a few months old, but this guide to creating your own role based authentication system in Rails is pretty good. It doesn't use any plugins other than the LoginGenerator.

RailsHelp.com has possibly the simplest homepage in the world. Just type in what you're searching for, and off you go. It's a nice change to digging through the regular API documents.

If you're on Windows and have been having trouble with your database adapters, this post about new Ruby database adapters for Windows might just be for you. Now, back to TextMate... :)

Michael Gorsuch demonstrates how to add SSL to your Rails app in 5 minutes. Very simple and very effective.

Craig Webster has posted several times over the few days about his adventures with sockets in Ruby. He provides nice code examples (even doing socket stuff direct from irb!) and his explanations are useful if you know what you're doing with Ruby, but haven't tried doing any TCP or socket work yet:

When using Rails it's easy to forget there's any other way. Sometimes, however, it's useful to access databases outside of that environment. Luckily, ActiveRecord can be used separately from Rails, and Craig Webster demonstrates how.

The creator of co.mments, Assaf Arkin, a Rails developer, has created a plugin that makes it easy to add a Undo feature to your Rails app. Instead of warning users about things simply let them do it, but give them the choice to undo afterwards. Assaf's plugin doesn't cover all the bases, but it's easy to build upon for creating your own system. For deletion, for example, you'd want to come up with a way to keep the data floating around for a while.

An oldie but a goldie.. Kent Siblev had an issue with his Rails application ballooning to 150 megabytes of memory usage per process. He couldn't figure out where the problem was, so he wrote a small plugin called MemoryLogging to check memory usage on each request (Linux only, I'm afraid). He found his problem within minutes and explains what was going on.

This is a "short" Ruby on Rails reference. It's goal is to give you an overview over the most used functions / methods / classes. It's not a tutorial, but as a handy guide when you already know your way around.

Devin Steffler shows you how to load over 100000 countries, states, and towns into your Rails app's database, from how to get the data to the code to transform the data into database entries.

Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland of Relevance LLC have put together an online presentation called AJAX on Rails. It looks at AJAX, its relation to Rails, how Prototype works, and provides lots of great code examples. If you want to brush up on your whole AJAX and Rails knowledge, it's worth looking at. A PDF version is also available.

Basic Ruby

Another new article in Bruce's series shows you how to get DOM-friendly IDs from ActiveRecord. This is a solution nearly all Rails developers have implemented at some time or another:

Bruce Williams has a great set of articles going on on his blog called "Rails Views". Each one looks at a different aspect of Rails' views and templates system and how you can use it in a cool or different way. You are bound to learn something or come up with some ideas on how to make your views more efficient (I sure have!). Here are some of the recent posts in the series:

Tobias Lütke needed to migrate a database from one architecture to another but needed to copy the data across intact. To ensure that the format would be architecture agnostic, he's created a plugin that dumps the data to YAML and then reloads it back into the database at the other end. It's a simple rake task, and Tobi gives quick and easy instructions.

Rodney, the Pin Up Geek, has set out to demystify the routing system in Ruby on Rails. He provides lots of basic code examples and shows you how to use most of the features of routes, like in this example of a requirements based route that only routes when a postal code is included in the URL: