On the back of Kevin Clark's "Things You Shouldn't Be Doing in Rails", Geoffrey Grosenbach has created a plugin called 'deprecated' that, with a single rake task, will alert you to all of the old and deprecated code in your application. This is perfect for bringing those old applications up to date and will help you catch all of the changes necessary, such as using flash and session instead of @flash and @session, etc.
Kevin Clark presents "Things You Shouldn't Be Doing in Rails". It's not a list of things Rails isn't any good for, rather it's features or concepts related to Rails that you shouldn't be using. It covers deprecated finders, the in-built pagination classes, scaffolding, engines, layouts, and namespaced controllers.
FileList["**/*.rb"].egrep(Regexp.new(ARGV.first))
Jim Weirich has an interesting blog post about using Rake's 'FileList' class to find files on your hard drive. I've already started to use the example he gives here.. good find!
This isn't particularly new, alas, but still interesting:
Prolific PuneRuby blogger Satish Talim has just begun a course of free Ruby lessons. They're open to anyone who wants to get involved, and so far 43 people are signed up! The lessons have already begun, but you can still get in on the action. The syllabus is available to check out, and to register to receive the lessons you only have to e-mail Satish at satish.talim /at gmail.com. This might be an ideal chance to get those friends who keep asking you questions about Ruby off your back ;-)
Alex Bradbury has developed Ariel, a library that uses predefined examples to work out how to extract information from other documents. It was a Google Summer of Code project and was mentioned by Austin Ziegler. More directly from Alex:
>> story.description = "Peter flippin' _Cooper_" => "Peter flippin' _Cooper_" >> story.description => "<p>Peter flippin’ <em>Cooper</em></p>" >> story.textiled = false => false >> story.description => "Peter flippin' _Cooper_"
Chris Wanstrath has created acts_as_textiled, a new plugin for Rails that allows you to specify columns on your model to be automatically parsed as Textile content.
Hiveminds Magazine has a long article about using Ruby's DBI library to connect to databases, along with installation instructions.
Ruby Inside is running a $100 contest for people who write a Ruby or Rails related article, resource post, or tutorial this week. There's still just over 24 hours left to run so get your entries in quickly if you want a chance at winning the $100. So far there have been 16 entries and they're all pretty good. But.. there are only two entries for the second prize so far, so if you want some great odds at winning the $15 second prize, link to the contest and let us know about it!
Geoffrey Grosenbach looks at how to use memcached, a fast in-memory caching daemon, from Ruby and Rails to speed up common repeated data operations, including ActiveRecord lookups. He also includes a useful install script and patch for Mac OS X users to make memcached fly on that platform. He also demonstrates the use of the cached_model gem to significantly speed up database reads from Rails applications.