Elsewhere

Akhil Bansal has created a cool bash script that will create a new Rails project, import it to an SVN repository, then remove and ignore log files, sessions, temporary files, and set up database.yml correctly. I was previously using a Rake task for this, but installing this script at the OS level might prove easier for me in future.

Mark A. McBride has put together a great article about processing credit cards with Ruby on Rails using the Active Merchant plugin.

In case the title of this post is giving you deja-vu, we've looked at "How To Create A Ruby Extension In C" before at Ruby Inside. We've also looked at using RubyInline to make the process even faster by not having to write a specialized C extension.

It's good to start seeing those Rails 1.2 guides coming out of the woodwork. Hopefully I'll get able to do a roundup of them shortly, but for now Andre Lewis presents a quick, practical guide to nesting CRUD resources in Rails 1.2.

Bruce Tate continues his fine Crossing Borders series with a look at Ruby's support for closures. If code blocks and block techniques used by routines such as Rails' respond_to confuse you, it's a great primer.

Russ Olsen has been putting together a small series of blog posts about building a DSL in Ruby. The first part dates from October 2006, but the second part has just been released, making it a good double length read. In the mini-series, Russ looks at the motivation for developing a DSL and develops a basic DSL called Potemkin.

License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0. Copyright, Why The Lucky Stiff.

You're about to start a new Rails project. Do you type rails <project name>? No, "Stop using the rails command", says Josh Susser. If you create a dummy / default Rails project that's set up just the way you like it with plugins, your own extensions, and all those carefully defined svn:ignore flags, you can just create a new Rails project with a simple svn copy. So simple, but I've totally missed this idea, and it's a real timesaver.

Amy Hoy has written a great tutorial running through the Rails console that's suitable for both complete novices and experts (there are a couple of tricks she mentions that I didn't know at least!). Amy appears to have taken up Slash7 with a new zeal lately, so let's hope we'll see more great content like this on her blog through 2007!

"How To Think Like A Computer Scientist" is a range of online books (distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License) developed by various authors each focusing on a different programming language and explaining computer science concepts with it. Elizabeth Wiethoff has now started the Ruby edition and has made her work so far available online.

css_dryer is a Rails plugin by Andrew Stewart that makes putting together stylesheets for your Rails applications more efficient than ever before. It supports nesting and basic variable interpolation. For example, here's an example of nesting:

Walter Korman has released the first version of a Yahoo! Video library for Ruby. All it takes is a gem install yahoo-video and some simple code like this:

I just came across this excellent article that provides links supporting many of the benefits of Ruby on Rails. If you need to justify your use of Ruby on Rails to employers, co-workers, or even yourself, check it out. Links about performance, scalability, philosophy and evangelism are all included.

I keep getting e-mails about job sites, Ruby jobs, and so forth, so I decided it's time for a bumper "here are all the Ruby and Rails job sites" post! Enjoy..

RailsForum.com has just announced the winners of their October Tutorial Contest. A lot of cool tutorials came out of the contest, so I wanted to link to them here.

1st place - HOWTO: Make a Rails Plugin From Scratch by Danger Stevens.

2nd place - Refactoring on Rails: Move to Model and Refactoring on Rails: Multiple Scopes in Controller by Ryan Bates.

3rd place - HOWTO: Send Instant Messages in Rails

Other entries
Image uploads and resizing for Rails models with mini-magick
XSS and when h() just ain't enough
Creating Two Models in One Form
Editing Multiple Models in One Form
Test Helper: Clean, Custom Assertion Messages
Debugging on Rails: Reading Stack Traces
Introduction to Form Helpers
Programming Best Practices
Advice to Rails Beginners: Follow Conventions
Handy RJS Tips
Using Autotest with Rails on Windows XP machines
Creating Many Models in One Form
Creating a Variable Number of Models in One Form
Getting Started With RESTful Rails
Rails Migration For Beginners

Ruby genius Mauricio Fernandez has been playing with an attempt at processing Prolog using Ruby found on a Japanese coding site and has come up with tiny_prolog.rb.