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.
ar_mailer is a system that automatically queues outgoing mails from Rails applications (using ActionMailer) by placing them into a special database table, to then be handled by a separate process, ar_sendmail. This could be particularly ideal for systems with mass mailing applications or simply as a method to speed up certain requests in your Rails applications since only a single database write is required rather than waiting for an e-mail to finish sending.
Evan Henshaw-Plath (more commonly known as rabble) is in the process of writing a book for O'Reilly about testing and debugging Ruby on Rails applications, and has just launched a companion blog, Testing Rails. The subject of the blog is exactly what the title says, and rabble hopes to post at least one in-depth tutorial relating to Rails and testing each week. The first is Building Tests from Logs - Test Driven Debugging.
ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Time::Conversions::DATE_FORMATS.merge!( :default => "%m/%d/%Y", :date_time12 => "%m/%d/%Y %I:%M%p", :date_time24 => "%m/%d/%Y %H:%M" )
Richard Leonard demonstrates how to use the date formats that come with Rails, as well as how to override or add some of your own directly into Rails' helpers on the fly.
Mathew Abonyi has made available the initial release of PluginTestKit, his test kit designed to make implementing testing for plugins easy. If you're actively developing plugins and bemoaning the lack of a decent test system, check it out.
The great guys over at New Bamboo (a British Ruby on Rails development team) have launched a new blog and their first post is a tour through the testing methods available in Rails. It's ideal for those who've fallen behind with their Rails testing knowledge or those who want to get up to speed quickly.
Lucas Carlson comes up with a cute trick to make Ruby feel a little more like a prototyped language by allowing you to define methods on a class in real-time through child objects, like so:
Simple "Send Email from Ruby" method - Using Net::SMTP to talk to the local SMTP daemon directly to send mail. Not elegant, but a useful quick hack.