Ruby-on-Rails

(photo credit: RBerteig)

Slideshare is like the YouTube or Scribd of presentations and slideshows and it features a few good Ruby and Rails related slideshows that are worth flicking through. This post links to some of the best:

Courtenay of the caboo.se has put together a solid "sample Rails application" that enables you to get up and running with a new Rails application quickly.

Image credited to Dave Thomas

Ilya Grigorik has written a article demonstrating three different ways you can schedule tasks to run using Ruby, including a simple thread based scheduler, a OpwnWFEru based scheduler, and a BackgrounDRB based scheduler. A notable omission is RailsCron, which provides another alternative for Rails users.

Benchmarking with httperf is a new screencast by Geoffrey Grosenbach in his Peepcode series of Ruby / Rails related videos. It costs $9, but for that you get a bundle of source code and a very high quality video of 53 minutes' length.

Andrew Birkett has stumbled across an interesting side effect of using SVN checkouts for deploying Rails applications in that, without adequate protection, SVN metadata is made available for all to see. In many cases this means you can see the revision number, the username of the last person to commit or update, and information about the SVN repository used. Andrew links to SVN files found at 37signals.com, Penny Arcade, and StrongSpace, which, at the time of writing, are all still viewable by the public. Luckily this problem is easily fixed by using svn export or a mod_rewrite rule. (I haven't tested this yet, but in theory I think this rewrite rule could work: RewriteRule ^.*.svn.*$ [F] )

Robert Dempsey, Founder of Rails For All, Inc. (a new Rails advocacy group), and Gregg Pollack, CTO of ADS, will be presenting a one-hour session for managers and developers at DeVry University's Orlando campus on Thursday, March 15 as part of the Orlando Ruby Group. There will be a free dinner, provided by Rails For All, so they suggest you arrive hungry! They say the session will focus on the business advantages behind Ruby on Rails and is particularly ideal for managers as well as developers looking for work. More details about the session can be found here.

Pledgie is a new Rails-powered Web site that allows anyone to raise funds online for meaningful causes. There is no charge for the service. Instead, Pledgie's goal is to create an online version of the personal, one-on-one interactions that traditionally are at the heart of successful grassroots volunteerism. Pledgie has recently been successful in helping Rick Olson and Justin Palmer raise some money to support their Mephisto blogging system.

Heiko Webers writes:

Mike Clark has put together a stunningly simple tutorial covering how to create a complete file uploading and image resizing system in mere minutes using Rick Olson's attachment_fu plugin. What impresses me the most is that he shows how attachment_fu can automatically store uploaded files on Amazon's S3 service with only a few tweaks. This is a must read for Rails developers who haven't brushed up on their file upload techniques lately.

Jonathan Conway of New Bamboo (more on this at the end of this post) has put together a rather comprehensive walkthrough on using mocks with Rails and using them to define your interfaces. Not having cut my teeth with mocks yet, I took the rare step of asking for a personal summary of the article by the author himself, and Jonathan delivered!