Category Archives: Ruby

Acceptance Testing non Ruby web applications with Cucumber

If you’re looking for the sample Standalone Cucumber Test Suite to get you started testing non Ruby based applications with Cucumber, here’s the source: http://github.com/thuss/standalone-cucumber. Sometimes you inherit a non Ruby based web app written in PHP, Perl, Java, C#, … Continue reading

Posted in Continuous Integration, Java, Quality Assurance, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Testing, Web | 1 Comment

Code readability through conciseness

One of the things I love about newer languages like Ruby and Scala (and to a degree Python and Groovy) are the language features that allow you to dial conciseness up or down for readability. Take for instance the typical … Continue reading

Posted in Java, Ruby, Scala, Software Engineering | 8 Comments

Standalone Migrations: Using Rails migrations in non Rails projects

Update 8/7/2010: Standalone migrations is now a gem (sudo gem install standalone_migrations) so disregard the outdated installation instructions below Update 7/8/2009: With the latest batch of contributed patches standalone migrations now works just like Rails migrations Update 12/26/2008: I switched … Continue reading

Posted in Database, Java, Linux, MySQL, Ruby, Ruby on Rails | 5 Comments

Search Engine Friendly URLs with Ruby on Rails

Update 2/5/07: I’ve since discovered five plugins that address this very problem with slightly different approaches (the latter two store a permalink in the table, good for mutable titles): acts_as_sluggable acts_as_urlnameable acts_as_slugable acts_as_friendly_param permalink_fu Obie’s recent post on search engine … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Search Engine Optimization, Software Engineering | 3 Comments

Ruby on Rails Dreamhost plugin

Update 2/11/07: Just to clarify, this plugin won’t keep your Rails site running on Dreamhost if the sum of all your running processes exceeds 200MB (which is when their process monitor kills your processes). Run ps aux and sum the … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Systems Administration | 15 Comments

Keeping Rails running at Dreamhost Part 2

Update 2/2/07: Per Thomas’ comment I’ve released the code below as the dreamhost rails plugin. Update 1/25/07: People have reported difficulties copy and pasting the dispatch.fcgi source code from this blog post so here is a dispatch.fcgi to download. Make … Continue reading

Posted in Linux, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Systems Administration, Web | 10 Comments

Switching from Edge Rails to 1.2 stable with Piston

Update 1/25/07: Francois pointed out that now as of Piston 1.3.0 you can now do this all with the following command: piston switch http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/tags/rel_1-2-1 vendor/rails For starters, if you’re still using svn:externals to manage your vendor/rails directory it’s time to … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Source Control | 1 Comment

An interview with the authors of JRuby

The Java Posse hosted a great podcast interview with the authors of JRuby: Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo. Additionally you get to hear what Tor Norbye is up to with his work on NetBeans Ruby integration and it looks like … Continue reading

Posted in Java, Ruby, Software Engineering | Comments Off on An interview with the authors of JRuby

Keeping Ruby on Rails running at Dreamhost

Update 1/12/07: This solution has reduced my 500 error rate down to less than 0.2% but it’s still not perfect. I continue to plug away at this… Update 1/24/07: I’ve finally solved my Dreamhost 500 error problems with a different … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Systems Administration, Web | 4 Comments

The Rails Way delivers the goods

I had a piece of data import code in Wind and Tides that I just knew could be cleaner and more elegant. Last week I submitted it to Jamis and Michael who write the Rails Way blog and their refactoring … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Software Engineering | 2 Comments