Articles

Recurring Items in a Rails Application

I recently had to implement some recurring items in a Rails application – we’ll call them “entries” here though you can use this technique for appointments, bills, or whatever else. After thinking about it for a while, I settled on:

Developer Webinar – Flex Plan Takeaways

Last week we hosted a live developer webinar covering the ins, outs and awesomeness of the new Engine Yard Cloud Flex plan. If you missed it, the recording is available on our site. Jon Crosby and Ezra Zygmuntowicz did the bulk of the work, running through live demos and highlighting the important features.

LRU Integration explained

Today I will present my reasoning which lead me to the implementation of the LRUHash as well as how I integrated it into the main code. We will look at how LRUHash works and how it is integrated into the project. Then I will answer some questions that were actually asked — or only thought.

jQuery custom events

Javascript is all about interactions. When an event happens then something should happen. For example hover, click, foucs, mouseover etc are basic events which are used on a regular basis. jQuery provides a method called bind to bind an action to an event. For example, if we want an alert message when we click on a link then that can be done like this.

Notes

I'm still wrapping a few things up, so theres a bit more to come, but in the mean time here are a few quick notes to pass on:

Today is the last day for a 35% discount at www.manning.com. Just use the discount code railsund35

If you get in touch with Obie, you can also get a great discount on tickets to BizConf!

Double Shot #508

A few odds and ends to close off the working week.

tig, the ncurses front-end to Git

This is a guest post from Nathan de Vries.

I’ve never really been a fan of gitk, but early on when I started using Git I found a tool called tig. It’s available in MacPorts and Ubuntu (since Gutsy) through apt-get install tig. Tig provides a simple command-line yet visual interface to Git.

Handling AJAX errors and displaying friendly error messages to users

AJAX is cool. Except that when it does not work. When an AJAX operation goes wrong then more often than not user continues to see the spinner spinning and no feed back is provided to the user that something has gone wrong.

CouchDB

Apache's CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API.

Basics

CouchDB is a document-based database server, accessible via a RESTful JSON API using the Javascript language as a query interface. CouchDB is a non-relational, non object-oriented database, which stands against one of Rails' basic conventions: the ORM data structure. CouchDB does not come to replace ActiveRecord or any other relational data structure laye…

CouchDB

Apache's CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API.

Basics

CouchDB is a document-based database server, accessible via a RESTful JSON API using the Javascript language as a query interface. CouchDB is a non-relational, non object-oriented database, which stands against one of Rails' basic conventions: the ORM data structure. CouchDB does not come to replace ActiveRecord or any other relational data structure laye…

Upcoming Late 2009 Ruby and Rails Events (With Tickets Ready To Buy) | Rails Fire

Upcoming Late 2009 Ruby and Rails Events (With Tickets Ready To Buy)

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Here's a list of some prominent forthcoming Ruby and Rails events scheduled through to the end of the year. Only events with tickets ready to buy right now are included - events which have already sold out are not included.

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Lone Star Ruby Conference 2009 (Austin, Texas; August 27-29, 2009)

The third annual Lone Star Ruby Conference (LSRC) is heating up and right around the corner, running for three days, August 27-29 in Austin, TX. LSRC 2009 offers a full day of advanced training on Thursday in addition to the two days of Ruby-packed, dual-track speaking sessions on Friday and Saturday. And, back again for an encore performance, is the author of Ruby, Yukihiro Matsumoto

Registration is $350 for the conference (meals includes) and an additional $300 for the advanced training. A full outline of available training sessions and presentations is available.

RubyRX (Washington DC; September 10-11, 2009)

RubyRX is a professional Ruby conference covering what you'd expect at a professional Ruby conference, namely: Ruby development, Rails, JRuby, Ruby tools, frameworks, testing, best practices, and so forth. You get a two-fer with this conference as the AgileRX conference is taking place at the same time at the same place!

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WindyCityRails (Chicago, Illinois; September 12)

WindyCityRails is a one-day conference taking place in Chicago (home of better pizza than New York, 37signals and, of course, Rails creator, David Heinemeier Hansson) in September. You get seven sessions and two tutorials for your money with Ryan Singer (37signals), Noel Rappin, Ben Scofield, John McCaffrey, Dean Wampler, Yehuda Katz, and David Elsinger to keep you entertained.

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RubyFoo (London; October 2-3, 2009)

RubyFoo is a Ruby conference taking place in London in October, 2009. It's being put on by Trifork, the company behind the successful JAOO developer conferences. RubyFoo is a sort of follow up to the RubyFools conference they put on in Copenhagen, Denmark last year. Speakers lined up so far include Sam Aaron, Ola Bini (JRuby), Aslak Hellesoy, and Matz.

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Aloha On Rails (Hawaii; October 4-6, 2009)

Aloha on Rails is a brave new entry to the Rails conference circuit, taking place in Hawaii in early October. If you've always wanted to try and get a Hawaii vacation on the company dime, this is the time to build up your powers of persuasion. The conference bills itself as "the premier destination event for Ruby on Rails and Web development" and promises three unique days (2 for conference, 1 for tutorials) of Ruby and Rails related fun.
The speaker list for Aloha is pretty significant. Names include Chad Fowler, Obie Fernandez, Gregg Pollack, Desi McAdam, Charles Nutter, Yehuda Katz, Sarah Mei, Tammer Saleh, Chad Pytel, Blake Mizerany, Pat Maddox, and Ezra Zygmuntowicz.. and that's only the start of it - see all of them.

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Rails Summit Latin America 2009 (São Paulo, Brazil; October 13-14, 2009)

Rails Summit Latin America comes back for a second run in 2009 - taking place between October 13-14 in sunny São Paulo, Brazil. Last year's event attracted 550 attendees, so for a regional Ruby/Rails conference it did amazingly. This year it costs 400 Brazilian Real to attend (about $200).

Speakers lined up to speak so far include Bryan Liles, Carlos Brando, Chad Fowler, Gregg Pollack, Ilya Grigorik, Jason Seifer, Matt Aimonetti, Obie Fernandez, Pratik Naik, Rich Kilmer, and several prominent South American Rubyists. It's a bit of an all-star affair!

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Rails Camps (Margate, UK and Melbourne, Australia; October / November 2009)

Rails Camps is a series of Rails related get-togethers, run in a lo-fi style in, usually, Australia and the United Kingdom. Two Rails Camps are on the calendar for late 2009. The first in Margate, UK (an interesting seaside resort, to say the least) on October 16-19 and the second in Melbourne, Australia on November 20-23. Previous reports show that these events seem to go down really well, especially if you want to get away from it all for a few days and hang out with fellow geeks - so check it out.

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