Tag Archives: rails

Valium extracts Model attributes without instantiating ActiveRecord objects

I was recently on a project that captures and logs data as ActiveRecord models.  Each datum had 10 or so numeric attributes.  One story required pulling out all the values for a particular attribute in a time range (i.e. all … Continue reading

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Designing mobile APIs – basic behaviors

As Rails developers we design APIs on a regular basis: routes for browsers to interact with a web app, JSON apis and routes for client side javascript to build dynamic pages, payloads queued for background processing on a server, and … Continue reading

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Generating documentation from specs

On one of our rails projects I am creating an api to allow mobile clients to access a web service. I need to provide documentation of this API to the developers of several different clients during its development. Normally I … Continue reading

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Rails 3 Upgrade Tip: Invalidate Session Cookies

I recently finished working with Kathryn Aaker on upgrading Eggs, her farm CSA management software, to Rails 3. While there is a lot of good information out there on upgrading from Rails 2 to 3, we did run in to … Continue reading

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Speedy Test Iterations for Rails 3 with Spork and Guard

Overview TDD is fun, right? Rails enthusiasts and agile evangelists alike agree. Waiting for your tests to run, however, makes for a frustrating experience. When the time between test iterations is magnified by bloated tests it can be hard to … Continue reading

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Deploying to Heroku from TeamCity

Previously I discussed our TeamCity configuration using RVM and mentioned that we often use git to deploy projects. Today I’ll share an example of how a TeamCity build agent can trigger deployments of a application hosted on Heroku and some … Continue reading

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Cassandra and Rails talk at LA NoSQL meetup

Last week, Mike Wynholds presented at the inaugural Los Angeles No SQL meetup. The movement to these non-traditional data storage systems has exploded in the last year, and we had a chance to use Cassandra in one of our client’s … Continue reading

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How to install rails on CentOS 5.4 x64

1. Download ruby source wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7.tar.gz tar -zxvf ruby-1.8.7.tar.gz 2. Install dependencies sudo yum install gcc sudo yum install gcc-c++ sudo yum install zlib-devel sudo yum install openssl-devel sudo yum install readline-devel sudo yum install sqlite3-devel 3. Build ruby from … Continue reading

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Automatically deploying to Engine Yard Cloud

I’m working on a application which is deployed to Engine Yard’s Cloud infrastructure and I wanted to automatically redeploy the application whenever our tests passed on our continuous integration server. Engine Yard will eventually allow us to push a branch … Continue reading

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