Articles on Rails

Jonah Williams

Jonah Williams

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 so on. As we move into mobile development we can benefit from many of the

Jonah Williams

Jonah Williams

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 would prefer to let my API tests act as documentation of the expected API behavior

Alon Salant

Alon Salant

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 a few tricky snags not covered in the guides. One such snag happened only once

Christian Bradley

Christian Bradley

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 maintain a purist’s test-driven approach. After looking into autotest, parallel testing, and in-memory databases, I

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Jonah Williams

Jonah Williams

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 of the challenges I found.

Michael Wynholds

Michael Wynholds

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 projects. Cassandra is a column based datastore developed within Facebook, and open-sourced as a top-level

Rob Pak

Rob Pak

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 source cd ruby-1.8.7 ./configure –with-openssl-dir=/usr/lib64/openssl make sudo make install 4. Download rubygems source wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/69365/rubygems-1.3.6.tgz

Jonah Williams

Jonah Williams

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 to our cloud environment from git (ie “git push engineyard master”) but until that is