"In which I provide easy instructions to try a new patch that drastically improves the start up time of Ruby applications, in the hope that with wide support it will be merged into the upcoming 1.9.3 release. Skip to the bottom for instructions, or keep reading for the narrative."

"Form-backing objects, also known as Presenters (not to be confused with the concept of view presenters), are objects whose sole purpose is to take user-entered form data and perform some unit of work. Creating and testing form-backing objects is simple. In this situation, you might add a Registration object."

"Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing."

"Helpers suck. They’ve always sucked, and they will suck on if we keep them in modules.

ActiveHelper is an attempt to pack helpers into classes. This brings us a few benefits

inheritance helpers can be derived other helpers
delegation helpers are no longer mixed into a target- the targets use the helper, where the new
methods are delegated to the helper instances
proper encapsulation helpers don’t rely blindly on instance variables – a helper defines its needs, the target has to provide readers
interfaces a helper clearly provides methods and might use additional helpers
Note that ActiveHelper is a generic helper framework. Not coupled to anything like Rails or Merb. Not providing any concrete helpers. Feel free to use clean helpers in any framework (including Rails and friends)!"

"Some people want to start doing some Rails 3.0 Beta work on Ruby 1.9.2 on their development machines. I’m tossing this up here to have something to point people to when they have questions."

"The main body of the view will always render into the unnamed yield. To render content into a named yield, you use the content_for method."

"This looks a whole lot like the initializer block in Rails 2.3, but the Application object, not a global configuration object, now has the configuration information. Similarly, routes.rb now begins YourApp::Application.routes.draw. The application object lives in the center of Railties in Rails 3, providing a core object that the rest of the frameworks can build on."

"It is true. You are. Go try it now. That is an order. I can wait for you to come back and finish reading this post. I could end the post now, but I suppose I’ll go on and tell you a bit about my experience with Heroku yesterday."

"Recently here at Webbynode we had a demand for validating HTML without going as far as driving a browser. We have an internal library that generates HTML after compiling HAML templates. To fulfill our BDD needs, we wanted a simple, straightforward way to validate HTML tags without the need of a full blown browser driving engine, since we don’t have an HTTP server running while testing this library."

"The question should not be, “is Rails a safe choice,” but “[how long] can we justify the expense of traditional development approaches.”"

"Again these are just named scopes. You can chain them together, call methods off of them, etc. What’s great about these named scopes is that they do NOT use the :include option, making them much faster. Instead they create a LEFT OUTER JOIN and pass it to the :joins option, which is great for performance. To prove my point here is a quick benchmark from an application I am working on..."

"Metric Fu is a compilation of several tools to help find areas of code that could be improved. In this episode I show you how to setup this tool on the railscasts.com source code."

"Things to keep in mind.

No matter where you start, start with one simple test. One assertion, if you can manage it.
Write the code to make that test pass
Then refactor -- this part is critical, this is where the creative design is with a TDD process.
Then write the next test.
In Rails, you'll often start in the controller then realize that code needs to be written in the model (or vice-versa). Write a separate test for the model -- testing models from the controller makes it hard to test all the model logic.
It's okay to plan the tests in advance, but you should only work on one test at a time. (Sometimes I'll write the series of tests, then comment out all but one)"

"RSpec, Cucumber, Webrat, RCov and Autotest are a powerful combination of tools for testing your Rails app. Unfortunately getting them to all work nicely together can be a bit of challenge. I recently configured a development environment from scratch on OS X 10.5 Leopard and kept track of all of the little details."

[Installing on Leopard Server seems even simpler, when I think about it]

"...And now you can start your server as usual with script/server. If you see any error, check the backtrace to see which plugin/gem is causing it and try to google about it, but hopefully your application will run smoothly from the first time."

[noting this in particular for the publishing business model it shadows]

"Thanks to O'Reilly and the RailsConf organisers, we're introducing ActiveResearch, an extended satellite meeting at this year's RailsConf in Las Vegas. ActiveResearch is a great opportunity to meet and greet others working with Ruby and Rails in a scientific or technology discipline. We'll have some special guest speakers, a series of more informal lightning talks, finishing things up with a round table discussion of the state of the art, and some drinks and nibbles."

"I was surprised to see so little mention of these fantastic short tutorials in the blogosphere. These videos are a gold mine of information, which is made all the more better by the fact that they’re entirely free. Do yourself a favor and check out these awesome clips, they’re well worth your time."

"Then, to display the timeline_events, you'll need an association on your User model. We've frequently defined this as a has_many :through followed items, like how you might imagine it's implemented in the github activity feed. Then, in your dashboards/show.html.erb, you'd have something like this."

"When viewed in development mode, the person div would be overlaid with a translucent gray box with the words “Milestone 6” in it, as shown below."

"Combining these techniques can net us some very sophisticated data manipulations. Below is a form that will update a Creator, his address, updates three existing widgets adds one widget, and deletes two widgets."

"Paperclip is a plugin for Ruby on Rails’ ActiveRecord that lets files work as simply as any other attributes do. There are no extra database tables, only one library to install for image processing, and the ease of being able to refer to your files as easily as you refer to your other attributes."

"To sum up, I use R with Rails successfully and very happily, but under controlled circumstances and not in a public-facing or uptime-crucial situation. I don’t have data on speed or memory usage, other than to say that I regularly run reports with dozens or even hundreds of different images and graphics rendering is not the most time consuming part of the task. What matters most to me is that I can easily prototype in R, and my library of graph types can be used in any environment that supports R. I am not locking myself in to a Rails-only or Ruby-only package. Also, although I haven’t even touched on it here, my Rails and Ruby applications have access to the rest of R’s extensive statistical and mathematical functionality and a huge package library."

"It’s christmas, baby, and do we have a present for you. We’re ending the bickering between Merb and Rails with a this bombshell: Merb is being merged into Rails 3!"

"Traditionally deployment has been painful because it involves getting all the required software installed, configuring various moving parts, remembering to copy the right files at the right time, and so on. Leopard Server changes all that. In addition to Ruby and Rails, Leopard Server comes pre-installed with everything we need to deploy and run a production Rails application: Apache 2.2, mod_proxy_balancer, MySQL, Mongrel, Capistrano, and a few other unique goodies. Indeed, Leopard Server raises the bar when it comes to ease of Rails deployment."

Rails plugin to add FSM functionality to models

"...overtime is any time when you wish you weren't at the office"

It will want a page title, if I install it....

Love the example

Eurgh.

Nice post, but the comments have the highest crap/word count I've seen in many months. Something about Big Shop Programmers? Work culture is icky; let's just *do work* instead.

Nice plugin for Rails, making complex database queries much more legible and avoid code repetition.