Cinderella is a fully managed development environment for open source hacking on Mac OSX. It's powered by homebrew and chef. You only need Xcode to get started.

Cinderella builds everything up in ~/Developer. It won't stomp on any of your current installations so you don't have to commit your entire machine immediately. It's simple to rollback if you really want to.

This guide covers Rails integration with Rack and interfacing with other Rack components. By referring to this guide, you will be able to:

Create Rails Metal applications
Use Rack Middlewares in your Rails applications
Understand Action Pack’s internal Middleware stack
Define a custom Middleware stack

Pow is a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X. Have it serving your apps locally in under a minute.

A Ruby memcache client library.

All the power of the Solr search engine; all the beauty of Ruby. Sunspot exposes all of Solr's most powerful search features using an API of elegant DSLs. That means robust, flexible fulltext search with no boolean queries and no string programming.

MVC is great.  It enforces sensible code organization for your models, templates, and business logic. But you’re probably not going to build even a basic webapp without a fair amount of JavaScript and CSS.  If you’ve worked with a medium to large size code base, you know how quickly things can get out of control for these assets.  To exasperate the situation, teams rarely lay down ground rules on how the developers should organize these assets, so you end up with a mess of inline scripts, inline styles, and multiple directories awash in loosely organized asset files.

So what is the best way to organize these into a framework?  I’ll cover how I go about organizing my JS and CSS, both for the purpose of being able to find things, but also making sure JS code and styles don’t accidentally conflict.  While my example is for Rails, thes ideas will translate directly into other MVC frameworks.

One of my first tasks as a new developer here at Ginzametrics has been to help migrate our production servers to AWS, not because our current setup is failing us in any kind of egregious way, but because we’re looking to better automate provisioning and scaling of the platform itself up to millions of keywords. It also helps that Amazon has very recently launched a new data center in Tokyo, right in the backyard of many Ginza customers.

If you’ve never worked with AWS before, your first foray will most likely be somewhat confusing. Part of it is that Amazon’s documentation, while thorough, is needlessly verbose and labyrinthine, to the point where it might take three or four hours of ceaseless jumping, scanning, and focused reading before you have even the slightest grip on how to bring up an EC2 instance. And even if you are familiar with the AWS-EC2 ecosystem, you’re probably always looking for better tools to make life easier.

Enter Rubber, a Capistrano/Rails plugin that promises to automate the provisioning of both vertically and horizontally scalable multi-instance EC2 deployment configurations.

We've been using Rails at Wealthfront for nearly two years and we love it, but there's no denying that, out of the box, Rails asset caching is broken. Below we'll identify the problems, define requirements for a successful strategy, and then describe how we meet those requirements at Wealthfront.

After a long time bouncing back and forth, I’ve come back to TextMate as my main editor. I realize that’s starting to sound almost old-school these days, but it still works the best for me.

What I’ve come to realize about TextMate versus, say, Vim, or RubyMine is that a) this is a genuinely personal decision and different people are just more comfortable with some tools than other and b) it comes down to what each tool makes easy and how useful that is.

For instance, RubyMine. RubyMine makes navigating a project super easy, which is great, since I do that all the time. It also makes refactoring easy, which is less useful because in practice I use the automated refactoring less. Vim makes manipulating text, if not easy, at least powerful, but again, I find myself doing that less. And the thing that Vim makes hard, having to keep track of modes, absolutely drives me crazy.

Anyway, TextMate. TextMate makes creating new snippets and triggers very easy, and doesn’t make anything particularly hard. That said, I have seen in some of my pairing around that a lot of Ruby developers don’t know about all the tools that give TextMate some of the features of RubyMine and Vim. So here are a dozen or so things that you can to to make TextMate work for you.

railsready: Setup script to get Ruby and Rails running on Ubuntu with one command
Adam Stacoviak posted this 1 day ago
How would you like to get a full Ruby on Rails stack up on Ubuntu with one command?

Now you can by running Rails Ready. Rails Ready is a setup script that gets Ruby and Rails running on a fresh install of Ubuntu with one command (Tested on Ubuntu server 10.04 LTS (Long-term Support)).

Here’s how I like to setup a Rails stack on Ubuntu 10.4. This recipe makes use of Apache as the webserver with Passenger to serve Rails, MySQL as the database, RVM (installed system-wide) to manage Ruby (I select Ruby 1.9.2 as the default these days), and the latest Rails, which is 3.0.3 as of this morning, and Bundler for installing gems. It also makes a system user for you to use, and a deploy user for deployments with Capistrano.

Give me an hour of your time, and I’ll take you on a fly by of the Ruby on Rails framework. We’ll create controllers, models, views, add admin logins, and deploy using Heroku’s service in under an hour! In this article we’ll create a simple bookshelf application where you can add books and write thoughts about them. Then we’ll deploy the application in just a few minutes. So buckle up because this article moves fast!
This article assumes that you may know what Ruby on Rails is, but not exactly how it works. This article doesn’t describe in-depth how each step works, but it does describe what we need to do, then the code to do that.

This plugin for Merb and Rails provides a simple and extremely flexible way to upload files.

Agile Web Development
Build it. Launch it. Love it.

Ruby developers can choose from a variety of tools to get their job done.

The Ruby Toolbox gives you an overview of these tools, sorted in categories and rated by the amount of watchers and forks in the corresponding source code repository on GitHub so you can find out easily what options you have and which are the most common ones in the Ruby community.

31 Fascinating Ruby on Rails Tutorials & Guides

Gruff Graphs for Ruby

Sparkline Graphs for Ruby