Just about every type of datastore has some form of indexing. A typical relational database, such as MySQL or PostreSQL, can index fields for efficient querying. Most document databases, like MongoDB, contain indexing as well. Indexing in a relational database is almost always done for one reason: speed. However, sometimes you need more than just speed, you need flexibility. That’s where Solr comes in.

In this article, I want to outline how Solr can benefit your project’s indexing capabilities. I’ll start by introducing indexing and expand to show how Solr can be used within a Rails application.

n a two-part post I'm going to show you some tricks you can do with SSH logins. This post covers setting up two-factor SSH authentication with the Google Authenticator app.

I was recently getting some servers in shape so I can pass the Payment Card Industry standards questionnaire and one requirement was two-factor authentication access to the server. I queried whether SSH key + passphrase was acceptable but didn't get a clear answer so I figured I'd explore setting up another authentication factor myself, plus it piqued my interest.

After a bit of research I found it was possible using a PAM module but it doesn't work along with SSH key authentication (only password authentication) and I only use SSH key logins for my servers.

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.

So you’ve heard about all of the excitement going on about MacRuby? Great! Want to learn how to start developing with MacRuby and create your first application? Wonderful, let’s get started.

The Ruby DBI module provides a database-independent interface for Ruby scripts similar to that of the Perl DBI module. This document describes how to write Ruby DBI-based scripts. It is an adjunct to and not a substitute for the Ruby DBI specification documents. See the "Resources" section for a pointer to the specifications and also for information about downloading the example scripts used here.

Rubular is a Ruby-based regular expression editor. It's a handy way to test regular expressions as you write them.

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.

Want to try out ScraperWiki, or learn to screen scrape from scratch?

Choose from a wide selection of screen scraping tutorials and examples, from introductory to very specialized. Simply click on a link below, follow the instructions in the comments, and start hacking.

I've rarely been as excited about anything related to web development as when making the switch to Ruby a couple of years ago. But it was when my fellow student from ITP, Greg Borenstein introduced me to Sinatra that I first noticed how perfect an environment Ruby is for web dev beginners.

In this post I will try to illustrate why I think Ruby and Sinatra should be the preferred environment for students who have never programmed before - and why it beats PHP any time.

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.

If you’re a web designer or developer, you’re well acquainted with prototyping. From raw wireframing to creating interfaces in Photoshop, designers map out how sites will work before they create them. Over the past few years, the protoyping process has changed significantly. With browser makers generally agreeing on web standards and the rise of tools such as Firebug and WebKit’s web inspector, we can sometimes skip Photoshop altogether and go straight to the browser. Plus, JavaScript frameworks like jQuery let us play with browser events with only a few lines of code. But what if we need to do even more? As websites increasingly become web apps, we now need to prototype backend functionality, too.

This article introduces Sinatra, a so-called “micro” web framework that helps you create real (albeit simple) web apps extremely fast, allowing you to prototype flows and behaviors that you may want to integrate into a final product. Sinatra is written in Ruby, but for our purposes we’ll use it as the “glue” between our HTML/CSS and the domain-specific Sinatra functions, so you won’t have to know much more than a few simple methods to get to “Hello world.” In this article, our example will be an extremely simple Twitter app that accepts two usernames and tells you if one user is following the other.

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server. This is also the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host your project’s page or blog right here from GitHub.

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.

This is a tutorial for using REXML, a pure Ruby XML processor.

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 tutorial will introduce Haml and Sinatra. Haml is a markup language that produces clean, well-structured HTML. Sinatra is a simple but powerful Ruby framework for creating websites or web services. The two work very well together and provide a powerful tool for quick and simple web development. I find them ideal for prototyping.
By the end of this tutorial, you will have created a website with two pages using Sinatra and Haml. Along the way, you’ll learn how Sinatra applications are structured, and will be introduced to Haml. You will also learn how to use a layout file to reduce the amount of duplicated code and give consistency between the pages.

Back in 1993, Apple Computer introduced a truly clever innovation: a way for ordinary users to write little programs (scripts) that would tell applications what to do. Tasks that would be repetitive, boring, calculation-intensive, error-prone, or virtually impossible if performed by hand suddenly became available through a single quick and accurate step — namely, running a script.

RVM is a command line tool which allows us to easily install, manage and work with multiple ruby environments from interpreters to sets of gems. RVM itself is easy to install!

Chef is a systems integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure.

Rails developers who want to leverage the speed and power of Rackspace Cloud Files are in luck – there are several different options to choose from. In this blog post, I will take a quick tour through three of the most popular Rails gems/plugins for cloud asset storage: attachment_fu, paperclip, and carrierwave.

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.

Full programmmatic access to Rackspace.

This is a Ruby interface into the Rackspace Mosso Cloud Files service. Cloud Files is reliable, scalable and affordable web-based storage hosting for backing up and archiving all your static content. Cloud Files is the first and only cloud service that leverages a tier one CDN provider to create such an easy and complete storage-to-delivery solution for media content.

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