"Lightrail is a minimalist Rails 3 stack for apps that serve primarily APIs, with a particular focus on JSON APIs. This makes Lightrail an ideal Rails backend for client-heavy HTML5/JS applications, particularly single-page applications written in frameworks like Backbone.js, Ember.js, and Spine.

If Sinatra doesn't give you enough, but Rails is still too much, Lightrail is for you."

Cucumber documentation (covers Sinatra and other non-Rails frameworks)

"A simple yesod tutorial. Yesod is an Haskell web framework. You shouldn’t need to know Haskell."

I use RSpec in all my projects. It’s really hard to overemphasize how helpful it is and how much easier becomes your life if you have good specs coverage. But its outstanding flexibility enables many ways to make your specs awful: horribly slow, over-bloated, even non-readable sometimes. I do not want to teach you BDD and RSpec here, but instead I will give you some ideas how to improve your specs quality and increase efficiency of your BDD workflow.

"One of the complaints about Ruby on Rails that I hear most often is its complexity, despite all the video tutorials showing how easy it is to build a simple application in 5 minutes. In reality, Rails was a huge paradigm shift for web application development and even with its complexity it's a great platform.

I've spent the better part of the last 6 years writing applications using Ruby on Rails and people often ask me for my perspective on how to bootstrap an application and best practices for using Rails. I also see a lot of people getting lost in the noise of scaffolding and complicated tutorials.

That's why I decided to write an example application using Ruby on Rails 3.1. The application is on Github to make it easy to get to, and takes advantage of source code control features like branches so you can follow along as the application gains functionality."

"What’s Rack?

In the words of the author of Rack – Christian Neukirchen: Rack aims to provide a minimal API for connecting web servers supporting Ruby (like WEBrick, Mongrel etc.) and Ruby web frameworks (like Rails, Sinatra etc.).

Web frameworks such as Sinatra are built on top of Rack or have a Rack interface for allowing web application servers to connect to them.

The premise of Rack is simple – it just allows you to easily deal with HTTP requests."

Tutorial/guide for Ruby testing with Minitest

"derailed_duke ~ now test any website using cucumber as an independent testing utility"

This article focuses on the workflow of installing RVM, and use it to install Ruby 1.9.2 (MRI), create gemsets and install Rails 3.1 Release Candidate, while considering current best practices.

"If you’re like me, most of the Rails applications you’ve written use tabbed navigation. And if you’re like me, you find that writing the code to handle tabs becomes increasingly more boring with each new application. So I wrote tabulous. Tabulous aims to solve this problem once and for all with a quick and easy way to set up and manage your tabs."

"Everyone was psyched when Nick Kallen’s has_finder plugin was added to Rails as named_scope. They’re powerful, particularly when chaining.

One disadvantage is that they are so easy to create, people want their tests to be equally concise, which is often impossible.

Two related “testing named scopes” questions have come up recently on the thoughtbot training mailing list and the shoulda mailing list."

"Community contributed documentation for the Sinatra Book, a cookbook for the Sinatra Web Framework."

"Here are some of the testing related tips I use while working on Spree"

"...Back when Steak was first released, Capybara didn’t have any of the nice RSpec helpers it does now. A lot has changed since. Besides the helpers, it got its own RSpec acceptance testing DSL recently, essentially eating Steak’s functionality and turning it into a complete acceptance testing solution (on top of RSpec)."

While building our new website, we decided to protect the admin using a really simple way: we can only access it signing in with Twitter. There are already some blog posts and documentation about using Devise, Omniauth, Twitter and Cucumber, but I couldn't find anything that really fitted my needs.

Overview of UJS in Rails 3

As I mentioned in my previous Ruby on Rails tutorial, Unobtrusive JavaScript (UJS) is one of the coolest new features in Rails 3. UJS allows Rails-generated code to be much cleaner, helps separate your JavaScript logic from your HTML layouts, and uncouples Rails from the Prototype JavaScript library. In this tutorial, we’re going to look at these features and learn how to use them in a simple Rails 3 application.

Command-line cheatsheets

Here at PlataformaTec we like to use Capybara for acceptance tests. Recently we have discovered the custom selectors feature in Capybara and we would like to share with you how that feature helped us to improve our tests.

RSpec reference

Quick summary of Capybara API

Subtleties of user stories

"This is a basic introduction to integration testing with cucumber. In it, I describe how to use cucumber and rspec to implement a feature in a web application, emphasizing the importance of writing tests before code, which is often referred to as TDD (test-driven development) or BDD (behavior-driven development, a refinement of the original TDD)."

"Up and down methods, rake tasks, column mapping, loading fixtures, example migration file, all packed onto one A4 page for an easy at-a-glance reference. Updated for Rails 2.1"

RFacebook is a Ruby interface to the Facebook API. It hides all the nitty-gritty details behind a beautiful Ruby front-end, allowing you to focus on writing great code.

"Facebooker is a Ruby wrapper over the Facebook REST API. Its goals are:

Idiomatic Ruby
No dependencies outside of the Ruby standard library (This is true with Rails 2.1. Previous Rails versions require the JSON gem)
Concrete classes and methods modeling the Facebook data, so it‘s easy for a Rubyist to understand what‘s available
Well tested"

Autotest makes your coding session even more productive as it automatically runs a subset of your test suite each time you change a file. Autotest is smart – it figures out which subset to run based on the files you’ve changed. Think of it as Continuous Testing.

Autotest source code is well-documented (rdoc) but finding a high level overview online is a little more challenging. This article will get you up and running in no time, so that you may concentrate on writing code. Let’s get Started!

The Ruby on Rails Tutorial Book
A thorough introduction to web development with Ruby on Rails
Up-to-date (now Rails 2.3.8, Rails 3 ASAP)
Associated screencast series coming soon

"Learning a new programming language always is fun and there are many great books legally available for free online. Here’s a selection of 30 of them"

"Here is a roadmap specially designed for a beginner to navigate their way to Rails mastery.

I’ve intentionally structured this roadmap so that you can learn one thing at a time. That way, you’ll spend more time creating and less time confused."

"Padrino is a ruby framework built upon the excellent Sinatra Microframework. Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating simple web applications in Ruby. Padrino was created to make it fun and easy to code more advanced web applications while still adhering to the spirit that makes Sinatra great!"

This screencast is a live example of upgrading a real-world application from Rails 2.3.5 to Rails 3. It demonstrates the fundamental steps that are required to upgrade your application, fix any incompatibilities, and finally have your project running on the latest version of Rails 3. This screencast also includes several links to articles and resources that cover the most important changes to Rails 3.

"This book is a look at how to go about upgrading your existing Rails app to Rails 3, how to convert common patterns to new ones, and how to improve your existing code in light of the new Rails 3 features. Inside you'll find everything you need to upgrade your application to Rails 3 and then apply many of the improvements in Rails 3 to your existing code."

Haml takes your gross, ugly templates and replaces them with veritable Haiku.

Haml is the next step in generating views in your Rails application. Haml is a refreshing take that is meant to free us from the shitty templating languages we have gotten used to.

Haml is based on one primary principle. Markup should be beautiful.

ust last week Ordnance Survey released a tonne of data. This is of course a wonderful thing for everybody, and software making use of this data has only started appearing in the past week. This morning, in fact, we noticed a gem, pat by Stef Lewandowski which uses Pezholio/Stuart Harrison’s very useful UK Postcodes.
We took a look at it, and decided to make a gem that uses a local database (usually a bit faster than using a Web-based API), but which is similarly easy to use.
Three hours later, we present to you posty!
The data it provides from CodePoint Open is:
postcode
quality
latitude
longitude
country
nhs_region
nhs_health_authority
county
district
ward
In all these cases, rather than proving the name of the county/district/ward/etc, it only provides the identifier used in the data set. This is a case where UK Postcodes would be a better option.

The holy grail for a lot of Internet Marketers is automation. This can be obtained through simple iMacros scripts, some PHP scripts on a server, or with a little tool called Watir using the Ruby programming language. All of these combos have their own inherent advantages and disadvantages, but that’s not something I’m going to go over here. I like to use Watir for a lot of botting needs, so that’s what I’m going to show you how to do today.

Sinatra is really fun to work with. It's small and fast. It doesn't make many assumptions. If something goes wrong, it's pretty easy to go into the source and figure out what is going on.

There were a couple projects I wanted to take for a spin: Sinatra, Datamapper, HAML, and SASS. I decided to roll them all up into one proof-of-concept project. I don't go into a lot of depth on each, just enough to know that I can get it all up and running.

Also, since I'm running Passenger on some production boxes now, I wanted to deploy my Sinatra/Datamapper app through Passenger's Rack support.

Felix's RoRoSnowLeopard recipe

Brett's RoRoSnowLeopard recipe

Alex's recipe for setting up RoR on Snow Leopard

For a long time, the Rails community has been thriving off of screencasts provided through Railscasts by Ryan Bates and many others. I am a big fan myself of these screencasts.

Now that I am a little better in with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, I am often asked how to do certain things. I wanted to have an outlet to share my knowledge and also allow others to contribute as well. This site provides that outlet.

My hopes are that we can build a community of teachers and students, and all grow in our knowledge in the process. I'm going to try to do a screencast once a week and I urge others to follow suit and help out.

"I recently had the privilege to supply the challenge for the second ever Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies. I thought it pretty cool that the challenge provoked 40+ "newbies" to submit responses. As one might expect, there was some rough Ruby, but very few butcherings of the language.

In the spirit of the code review, I tried to provide constructive feedback to all participants. Following is a summary of some common suggestions that I had to offer..."

Contains an interesting example of how tests could have prevented some problems...

If you're using the Twitter API and you issue the command to query a timeline, you'll get what looks to be a whole mess of XML. If you look closely, the XML is well-structured and hierarchical. The encompassing array is the statuses element. This houses a list of status elements which describes each individual status update. In the status element are various other elements, such as text and created_at. Nested even more deeply inside the status element is the user element, which describes the user the update belongs to.

The Twitter API (Application Programmming Interface) in Ruby on Rails is about as simple as you can get. Twitter is a RESTful Rails application. API calls that query for information are GET requests, while information that changes, creates or deletes information are POST requests. The commands themselves are the URL your program accesses. Twitter will return status codes in the HTTP response code, and data in the format of your choosing (HTML, XML, RSS, etc).

JCF's BDD workshop notes

Sheffield-based RoR firm

"With the help of super awesome ruby hacker Mike Dalessio, I wrote an XML/HTML parsing library for ruby called Nokogiri. What is so great about Nokogiri? Well, for one it is really easy to parse HTML or XML:"

"FeedTools is a simple Ruby library for handling rss, atom, and cdf parsing, generation, and translation as well as caching. It attempts to adhere to Postel’s law—i.e. a liberal parsing and conservative generation policy.

It’s ideal for parsing RSS feeds in Ruby on Rails applications and equally useful in just simple scripts. FeedTools can also create new feeds for you in only a few lines of code."

"...I’ve attempted to compile a list of resources which are still (at least for the most part) still relevant at the time of posting."

"Webby is a fantastic little website management system. It would be called a content management system if it were a bigger kid. But, it’s just a runt with a special knack for transforming text. And that’s really all it does – manages the legwork of turning text into something else, an ASCII Alchemist if you will.

Webby works by combining the contents of a page with a layout to produce HTML. The layout contains everything common to all the pages – HTML headers, navigation menu, footer, etc. – and the page contains just the information for that page. You can use your favorite markup language to write your pages; Webby supports quite a few."

This is part of an ongoing series of posts about how to get started writing tests for Ruby on Rails. The series begins with the introduction and overview of the ideas behind testing.

iPhone on Rails - Creating an iPhone optimised version of your Rails site using iUI and Rails 2

Understanding RSpec Stories - a Tutorial

Rails 2.1 is right around the corner and now comes my update for “The First Full Rails 2.1 Tutorial”.

A brief introduction to the why behind TDD and an explanation on how BDD builds on that. A quick walk through of the ruby BDD framework, rspec

List of useful plugins

Basic intro to using rspec - with an example using restful_authentication

Social networking site-in-a-Rails-shaped can

Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to add Rails as a tool to your development toolbox. If you’re proficient with PHP, you already have the essential skills needed to build web applications. This site will present an ongoing discussion of

The main Ruby and Rails forums, all bazillion of them.

An online copy of the first edition of the Pickaxe.

A text version of the original DHH "create a blog in 30 mins" Rails demo.

"Photo galleries can be developed easily with Rails using the attachment_fu plugin. In this blog entry i will give an example of how you could get started with this plugin, based on my own experience with it."

A list of 30 RoR tutorials. No context here, but a long list.

Another list of RoR tutorials, complete with annoying framed links. 62 tutorials lists, so fairly comprehensive/esoteric.

A list of the "top 12" RoR tutorials. From 2005, so getting somewhat outdated, but useful nonetheless.