Editorial
Rails Framework
This section covers various aspects of how Rails works and how you can extend it through plug-ins. Although you can often get by with treating much of Rails as akin to magic, there are times when you need to dig in and understand how it all really works.Enhancing Conditional Routing in Rails
Rails' routing infrastructure supports the concept of conditional routes: preconditions that must be satisfied before a particular route will trigger. Rails 2.1 supports one built-in condition, HTTP method checking, which is of some use but rather limited. What I needed was to be able to limit certain routes to only trigger when a particular host-name was used to access the application. I show one implementation in this article. continue...
Articles
New Articles
from around the Web
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Rails 2.1: Now With Better Integrated Caching
Great walkthrough of the new support in Rails 2.1 for Memcached as a first class caching solution.
- What's New in Edge Rails: UTC-based Migration Versioning
- What's New in Edge Rails: Pluggable Controller Caching
- Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support: An Overview
- What's New in Edge Rails: Has Finder Functionality
- What's New in Edge Rails: Gem Dependencies
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Riding Rails: Rails 2.1: Time zones, dirty, caching, gem dependencies, caching, etc
Announcement of the Rails 2.1 release.
- What's New in Edge Rails: Dirty Objects
- What's New in Edge Rails: Partial Updates
- Plugins - Seamless Database Pool
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Advanced Rails Caching.. on the Edge
Using edge side includes (ESI) for advanced caching in Rails applications.
Books
Related Books
Advanced Rails
This is one of the first books for people who are comfortable building applications with Ruby on Rails and want a book that goes beyond t...
List: $34.99 Amazon price: $23.09 Buy
Practical Rails Projects
An eclectic collection of real-world example applications from task list management and exercise management to community group and web co...
List: $44.99 Amazon price: $27.41 Buy
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Documentation (23)
- Noobkit Docs - Ruby On Rails API... on Rails.
Another viewer for Rails API documentation, with some unique features. - Raaum's Rails Reader
An extensive reference to Ruby on Rails, and a large set of links to other resources. - Ruby on Rails API
The official API site for Ruby on Rails documentation. - GotAPI
Searchable API documents for Rails, as well as for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. - RailsBrain: Javascript-Enhanced Rails API Documentation
A Rails API viewer using Ajax. Can also be downloaded to run locally. - Rails Edge API documentation
- Ruby on Rails API
Searchable Ruby on Rails documentation - Rails CHM Documentation - Version 1.2.1
Rails docs in Windows help file format. Unfortunately, as of this writing the version is rather behind. - Raaum's Rails Reader
Very useful set of tutorially-oriented documentation for Rails. - The Rails Documentation Project
An ambitious effort to develop better documentation for Rails, including improvements to the API documentation, an open-source ebook for beginners, and minidocs on specific topics. - Reserved Words in Ruby on Rails
- The Rails Documentation App - Rails-doc.org
- APIdoc
Rails Doc morphed into APIdock. Collects various versions of Rails, Ruby, and Rspec documentation into one place. - Ryan's Scraps: What's New in Edge Rails: Shallow Routes
Now you can access your nested routes directly or through the complete nested resource path without specifying multiple manual routes. - Hpricot HTML Parser
- better rails caching
Plugin for high performance caching. From the site description: "Interlock uses memcached to make your view fragments and associated controller blocks march along together. If a fragment is fresh, the controller behavior won't run. This eliminates duplicate effort from your request cycle. Your controller blocks run so infrequently that you can use regular ActiveRecord finders and not worry about object caching at all." - Action Cache plugin >> CRAZ8
A Rails plugin that is a drop-in replacement for Rails Action Caching. Adds many useful features including: last-modified header usage, storing response headers in cache, custom cache key implementations, conditional caching, and more. - Content-only caching for Rails
Introduces a new level of caching for Rails in which content that doesn't include layouts is cached. Similar to action caching, but more granular. - Active Record -- Object-relation mapping put on rails
The official API documentation for Active Record as implemented in Rails. - Raaum's Rails Reader: ActiveRecord
- Installing Sqlite3 on Windows for Rails
A guide for getting SQLite installed on windows. Important as the default Rails DB is currently set to sqlite3. - FiveRuns and Seattle.rb's memcache-client
Replacement for older memcache-client that deals with disconnecting memcache server issues. - Hack to Learn : Workaround the Memcached 'undefined class/module' Bug
If you are experiencing the error: "undefined class/module MyClass” when fetching data from memcached, be assured that you are not alone...
Links (1)
Screencasts (27)
- Railscasts - Catch-all Route
- Railscasts - Named Routes
- Railscasts - Custom Routes
- Railscasts - Generate Named Routes
- Railscasts - Simplify Views with Rails 2.0
- Railscasts - Fixtures in Rails 2.0
- Railscasts - HTTP Basic Authentication
- Railscasts - Migrations in Rails 2.0
- Railscasts - Cookie Based Session Store
- restful_authentication
- Railscasts - Making a Plugin
- Railscasts - Optimistic Locking
- Railscasts - Eager Loading
- Railscasts - Fun with Find Conditions
- Railscasts - Using with_scope
- Railscasts - Find Through Association
- Railscasts - Dynamic find_by Methods
- Tracking Attribute Changes
- Railscasts - named_scope
- Railscasts - Tracking Attribute Changes
- Envycasts -- Advanced Active Record
A new entrant in Rails screencasts, Gregg and Jason bring their wit and creative production skills to an advanced Rails screencast. No doubt the most entertaining Rails screencast yet, and also full of great information. Priced at $9. - Page, Action, and Fragment Caching
- Railscasts - Caching with Instance Variables
- Gitting Rails 2.1 RC1
- Railscasts - Time Zones in Rails 2.1
- Gem Dependencies
- Railscasts - Migrations in Rails 2.1
Software (39)
- Excel export plug-in
- ActiveScaffold
ActiveScaffold is a plugin that dynamically generates Ajax-based scaffolds that understand model associations and are customizable via configuration statements. - Custom Scaffold for Rails
A plugin that replaces the view code produced by the standard Rails scaffold with a view that explicitly references each column, rather than iterating over all the columns, so it is much easier to customize. - GeoKit: a plugin for location-based Rails apps
Plugin for building location-based apps; provides geocoding, location finders, and distance calculation. - Datetime Toolbocks - Intuitive Date Input Selection
Plugin that provides a JavaScript widget for entering dates in a mini-calendar, and also parses many common text versions of dates -- even things like "next Tuesday". - acts_as_textiled
Plugin that makes using Textile as simple as it can be. The specified model field is always interpreted as Textile when displayed, except when in a form (for editing). - Textile Editor Helper
Plugin that shows a simple toolbar over Textile text-entry areas, so you can, for example, click a Word-like "B" icon for bold and it will wrap the selected text in asterisks. (Display is still not wysiwyg, however.) - validates_email_format_of
Plugin to provide a validation for email address formats. - Sitealizer Web Stats plugin for Rails
Plugin lets you track visitors, referrers, robots, search terms and more. - Combustible
Rails plugin for accessing the FeedBurner API. - Google Analytics Plugin at Notes from a messy desk
A simple plugin that inserts the google analytics tracking code in your layout. - YM4R: Yahoo Maps for Rails
Plugin for using Yahoo maps in Rails applications. - /plugins/legacy/ - Rails Trac - Trac
Legacy Rails core plugins. - Blazing fast page loads through bundled CSS and Javascript
Plugin that bundles multiple CSS and JavaScript files into a single pair of files to improve page rendering times. - ActsAsIndexed
- acts_as_emailable
- codefluency's keyword_search-1.3.1 Documentation
Add gmail-like keyword search (using keyword:value pairs) to your application. - Savvication: Email Veracity Plugin
Plugin for validating email addresses using the existence of an MX record as the test. - activecalendar
- annotate_models plugin
Provides a rake tasks that adds comments to all your models listing the database columns. - SeeSaw | Rails Widgets
- Announcing acts_as_taggable_on
- Announcing Princely Rails Prince XML PDF Wrapper
- comatose-plugin
A "micro-CMS" (content management system) Rails plug-in. - XSendFile
Rails plugin to support the X-Sendfile protocol, which enables you to use Rails to do authentication while having the web server deliver the file. - Active Merchant
The most widely used payment processing library for Ruby on Rails. Provides interfaces to more than 30 gateways with a single, abstracted API. Extracted from the Shopify hosted service. - /plugins - Rails Trac - Trac
Here's where to find all the plugins that used to be in Rails but were pushed out for Rails 2, such as acts_as_list, acts_as_tree, and scaffolding. You'll also find other plugins that were never in the framework but have come from the core team, such as exception_notification and ssl_requirement. - Dojo Toolbocks
Plugin for using the Dojo JavaScript libraries with Ruby on Rails applications. - Better Partials Plugin for Ruby on Rails
A nice simplification for rendering partials. - RubyForge: Acts As Ordered Tree: Project Info
- Auto Tags
Auto-generates tags based on text content. - in_place_editor for rails2.0 - EnjoyRails
A modified version of the in_place_editor plugin code so that it works with Rails 2.0 - Official Rails plugins
These are the plugins that live in the official Rails repository. Some are in serious need of updating, however, and in some cases there are better alternatives elsewhere. - Plugems Runtime
A gem that supports using enhanced gems to replace Rails plugins. - jRails -- jQuery on Rails
jRails is a drop-in jQuery replacement for Prototype/script.aculo.us on Rails. Using jRails, you can get all of the same default Rails helpers for javascript functionality using the lighter jQuery library. - ActionMailer with optional TLS
github home of the action_mailer_optional_tls plugin. Use this plugin to connect to Google GMail from your Rails app. Pay attention to Googles TOU, as there are limits to the number of email messages you can send in one day. - Debug View Helper
This plugin adds easily accessible debug information into your views. It adds a button that will pop up a new window that displays request parameters, session variables, flash variables, and assigned template variables. - Mysql Replication Adapter
Rails database adapter that supports replicated MySQL databases. - RubyForge: ActiveRecord
If you want to access the ActiveRecord source code independently of Rails, you'll find it here. (And yes, you can use ActiveRecord in non-Rails projects.)
Presentation Slides (2)
- A Peak at Rails 2.0
DHH's talk at RailsConf 2007. - Introduction to Active Record
Presentation from the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference 2007. A great overview of ActiveRecord
Presentation Video (1)
Directories (1)
Cheat Sheets (2)
- Rails 2.0 Cheatsheet
- Ruby on Rails Cheatsheets
Nice cheatsheets for various aspects of Rails, including Active Record validation errors, migrations, form helpers, and Action Mailer.
e-Books (2)
- Rails2 PDF
A good overview of the new features in Rails 2.0. - Ruby on Rails 2.1 - What's new
Free ebook from Brazil
Blogs
Top Blogs
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PluginAWeek
These prolific plug-in developers provide detailed blog posts on Rails techniques.
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Enhanced Migrations v1.2.0
Plug-in that provides improved migration support, simplifying coordination of multiple developers.
