Rails Envy Podcast: Rails Envy Podcast – Episode #091: 09/10/2009

Episode #091. I’m joined again by Dan Benjamin and we have quite a fun time. You may know Dan from his compiling Ruby, Rails, and MySQL guides, cork’d, and most recently Playgrounder. We’ve got a ton of great content this week and we tried to keep it a bit more brief than last week.

The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by NewRelic. NewRelic provides RPM which is a plugin for rails that allows you to monitor and quickly diagnose problems with your Rails application in real time. Check them out at NewRelic.com.

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Show Notes

• Rails Security Issues

  Rails saw some patches for an XSS vulnerability and timing weakness with the cookie store. You can either upgrade your installation to 2.3.4 or patch it with the provided patches. All Rails versions past 2.0 are affected with XSS and 2.1.0 with the timing weakness. It is urged to upgrade ASAP.

  http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/9/4/timing-weakness-in-ruby-on-rails
  http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/9/4/xss-vulnerability-in-ruby-on-rails
  http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/9/4/ruby-on-rails-2-3-4

• Rails Magazine Issue 4

  Rails magazine issue for is out with coverage from Ruby Kaigi 2009, interviews with prominent community members including DHH, Matz, Yehuda Katz, and others. There’s also articles on background processing, generating pdfs with odf templates, radiant cms, and more.

• Passenger preference pane v1.3

  The Passenger preference pane has been updated to version 1.3 which is Snow Leopard compatible (though in 32 bit mode) and contains bug fixes.

• That’s Not a Memory Leak, It’s Bloat

  This is an Engine Yard blog post about when your application may have a memory leak (rare) versus when there may be bloat from ActiveRecord calls (not rare). Conclusion: rails can’t scale.

• RCov 0.9.0 released

  RCov 0.9.0 is out and it’s prettier and has some other usability enhancements.

  http://github.com/Relevance/rcov
  http://www.idolhands.com/ruby-on-rails/update-rcov-html-and-css-enhancements/

• Open ID Engine

  Terry (terrbear) writes in to let us know that he has packaged the openid plug-in as a Rails engine and it’s now quicker and easier to get up and running in your app.

• Launching Soon

  Launching soon is a plugin that helps rails projects to manage a dedicated launching soon page before the actual launch date. The plugin also collects email from potential customers.

• Bullet

  The Bullet plugin is designed to help you increase your application’s performance by reducing the number of queries it makes. It will watch your queries while you develop your application and notify you when you should add eager loading (N+1 queries) or when you’re using eager loading that isn’t necessary.

• SWFUploadFu

  This plugin allows you to easily integrate SWFUpload to your Ruby on Rails application

• Ruby Pulse

  RubyPulse is a series of short and quickly recorded screencasts showing features of recently realeased or updated Ruby Gems and Libraries by Alexander Peuchert.

• A Cacheable Hash That Stays Synced

  Thomas Mango introduces Cacheable hash so that you don’t have to read and re-write hashes stored in the rails cache if just accessing values.

• Tracking Down Slow-Running Examples in RSpec

  Corey Ehmke shows how to use the ‘profile’ flag in RSpec to track down slow running specs.

• 9 Essential Rails Tips

  The FortyTwo blog has a post on 9 essential Rails tips you should take in to account before going live with your app.

• Planting the Seeds

  Robby Russel gives a tutorial on the new seed features included in Rails 2.3.4.

• Sumo: One-off EC2 Instance Lanching

  Sumo creates, launches, and connects you to one-off EC2 instances from the command line.