Rails Envy Podcast: Rails Envy Podcast – Episode #098

Episode #98- “I leave my syntax out when company comes over.”

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.

Show Notes

• Gemcutter will become default host for gems

  Gemcutter will become the default for Ruby gems. They hope to complete the transition by Rubyconf. The new address will be http://rubygems.org and migration paths are being worked out.

• Rails in a nutshell

  Rails in a Nutshell is a concise introduction to Rails, an overview of commands and configurations, and a guide to the parts of Rails you’ll be using every day. It’s written by Cody Fauser, James MacAulay, Edward Ocampo-Gooding, and John Guenin. It’s a beta book and you can comment on every paragraph.

• Devise is a new authentication gem for Rails

  Devise is a flexible authentication solution for Rails based on Warden. It’s Rack based, is a complete MVC solution based on Rails engines, allows you to have multiple roles (or models/scopes) signed in at the same time, and is based on a modularity concept: use just what you really need. There’s also an example app available.

  http://github.com/plataformatec/devise/
  http://github.com/plataformatec/devise_example/

• Ancestry 1.1.0 Released

  Ancestry allows the records of a ActiveRecord model to be organised as a tree structure, using a single, intuitively formatted database column, using a variation on the materialised path pattern. It exposes all the standard tree structure relations (ancestors, parent, root, children, siblings, descendants) and all of them can be fetched in a single sql query. Additional features are named_scopes, integrity checking, integrity restoration, arrangement of (sub)tree into hashes and different strategies for dealing with orphaned records.

  Version 1.1.0 Notable new features:
  * Depth caching and selecting records on depth
  * Easy migration from parent_id based plugins like nested_set and acts_as_tree

• Dm-is-schemaless

  Brian Lyles of TATFT fame has written dm-is-schemaless which is a DataMapper plugin to accomplish schemaless storage in a relational database by storing it in JSON with a primary key.

  http://github.com/BrianTheCoder/dm-is-schemaless
  http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql

• Trusted Params

  Rails plugin which adds a convenient way to override attr_accessible protection.

• Riot

  Riot is a new, concise, and fast testing mini-framework.

• GeoMereLaal

  GeoMereLaal is a plugin that includes all you need to create Location-Aware rails application based on W3C Geolocaton API.

• The Complete Class

  Robert Klemme posts a thorough walk through of writing a Ruby class on the Ruby Best Practices blog.

• acts_as_pingable

  Acts as pingable is a Rails plug-in for simply opening your Rails app to HTTP pings. It can produce pingdom.com XML.

• Sinatra_more

  Sinatra_more strives to be a central-hub for useful sinatra extensions such as tag helpers, form_builders, partials, and a whole lot more.

• Installing Varnish with nginx, Passenger, and Monit on Ubuntu 8.10 intrepid

  Trever posted a tutorial about getting nginx, passenger, varnish, and monit installed on the Almost Effortless blog.

• Loofah

  Loofah is an HTML sanitizer. It will always fix broken markup, but can also sanitize unsafe tags in a few different ways, and transform the markup for storage or display. It’s built on top of Nokogiri and libxml2, so it’s fast.

• Rails 2.3.4 and SWFUpload

  Brian Racer posted a walk through of how to get SWFUpload working with Rails 2.3.4 for gracefully degrading flash and javascript uploads.

• Curbit

  CurbIt makes it easy to add application level rate limiting to your Rails app by using a controller macro.

• Amazon RDS

  Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a set of services that together form a reliable, scalable, and inexpensive computing platform ‘in the cloud’.