Archive for the ‘Ruby on Rails’ Category


[BlogEntry] Yet Another Web Framework Shoot-Out

This is a really well done, albeit long, screencast comparing JSP, Rails, Zope (Plone), Turbo Gears, Django, and J2EE. It is entertaining, smart, and fun. It's also a great example of quality presentation techniques. And the final score is almost definitely going to surprise you. It took me over five months to get around to [...]

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[BlogEntry] NoMethodError in Users#list from Streamlined

I've been playing with Streamlined today, and, despite the never-restart-the-server impression you get from the movie, there are times when you get errors as you add belongs_to, has_many, and relationships to your model and streamlined files. I pulled my hair out for far too long and was ready to chalk it up to buggy, prerelease [...]

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[BlogEntry] Entrepreneurial aspirations drive software innovation

I suspect that a large part of what makes Ruby on Rails so captivating has to do with its promise of rapid web site development driven by entrepreneurial pursuits. (I know that's true for me.) Certainly, that's what motivated the 37signals guys, and look at what they did with it (backpack, basecamp, etc.). Most big [...]

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[BlogEntry] Returning and Executing JavaScript from a Rails URL

AuctionRelay.com has been running in Tomcat for a few years. A simple "include" script tag is all it takes to make AuctionRelay add HTML to the middle of an existing web page. The trick is in using the document.write command to make executable JavaScript write visible HTML at the location in the document where it [...]

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[BlogEntry] Iterating over a Hash in Ruby

Let's say you define a simple Hash. irb(main):001:0> h1 = {"a"=>1,"b"=>2,"c"=>3} => {"a"=>1, "b"=>2, "c"=>3} What do you think you'll get when you send an each message to it? I figured either a, b, c or 1, 2, 3. Surprise: irb(main):003:0> h1.each{|a| puts a} a 1 b 2 c 3 => {"a"=>1, "b"=>2, "c"=>3} It [...]

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