I've been using Vim for awhile as my primary editor and when I was first starting I did a lot of poking around to see what other peoples setups looked like, so I figured I'd contribute a quick article back to the innernets with my setup.
Only one of the plugins I have installed is actually Rails spe…
When you have a high traffic app that is going to be repeatedly making the same requests that won't change a lot from the database, It's obviously a good idea to store these results in memory instead of hitting the database every time you need the data.
Rails provides some nice built in caching mec…
There is a known bug in Rails 2.3 that is worth being aware of, count no longer works on anything using named_scope. There are some patches and a fix available in the ticket there and it looks like it will be resolved in the next version... but for now, beware!
also, I'm not sure when but somewhere …
In Rails 2.1, they added partial updates - which is a great idea and a long time coming. This makes ActiveRecord only updates the parts of a model that has actually changed, and also gives you the ability to see if a field (or a record) has changed since retrieving it from the database. (via mode…
There is a post on RubyInside today that spawned quite the cascade of comments on the topic of deploying rails. While a lot to wade through, there are some interesting comments buried in there. I still find it strange that everyone is clamoring for a solution, while ignoring one that exists because …
I found a fun gotcha! today with CruiseControl - if you create a custom cruise task you have to set the RAILS_ENV AND ENV["RAILS_ENV"] to test.
If you do not, CruiseControl will run against your production database. Before CruiseControl invokes it's own built-in cruise task it sets the RAILS_ENV to …
I have been meaning to write an article about netbeans + ruby for awhile, and anyone who knows me has probably heard me talk about it - it's great, it's fast, and it actually just works. However, somebody else saved me the trouble, infrid over at http://lifeonrails.org wrote an epic post about it, …
I ran into a situation today where I had to mock out a helper method in a view spec. After a bit of poking around came across Jake Scruggs blog where he has a post titled, appropriately enough, Mocking/Stubbing partials and helper methods in RSpec view tests.
For the lazy, it's just:
@controller.te…
As our number of specs grow I started to miss the test:recent functionality, so I created a simple little rake task to make it work with RSpec. Drop this in lib/tasks, I called it spec_recent.rake.
require 'spec/rake/spectask' # Grab recently touched specs def recent_specs(touched_since) recent_s…
I recently updated a project at work to Edge rails to take advantage of ActiveResource - as a result, ActionWebService went away. We've known for a long time AWS was on it's way out, but I was hoping a plugin version would be created prior to it's removal - which in all fairness may still be the cas…
Now that Alex has gotten CruiseControl.rb setup setup at work, I wanted to use it to enforce good test coverage - and I wanted the output to look good doing it. Turns out this isn't that hard, but requires a few things:
While I'm using Markdown for formatting blog entries, I wanted to have some decent syntax highlighting support as well. After looking around I decided to use CodeRay. It's fast, customizable, has nice output, and is easy to extend. All I had to do to make it work with Rails was to create a helper. I…