Business of Rails Google Group
I had the pleasure of being on the The Business of Rails panel at RailsConf this last weekend. Based on the response we got from the audience and the followup communications, co-panelist Robby Russell has created a Google Group to continue the discussion. If you are working independently with Rails, or want to chat with others who are making their living working with this wonderful technology, join us in the group! See Robby's announcement here.
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The Rails Community is Making a Difference
Chad Fowler challenged all of us at RailsConf 2007 to share our success in a meaningful way though charitable donations to Livestrong, Earthday, Habitat for humanity, and others. By the end of the conference, the donations were approaching $30,000! This is a community that I am proud to be a part of.
Thanks to Chad for his dedication and stewardship.
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12 Takeaways from RailsConf 2007 Sessions
Streamlined's use of separate UI classes is a great way to describe how the scaffolding it creates should behave. This is the best solution to the problem I've seen so far.
Play with helpers in script/console: helper.methods.grep /tag/
I plan on making a small suite of highest-level tests for all my apps with Selenium. Selenium tests should encompass relatively long sequences of user actions. Pro: can test the full stack, including Ajax. Con: slow and relatively brittle. Rule off thumb: convert to integration tests whenever you can.
Orthedoxy means teaching right; othopraxy means doing right. Dig it.
Take advantage of what Rails' REST implementation gives you, but don't be dogmatic about REST principles. I will continue to add verbs to my controllers when it is pragmatic to do so, use cookies for authentication, and use server-side sessions for maintenance of state.
A valuable notion: URL's can be considered part of your user interface. Don't let Rails dictate how your URL's should look if it's not best for our users.
- In a conversation afterwards, Richard White brought up a great counterpoint: sometimes we should choose a UI according to what's best for the community of users as a whole, rather than what is best for individual users.
Adam Key's Rails Spelunking Recipe: 1) start with routes. look at your url, use routes to figure out where you are; 2) check out the controller or skip directly to the view; 4) grok any controller filters; 5) grok the controller action; 6) grok any methods the action calls; 7) check the template and any helpers it might use
Remember that we're simply running code as we're defining a class . . . you can define a method and call the method all within the definition of the class. Thanks to James Adams for a great presentation on developing plugins.
The !! idiom is generally unnecessary. Not to mention alarmist looking.
Go check out Hampton Caitlin's make_resourceful plugin. Can't wait to try it out, it will 1) make your RESTful controllers shorter and DRYer, and your xml/JSON/whatever representations easier to produce.
Simile is an Javascript widget for time-based data. Think Google Maps for timelines.
Solr rocks for full-text search. You can add multiple facets to your search (think: searching on EBay, and getting counts for each of the categories in which hits occur), get highlight, spell checking, and more. Loot at solr-ruby, acts_as_solr, and Flare as well. Thanks Erik Hatcher for an extremely useful presentation.
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