Topic Archive: ruby

Rails, AMF and Flex

Justin Ficke, Tuesday, November 4, 2008 @ 6:17 pm

I've just completed a project where I was the Rails developer for a site that was integrating a Flex application that needed to pull from a database. A primary consideration is how to transport the data.  Rails supports xml and json natively, and is very easy to set up by adding a single line to a controller's respond_to method. Sasha, the Flex developer on the project, suggested that we go with AMF if possible as it's native to Flex and is deserialized straight into custom typed objects.

After reading a bit about some performance considerations it looks like AMF and JSON are going to get roughly similar performance in most cases, so it becomes a matter of ease of development and taste.  Sasha definitely preferred working with AMF, so i started checking out Rails implementations.

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Ruby on Rails with Windows - How I made it work

Karthik Muthupalaniappan, Friday, August 8, 2008 @ 1:09 pm

I have been developing with Ruby on Rails over the last few weeks. Coming from the ASP .NET/C#/VB world, I am a total stranger to a programming language like Ruby. Any new programming language is fun to learn! Ruby was even more exciting cause it was a new kinda language to me. Though I think Ruby is not as user-friendly as C# or Java, it is as powerful and flexible if not better. Combined with Rails, Ruby becomes a platform that facilitates quick and efficient development of database-driven web applications.

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Selling colleagues on progressive enhancement

Brian Dillard, Monday, June 23, 2008 @ 5:14 pm

Achieving progressive enhancement at the view layer takes a lot of coordinated effort between server- and client-side developers. A lone UI developer can't make it happen without assistance and buy-in from the rest of the team. I'm not talking about selling the client or the business team. I'm talking about selling one's fellow developers.

I used to work for a giant company (Orbitz) with a large team of front-end developers and total organizational buy-in about accessibility and web standards. It took Orbitz years to get there, but once it did, progressive enhancement was the gospel.
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jRails: Ruby on Rails with the Prototype guts ripped out

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, June 11, 2008 @ 3:21 pm

My esteemed colleague Noel Rappin sensibly advocates doing things the Rails way whenever possible. As a Rails noob, I should follow his advice. But as a dedicated user interface developer, I'm already finding that many of the best practices of my discipline take extra steps to enforce in Rails. Case in point: The ability to write unobtrusive JavaScript using my tool of choice, jQuery.

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Using ActiveRecord and Metaprogramming to Define Constants for Enumerated Types

Anthony Caliendo, Tuesday, May 27, 2008 @ 4:33 pm

Have you ever stored your application's enumerated types in a database? If you have, you might have also noticed that code will often times "duplicate" this data by defining constants or enums that reference what is in the database. If you're anything like me, this duplication does not feel right.

With the metaprogramming capabilities of Ruby, we can address the maintenance costs of duplication by generating these constants at runtime.

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