I recently stepped back and took a look at the Rails stack to see what’s available for someone approaching it for the first time. Especially with the proliferation of projects on github, the Rails ecosystem has really exploded. In some areas it now faces much the same problem as the Java world in having too [...]
Read MoreIf you are an active Ruby developer you probably know about and use RVM. For the past few years, many of us have turned to RVM to manage the various Ruby installations on our systems and the gemset feature to handle the gaggle of gems for various projects. Now there’s a simpler alternative to RVM: [...]
Read MoreWell, I hope so anyway. CoffeeScript is a language based on JavaScript with a simplified the syntax that more resembles languages like Ruby or Python. This make it more useful as a software engineering tool as well as making it much more fun to use. In addition, it is JavaScript. And herein lies the hope. [...]
Read MoreThis article was recently dug up by our very own Chris Lamothe and directs some pointed criticism at frameworks. The post is still amusing even though it is now six years old. The article is still relevant and I think acts as a measure and challenge to developers as to how far (or not far) [...]
Read MoreThe other day, Adam (one of Cantina’s founding fathers) sent out an email recommending that we check out RVM if we’re dealing with multiple versions of Ruby. Although I primarily use one version of Ruby (old faithful, 1.8.7), I use multiple versions of Rails – you know, since I love Rails 3 but am still [...]
Read MoreI love Ruby on Rails. There are few things in life that bring me more joy than opening up Textmate and coding a Rails web app. That being said, my infatuation has been with Rails 2, and I’ve been itching to get working with Rails 3 – especially with the prospect of a release [...]
Read MoreOne of the founders of Woofoo just wrote a terrific article on what it takes to build a web application called “Web App Autopsy“. They were lucky enough to get some great information from three other firms, Blinksale, Feedburner and RegOnline. I think the charts and information they put together are great, but if you [...]
Read MoreI’ve been working on a bit of code to perform audio and video encoding for media files uploaded to one of our client’s sites and I was thrilled to come across BackgrounDRb, a Rails plugin that allows developers to build scheduled background tasks, similar to the OpenSympony’s Quartz for Java. The plugin also allows you [...]
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