We’ve been working on one of our first Angular projects with a Rails backend. It’s been a great experience. I wanted to share a few things we learned that we hope are helpful to others building Angular on Rails apps.

With the impending release of Ruby on Rails 4, it looks like a lot of developers will be updating their web applications in the coming new year.

To help with this transition, over the next 31 days, we are going to be releasing a series of blog posts going over everything you will need to know about Rails 4 for an effortless upgrade.

If you have an integer and want to use it to represent an element's position (like "1st" for 1, or "2nd" for 2), you can use ActiveSupport's ordinalize:

1.ordinalize     # => "1st"
2.ordinalize     # => "2nd"
1002.ordinalize  # => "1002nd"
1003.ordinalize  # => "1003rd"
-11.ordinalize   # => "-11th"
-1001.ordinalize # => "-1001st"

Do you have page caching enabled for the development environment and there are cached pages lying around in public/?

This error is raised because your old database does not have a configured environment yet, which Rails 5 enforces.

If this error occurs while migrating your parallel test databases, make sure to update the parallel_tests gem first: current versions fix this. If you're still using Cucumber < v3, the latest version of parallel_tests will be 2.18.0.

Rails 5 migration classes look like this now:

class CreateUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.0]

Mind the [5.0] at the end.

They do this to evolve the ActiveRecord::Migration API without breaking your historical migrations in db/migrate.

Postgres 9.4 introduces a new column type: jsonb. json and jsonb columns store data differently, so just compare the two when you want to store JSON data and choose the one that matches your use case best.

Rails 4.2 includes support for jsonb columns, too. The article outlines different ways on how to interact with the serialized object.

Previously the assets group existed to avoid unintended compilation-on-demand in production. As Rails 4 doesn't behave like that anymore, it made sense to remove the asset group.

How to remove/disable the automatic XSS protection helper html escaping for Rails 3.

This is probably a horrible idea.

See attached link for a way to extract the conditions of a named scope in Rails 2.3.

Let’s take a look at what you need to do to get your app ready for Rails 4.

The asset pipeline from Rails 3.1 packported to 2.3. By Michael Grosser from parallel_tests fame.

This sounds promising:

The best part from the Rails side, is that you don’t have to change anything at all in your code to swap a varchar out for an ENUM.

How to call routes, make requests and try out helpers from the Rails console.

A possible way for localisation in Rails applications that allows editing translations remotely.

I still see people promoting various gems and plugins to handle miscellaneous configuration elements for your application. One little known secret is that Rails 3 allows you to define your own configuration elements trivially.

Recently, we had an interesting lunch-break with the rails 3.1. asset-pipeline in production mode. Daniel Zahn made a blogpost about our journey, precompiling assets, fingerprinting, Haml, Sass & Compass and what he calls "the dark heinous hutch".

Most web applications contain several examples of state machines, including accounts and subscriptions, invoices, orders, blog posts, and many more. The problem is that you might not necessarily think of them as state machines while designing your application. Therefore, it is good to have some indicators to recognize them early on. The easiest way is to look at your data model.

XPath matchers can be combined with CSS-selector matchers. This is really useful if not, for example, the content of an element should be matched but the element itself like in the following example. Here a form is used to display data as default value in its input elements. This can be the case in web applications in which data should be edited easily without additional clicks.

In an environment:

config.logger = Logger.new('/dev/null')

The rack-contrib gem brings a JSONP middleware that just works™. Whenever a JSON request has a callback parameter, it will wrap the application's JSON response appropriately.

The project is a bit dated, but the JSONP middleware is ok.

rack-mini-profiler is a powerful Swiss army knife for Rack app performance. Measure SQL queries, memory allocation and CPU time.

This should probably not be loaded in production (the article recommends otherwise), but this looks like a useful tool.

Amazing guide how to divide a ball of Javascript spaghetti distinct separate layers (model, view, controller, backend adapter).

It does not use a Javascript framework.

quiet_assets helps with disabling asset pipeline log messages in the development log. When the gem is added, asset pipeline logs are suppressed by default.

If you want to disable muting temporarily, add config.quiet_assets = false to your config/application.rb.