httptunnel creates a bidirectional virtual data connection tunnelled in HTTP requests. The HTTP requests can be sent via an HTTP proxy if so desired.

I have been playing around with RESTful Rails recently. Below is my collection or Rails REST howtos, tutorials and other resources I have found so far.

PUT means update the resource with this entity, which tends means "overwrite". Now think for a moment about how that works for things like tags in a blog post - if I leave the tag out, am I saying remove it? Ignore it? Do I have to echo back all the data so it doesn't get scrubbed?

Once you start introducing partial updates, you open yourself for caching problems. doing partial updates means all cached copies of the original resource are now invalid.

i keep looking for ways to help people 'get' REST. not URLs or HTTP Methods; but REST itself - in a nutshell. so here's a new angle i've started playing with: "REST Upside Down."

There are many wonderful things about Rails and the Rails ecosystem. A clean, well-lighted path for keeping all your extensions up to date is not one of them.

One of the things that I always wanted to do but never got around to was to analyze a user’s browsing history to estimate age and gender.

SWFRIP is a Macromedia Flash resource extractor and editor. It can save resources in various formats, including SVG conversion from the flash vector format, decompile ActionScript, and remove the protect tag from SWF files.

So, as a result, people using RESTful ideas to talk to browsers have to put the smarts back on the server. They invent new URLs which (for example) return a resource, but return it all wrapped up in the HTML needed to display it as a form for browser-based editing.

In earlier version I needed to do an awkward thing that only affected development mode, where Rails unloads all classes after each request. run_later runs code in a separate thread, and depending on how long that code runs the classes would be unloaded when they're still accessed from the worker.

Porter is essentially the inverse of X-SendFile. It parses the multipart post in C inside your apache process and writes the files to disk. Once that work is done it changes the request to look like a regular form POST which contains pointers to the temp files on disk.

Most of the problems with cookies are due to breaking visibility,

Without intending to take anything away from Roy’s (valid) criticism on labeling, REST isn’t an all or nothing proposition. One can get significant value from partial adoption.

Trample is a more flexible load simulator. Instead of a static list of urls, trample's configuration language is ruby. Using ruby's blocks (lambda functions), it's possible to randomize the requests that get made in each thread, as well as the user that logs in.

What if my controller decides to take the Thing.create! and rescue route? What if my model has a special initializer method, like Thing.build_with_foo? My spec for behavior should not fail if I change the implementation.

On any page accessed with SSL, all Ajax requests must use SSL, or they will fail. To make this happen, all you need to do is include the names of the actions that service the requests in your ssl_required statement.

The idea behind scrooge is both surprisingly simple and powerful: instead of forcing the developer to manually specify each attribute column, simply observe and record for some period of time all of the attribute accesses and then reuse this knowledge in the future to automatically optimize your subsequent query requests.

Deadweight is RCov for CSS, kind of. Given a set of stylesheets and a set of URLs, it determines which selectors are actually used and reports which can be "safely" deleted.

MailStyle allows you to write the css for your html emails as you normally would, then writes the styles inline when you send your emails. It also makes sure that your image paths are absolute rather than relative.

Rails 2.3 has a ton of really nice functionality locked up in monolithic components. I’ve posted quite a bit about how we’ve opened up a lot of that functionality in ActionPack, making it easier to reuse the router, dispatcher, and individual parts of ActionController. ActiveModel is another way we’ve exposed useful functionality to you in Rails 3.

Helium accepts a list of URLs for different sections of a site then loads and parses each page to build up a list of all

RESTClient is a Java application to test RESTful webservices. It can be used to test variety of HTTP communications.