HotKey provides functionality similar to the accesskey attribute, but has many enhancements that allow for more granular control when creating keyboard driven interfaces.

Write declarative tests using nested contexts without performance penalties. Contest is less than 100 lines of code and gets the job done.

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.

validate( "email".is("required").andIsAn("email") );

Unit tests are to refactoring like a drop cloth is to painting. Both feel like more work at first but ultimately save you time by allowing you to move faster.

After some deliberation, we decided to implement a "schema-less" storage system on top of MySQL rather than use a completely new storage system. This post attempts to describe the high-level details of the system.

Store schema-less data in MySQL.

An ActionMailer delivery method to save mails as files in a directory.

So here’s an overview of how things are going to work in Rails 3.

Ambitious Query Indexer is a Rails plugin to identify database indexes that are missing. Rather than looking at tables and guessing what needs indexing, it will locate and run as many queries as it can find and suggest indexes that could be added based upon its findings.

The Web of Data has many equivalent URIs.

A simple implementation of an Identity Mapper for Active Record.

They don't teach you this in college, but the fundamental theorem of the software industry is the idea that everything needs to be rewritten all the time. As a corollary, web startup engineers believe that there is no problem but scalability, and architecture is its solution. And thus, the NoSQL movement was born.

Next in our series on not shooting yourself in the foot: Doing a sudo shutdown -h now on the main database server right before you head home to cook dinner for six.

Asset Fingerprint Plugin for Ruby on Rails - allows you to use md5 or timestamps in query string or in asset filenames as suggested by Google Page Speed

File upload solution that supports form roundtrips when a validation fails.

I asked other software entrepreneurs to share their stories of failure in the hope that we might save others from making the same mistakes. To my surprise I got excellent 12 responses, which I include below along with one of my own. It is a small sample and biased by self selection, but I think it contains a lot of useful insights.

The Netty project is an effort to provide an asynchronous event-driven network application framework and tools for rapid development of maintainable high performance & high scalability protocol servers & clients.

All ActiveRecord associations except for has_many :through support callbacks for pre- and post-insertion/deletion via the following, self-documenting parameters:

Just assign the existing attachment to another record:

new_photo = Photo.new
new_photo.image = old_photo.image

Paperclip will duplicate the file when saving.

To use this in forms, pimp your attachment container like this:

class Photo < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_attached_file :image
  
  attr_accessor :copy_of

  def image_url
    if copy_of
      copy_of.url
    else
      image.url
    end
  end
end

And in the controller do:

new_photo = Photo.new(:copy_of => old_photo)

This is more tricky than it should be because url_for, asset_path, etc. all rely on different mechanisms.

Anyway, you can use the attached trait like this:

class ExampleController < ApplicationController
  does 'host_enforcement', :for => 'some_action'
end

Short explanation:

• asset_host is used for links to stylesheets and javascripts
• asset_host belongs to ActionController::Base -- changes are persistent and will not be reset after a request
• rewrite_options is used by the ..._path methods in the views
  ^...