Squirrel is an enhancement for ActiveRecord’s find method that allows programmers to query the database using a more Rubyish syntax.

Reads Active Record's validations and makes them available to live client side javascript

Rails’ script/console makes it easy to fetch, view and edit your database records. But can you edit those records as quickly as you edit code in your text editor? Riiight, like editing our database records in an editor is gonna happen? It already has.

Unfortunately, by default plugin tests are pretty bland. They use the plain unit test suite supplied by Ruby, and not any of the extended Rails test framework. This will leave our plugin’s test classes with no access to fixtures, database.yml configuration, or any of those nice class auto-loading features.

I’m working on a problem for a client which involves connecting to a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database from Linux using Ruby. Here’s what I did to get it working, based off some useful instructions that are tailored for Ruby on Rails:

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.

Finish the remainder of the ActiveModel todo list (observers, callbacks, validations, scoping, and serialization) in addition to associations. Also wire up ActiveModel up to ActiveRecord and ActiveResource.

Record Filter gives you the full power of ActiveRecord's query building tools with a heaping helping of DSL thrown in to save your Ruby-loving fingers from writing nasty SQL.

Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

Capistrano recipes for database backups before migrations, passenger deployment strategy, release tagging in Git repos.

Read_from_slave for Rails enables database reads from a slave database, while writes continue to go to the master

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.