I recently ran across a rather bare post espousing some generic “optimization” techniques for Rails apps. It offered no education, no explanation, no benchmarks. So, I thought, why not put those claims to the test?
Rails’ baked-in REST support is great. Build your app right, and you can expose a programmatic interface to your users for free.
That said, many times providing views in non-HTML formats tends to be bulky and unwieldy. You end up with either very brittle representations of your data, or extremely bulky respond_to blocks in your controllers.
Fortunately, [...]
Rails does a great job at many things, but one of the most consistent stumbling blocks I see in #rubyonrails is RJS. It complicates many things that just don’t need to be that complex, especially when using a Javascript helper library like Prototype or jQuery.
Keep things simple! One little helper, and your AJAX requests get [...]
Ever wanted to do IM from Rails? xmpp4r-simple makes it really easy to talk to Jabber clients (such as Google Talk users) from Ruby, but it’s not quite a cut-and-dried solution for your Rails apps. Fortunately, there’s Jabberish.
Jabberish is a DRb-backed Jabber client designed for use in multi-server Rails apps. Just drop in the plugin, [...]
site_config is a little plugin that addresses a problem lots of people seem to need to solve in their Rails apps: per-environment configuration variables.
It’s very simple, but makes configuration dead-easy. To install it:
script/plugin install git://github.com/cheald/site_config.git
Once you have it installed, check out config/site_config.yml - there’s your config file.
You’ll notice that it has some dummy data in [...]