I ran into a rather surprising little problem earlier this week that I felt bore documenting. It turns out that the “simple” Rails strip_tags helper is massive overkill when you just want to strip markup out of a document. It offers a lot of functionality, but it comes at a pretty ugly performance cost. Here’s [...]
I recently found myself needing to share session data from my Rails app with a PHP app on the same domain. We use cookie sessions for a number of reasons, and while they work great, the data stored in them is stored in Ruby’s native Marshal format, which is not trivial to reimplement in PHP. [...]
MongoDB, as I’ve mentioned before, is not without its warts. I’ve run into another, and it’s a nasty one. It turns out that if you perform count() on a query cursor that includes any conditions, even if those conditions are indexed, the operation takes O(n) time to run. In practice, I’ve found that this costs [...]
Resque is a bucket of awesome slathered in a delicious candy coating. It makes background job work really, *really* easy. I recently switched to it, and found that in the process of testing it, I was generating an awful lot of extra unfulfilled jobs in my queue, when the job was a side-effect of some [...]
Once upon a time, I wrote a quick-and-dirty Rails plugin for site configuration. Since then, I’ve continued to use variants on this pattern, and it’s evolved to the point that it deserved a revisit. After continually slimming down the code, I realized that even though it’s tiny, it’s danged useful to be able to just [...]
Haml’s among my favorite of the Rails technology stack. Clean, self-correcting templates that mean less typing and more doing for me. I love it. Unfortunately, there have been a number of performance regressions introduced into Haml recently, and that sucks, because Rails spends a lot of time building views, and I’d really like those numbers [...]
I started playing with JRuby tonight, and got my application up and running on it in under 10 minutes (kudos to the JRuby team!), but when I started measuring its performance, I was seriously unimpressed. This didn’t quite line up with what I’ve read of JRuby, so I decided to do a little digging.
Users of MongoMapper may be familiar with mongrations, a Rails plugin to provide you with ActiveRecord-style migration tools for MongoDB. You don’t need them for schema changes, obviously, since MongoDB is schemaless, and you can define any changes you need to in your model. However, there are times that deploying a changeset will require some [...]
I’ve recently been trying to figure out how to get Rails to place nicely with Varnish. It doesn’t do that very well. In a nutshell: Varnish is easy to use, if your app isn’t setting session cookies until you actually need them. The presence of a session cookie usually means that content shouldn’t be cacheable. [...]
In the project I’m currently working on, I’m heavily using factory_girl to generate test data, rather than using the old Rails fixtures standby. However, I still have a set of read-only fixtures (which are used for testing read-only models against a legacy database). I’m using these in my tests, but since they are read only [...]
