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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
will_paginate is the de facto Rails paging plugin, and with good reason – it’s solid, fast, and reliable. Everyone I know uses it, but a lot of people don’t use it to its full power. I recently discovered some very cool functionality it includes – the WillPaginate::Collection class can be used as a custom paginator [...]
I’ve started playing with MongoMapper, and it’s quite excellent, but it does suffer very much from being young. There are lots of pieces missing that veterans of ActiveRecord will take for granted. I’ve been working around or patching them, for the most part, but I felt that my solution to `:counter_cache` deserved a post. In [...]
I’ve started using action caching more aggressively, to handle a large volume of not-signed-in search traffic. It composes a significant chunk of my site’s total traffic, but there’s no good reason to be recomputing full pages for all those long-tail hits. So, the obvious thing is to just implement a quick action cache. This all [...]
