Massive interest in Ruby on Rails over the past few years was quickly mirrored in book sales. Early entrants like the (near definitive) Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails were break away hits in a world that usually sees modest sales of each title. It’s not surprising a lot of people wanted to get a share of that market, and the range of Ruby and Rails titles has exploded, with an unsurprising dip in average quality. ...
It’s very clear from posts on the rails email list that there’s space for books that take the novice developer beyond what they learn in beginners’ books like Agile Web Development With Ruby on Rails. Those books will help you build your first app and get a sense of the structure of Rails but before long you’ll want to write code that needs to be reusable between models, or across projects, or to interface with services other than databases. The beginners’ books, by definition, don’t deal with intermediate topics. That’s the niche Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development sets out to fill, but sadly it doesn’t offer much beyond those beginners’ guides. ...
All reports, and the evidence of the subversion commit log, says Ruby on Rails 2.0 will be with us very shortly. Apparently the announcement has been delayed until the gems have properly circulated. For those who’ve not been following, Rails 2.0 isn’t going to seem like a huge step forward as it’s mainly focussed on cleaning up existing features, and moving quite a few out of the core and into plugins. ...
When Ruby on Rails first hit the scene, what attracted many of us to it was ActiveRecord. By providing a declarative syntax for describing relationships, validations, and callbacks it provided an elegance to model code that makes programming a lot more fun. Over the past couple of years ActiveRecord has received a lot of love, with has_many :through and improved caching options being the key additions I’ve enjoyed. But despite all that it’s given, ActiveRecord is clearly not the last word in Object Relational Mappers and it’s been good to see increased attention for some alternative Ruby ORM s such as DataMapper. ...
Practical Rails Projects is a weighty tome, coming in just shy of 600 pages, which led to this review taking a little longer than it otherwise might: not just because the book took a while to get through, but also because it wasn’t quite so practical to lug it on the bus as some of the others I’ve recently covered. A result of that heft is a fairly comprehensive volume, but one that doesn’t feel quite so consistent as it perhaps should. ...
As I’ve indicated here a few times, when announcing site launches and offering a few hints and tips, I fairly frequently find myself working with Drupal but have long had reservations about doing so. What I’ve so far avoided doing is going into much detail about why that would be, what those reservations are, and so on. But now I’m working on a review of a Drupal book and so it seems appropriate to lay those cards on the table and look at the details on them. It seems easiest to do that by comparing with the framework I do most of my development in: Ruby on Rails. ...
I am not in this book’s target audience. Whereas the book is aimed at experienced java developers who are just getting started with rails and want to take advantage of JRuby, I’ve rarely touched Java but have lots of ruby and rails experience and am interested in JRuby mainly to see where I might be able to take advantage of java libraries, or ship my ruby apps into new contexts. In that respect, the book was helpful but there’s probably space for a companion volume for people like me. ...
With a few projects coming to an end it turns out I have some time on my hands that I could do with filling with some paying work. I’m an experienced web developer, having been building sites and applications for eleven or twelve years now. I prefer to work with Ruby on Rails, and have been doing so for two years, but am comfortable in a range of environments and want my tools to match the project as well as possible. I frequently find myself working with drupal, and as an eight-year PHP veteran, that’s okay. ...
Taking readers step-by-step through the creation of the RailsCoders.net website, Practical Rails Social Networking Sites is a well paced guide to building web applications that tick many of the boxes of the moment. The book starts with basics, giving simple instructions for installing Rails on a variety of platforms, and then steps through simple content management, adding users and groups, building a blogging engine, adding a discussion forum and photo gallery, integrating with Google Maps and Flickr, and deployment. Along the way the various aspects of rails’ testing framework are introduced as they’re used. The style isn’t test-driven, and it would have been nice to see that style introduced, but tests are written after each piece of functionality, demonstrating some of their use and importance. ...
Since I wrote my first piece on extending a rails app to accept OpenID quite a few other tutorials and an official plugin have appeared to make that process easier. OpenID is quickly becoming quite mainstream, at least amongst developers, and that is very good news. It’s becoming so mainstream in fact, that recently I’ve been asked to implement an OpenID server on top of an existing user database so that those users can have an easy single-sign-on option across a range of sites. Writing the server side piece is not quite so straightforward and there’s not much documentation yet. A few sample servers are available but the rails examples don’t run cleanly on the latest gems, so while I took some code from them it made most sense to start from scratch. Over the past couple of days I’ve hacked together something that works for me and even though it could still do with some polish a few notes follow. Please do use the comments to correct anything I may have gotten wrong or skipped over. ...