Creating a Rails app with all the dependencies has never been so easy - rg, a template-based rails app generator has been just added to the core.

This tutorial is an extension of the paperclip tutorial I put up last week. This time we are going to take advantage of polymorphic paperclip. Polymorphic paperclip utilizes separate tables (an assets table and an attachings table) to track your attachments. This allows for an unlimited number of attachments per item per model. In the first tutorial I showed you how to attach just one item, although you could add more columns to your table to handle additional attachments this way is a lot more flexible. While this plugin is not perfect, there is a lot of room for improvement, its a great starting point. Perhaps a fork is on its way from me…

In case you missed it, rails 2.2 recently got released, finally promising thread safety among some other things. Thread safety has always been neglected by the rails core team, the standard way to scale up in rails (pre 2.2) is to run multiple processes, which makes deployment a lot harder (I think there’re at least 10 different ways to deploy rails apps at the moment, and people still come up with new solutions: apache+fcgi, mongrel, mongrel_cluster, thin, phusion, rack…).

Rails 2.3 (inspired by Thoughtbot’s Quiet Backtrace plugin) is smart enough to just shut up about the parts I don’t care. Here’s the default Rails 2.3 log in the same situation:

When the Ruby on Rails framework was first introduced a few years ago, nothing helped put it on the map more than the now famous “Creating a weblog in 15 minutes” screencast. In it, Rails originator David Heinemeier Hansson created a blogging engine using Rails in just 15 minutes. That demonstration was so powerful that it helped launch Rails into a major framework in the web development world, one for which programmers remain in demand for high paying jobs.

Ramaze is a fabulous framework that lets you create web applications in Ruby with a minimum of code.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. Here are a few things I’m thankful for besides family, football, and turkey this year.

Nanite is Engine Yard's latest addition to their cloud computing strategy: a "self assembling cluster of ruby processes" to form the backend of highly scalable web applications. InfoQ talked to its developer Ezra Zygmuntowicz and also got some news about Vertebra.

When hiring Ruby on Rails programmers, knowing the right questions to ask during an interview was a real challenge for me at first. In 30 minutes or less, it’s difficult to get a solid read on a candidate’s skill set without looking at code they’ve previously written. And in the corporate/enterprise world, I often don’t have access to their previous work.

Interview with Fabio Kung about his project, which he refers to as "JMaglev", about what's involved in getting JRuby and Terracotta to work together and which problems need to be solved before it will work.

Sometimes you'll want to call JRuby directly from your Java program. Mixing a scripting language with the power of a more standard programming language has tremendous advantages. You can modify your program on demand, without studying up on advanced reflection topics. For example, a game developer might want to have objects that executive specific scripts when you activate them: scripts which could be stored in your database and easily updated by your developers. Instead of restarting your server to add new functionality or features to these objects, you can write the code directly in JRuby and have your program run it via whatever method you chose.

A tip for people new to collections which use blocks for iteration (like Ruby does)

I guess we’ve all heard last week’s sad news about Engine Yard diminishing the awesome support they’ve given the Rubinius project. That’s personally how I see it: they’ve put the project on steroids for roughly a year, rather than “they’re now cutting back” x people.

To play, you must have Ruby (the beloved programming language) on your computer.

For too long we’ve let the JRuby core contributors be the only voice for JRuby. I for one am guilty of taking and taking and taking from the tireless and thankless work the JRuby team has done. Charles, Ola, Tom, Nick, Vladimir and many others need to be thanked.

A tutorial on how to build a simple iPhone web app using Sinatra and iUI.

Meta-programming is the writing of computer programs that write or manipulate other programs (or themselves) as their data, or that do part of the work at compile time that is otherwise done at run time. In many cases, this allows programmers to get more done in the same amount of time as they would take to write all the code manually.

REST. What is it, and how can it be used to design better web applications?

Powerset developer Dave Fayram writes about the current state of Ruby: "Basically, the Ruby 1.8 interpreter is a mess. The Ruby 1.9 interpreter is a little better, but is incompatible and not designed for real people to use (rather it’s claimed that it’s a transition release moving to 2.0). So what are we supposed to use in the meantime?"

I’ve just put online the latest version of our free Ruby programming eBook, The Book Of Ruby. This now has 14 chapters, contains 278 pages and comes with 222 small demo programs in the source code archive. The latest chapter explains how to serialize data - typically to save it to and from disk - using YAML. As always, The Book Of Ruby is free.

But alas, now that the language has become significantly mainstream and generally accepted as legit, these expats (Java devs enjoying a more trendy and carefree life in ruby_land) are now hurriedly disclaiming it before anyone has a chance to notice that they are doing something mainstream.

Now I’m starting in on learning Erlang. It’s not because I want to learn Erlang so much as I want to learn how to think in the ways that Erlang functions. Particularly the concurrency and how Erlang does it’s stuff.

If you want to learn the DLR and IronRuby fast, I suggest you start playing with the DLR Console as much as you can first then download the Silverlight Dynamic Language SDK.

In this article I will propose a new method for organizing CSS that better maps to how popular web application frameworks are built; and I’ll also provide some helpful code to make this easy to accomplish. The examples I use are based on Ruby on Rails, but the concepts should be easily transferrable to other MVC frameworks.

Short thoughts on KirinDave's post The Opposite of Momentum, which the anti-Ruby crowd has latched on to as more evidence that Ruby is "falling flat on its face".