Tutorials & Tips

Kevin Jones explains how ActiveRecord works in Rails, and in a standalone Ruby application

After uploading a file to your server/database you may want users to download it, and send_file works great for just that! Lets say you are allowing users to upload "gif" files to your /RAILS_ROOT/images/*usern ame*/*thegif.gif*. Now you want to allow them to download them or other users to download the pictures.

This plug-in is a great one! I have found a few bugs but it did the job just as i needed it to. I am using this plug-in to connect to three databases, where i am selecting, updating, inserting, and deleting.

One of the coolest things I ran across in RJS was the delay method. This delay method will do just that and delay a number of seconds. So lets say you need to highlight something that was just added to the page after the user submits it.

Developing Ruby on Rails applications requires an ability to program in the Ruby language. This guide, written by the creator of Ruby, provides an easy to follow guide to the Ruby programming language, covering all the important topics including variables, looping, object-oriented programming, strings, arrays, error handling and much more. This guide is recommended for anyone planning to develop using the Ruby on Rails framework.

This will show how to validate your fields, by adding the lines of code into your controller. Very easy to use and duplicate in your ROR application.

This article contains step-by-step tutorial for creating photo gallery in Ruby On Rails -- basically a list of jpeg images with uploading/editing support. Command-line ImageMagick tools are used to generate thumbnails and determine image width and height. No Rails plugins or Ruby libraries (like RMagick) required.

This article contains simple Ruby function ae_some_html which allows usage of basic HTML tags and converts everything else to entity-escaped HTML code.

Tips and Tricks for improving your RoR app so it is search engine friendly.

Yes, you can run Ruby on Windows and eRuby on Windows IIS web servers. Ruby has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks as languages like Perl or Python do. Ruby is also a great web scripting language. Follow this tutorial and you can use Ruby on your Windows IIS web server by setting up eRuby to process *.rhtml pages.

If you want create a dynamic web page that works on more than just MySQL then try Ruby DBI. Ruby DBI will help you create a single database interface for connecting your web application to multiple database types like MySQL, PostGreSQL and SQL Server. This article also explains some of the typical mistakes made when installing Ruby DBI.

SUSIE is a simple image gallery that is an opensource eRuby application. It is interesting because it shows how Ruby, a powerful and fully object oriented programming language can be used to do the tiniest of tasks. Ruby can be used as a fast procedural code language that rivals PHP and still do things in OOP that Java and C# cannot.

Ruby on Rails is Model-View-Controller web-application framework. Rails uses ActiveRecord database abstraction classes to work with SQL tables. However, sometimes it is more convenient to work with plain SQL queries(without any model classes) for specific database operations.

RoR's default pagination methods have a number of bottlenecks. In this guide you will learn how to use paginating_find to create fast, reusable and good looking pagination code for your projects. This method also works for pagination of find_by_sql queries and even supports find_by_sql with eager loading!

Because Rails is a young framework, I thought it would be helpful to write up what I consider best practices when coding with it both for my new coworkers and the web at large. Here’s my current draft. Feel free to critique and comment. I’m very open to suggestions.

IBM DeveloperWorks has a helpful howto on how to bring the worlds of Ruby on Rails and your DB2 framework together. From the article: 'Because Rails emerged from the open source world, until recently you had to use MySQL or PostgreSQL to work with it. Now that IBM has released a DB2 adapter for Rails, it's possible to write efficient Web applications on top of your existing DB2 database investment.'

This article details the components of Rails and shows you how it works.Rails gives you an extremely quick way to develop flexible Web applications; this introduction just barely touched on what it's like to work with Rails. The full framework contains many useful classes and methods for carrying out the actions most used in Web-based applications.

Applie included Ruby with the Jaguar OS. In this article, Jim explains how to use this pure object oriented scripting language by exploring Ruby's features.

In this tutorial, we'll go through the following steps: Setup the environment Create the SQLite database Develop the Rails application Create the RBA (= Ruby archive) from the application with Tar2RubyScript Create the standalone executable with RubyScript2Exe

Test-driven development is A Good Thing. This article takes the example of a simple user authentication system controller and explain how to do test driven development using Rails.