You've finished the first sprint of your new Rails application and you're ready to show it to the client - or are you? Most user interfaces look better when they're actually filled with data. You could sit down and start entering records by hand, wracking your brain to think of new names and addresses. Or [...]
Most Rails developers are familiar with the repetitive grunt work between running the rails command and starting in on custom code: adding plugins, setting up git, initializing Capistrano, bringing in your usual custom rakefile, and so on. There are projects that provide a "Rails-plus" starter application with common stuff baked in (like Bort), but [...]
Vasco (Github repository) is a "route explorer" for Rails developed by Relevance, Inc and released under an MIT license. Effectively it provides a Web-based UI to explore the RESTful routes configured for your Rails app. It installs as a plugin.
With Vasco, you can perform GETs, POSTs, PUTs, and DELETE HTTP operations upon your RESTful controllers, [...]
Hampton Catlin's recent Ruby Survey (results here) showed that more Ruby and Rails developers prefer the jQuery Javascript framework to the Prototype framework that comes with Rails. jQuery has become popular across the board, but is unlikely to be included with Rails any time soon due to 37signals' support for the library.
jRails to the rescue! [...]
Tog is a new extensible open source social networking platform that you can add to your Rails apps developed by Keras Software Development. It
Unlike the incumbent Community Engine, Tog is not a plugin - nor is it a stand alone application like Lovd By Less or Insoshi. It's a collection of many plugins and scripts [...]
Spree (GitHub repository) is an open source e-commerce platform based on Rails. Envycasts.com provides a good example of it in action.
Spree is Rails 2.1 compatible, distributed as a gem, designed to be very extensible, and includes production ready data models and full administrative interface. The developers stress, however, that you'll still need to do quite [...]
Disclaimer: New Relic sponsors Ruby and Rails Inside. This announcement is not advertorial, however, and is written as objectively as possible. Similar items have been written for non-sponsors, such as this item on Scout.
New Relic is best known as a provider of Rails application monitoring services to large sites - such as all of 37signals' [...]
Hyperactive Resource (Github repository) is a extension to ActiveResource that adds a lot of ActiveRecord-esque functionality and finally makes it a reasonably simple task to do a "drop in" replacement for existing ActiveRecord models. It includes dynamic finders, client-side validations, validation and save hooks, association awareness, and lots more.
The Background
Two years ago, ActiveResource was revealed [...]
Exceptional is a new "exception tracking" and exception management application for Rails developers and their apps. It's currently in beta, but if you follow this special link, I'm told that Rails Inside readers will be prioritized in the signup process. It's developed by a group of guys working for a Web app development firm in [...]
As the developers say, Kawaii is "a script/console that runs in your Web browser." Essentially, it lets you debug your app and play around with the data in your database in real-time from afar. Unlike script/console, however, Kawaii cleverly formats ActiveRecord responses (such as database objects) into an easy to read table. It also supports [...]
