Just got back from EuRuKo in Amsterdam, and getting ready for teaching my first class of the semester at the University of Texas when I stumbled on this gem on HN. The author makes some amazing points and digs deep into an issue that has been clawing at me since I joined Heroku. You should check out the article, even if you don’t use Heroku. IMHO all products should be built for simplicity and ease of use, and it doesn’t mean you’re building for idiots…just look at Apple products. Wish me luck on my class, I’ll try to post some materials from it as soon as I get a chance.
News flash, writing a Rails app without knowing your routes is pretty much impossible, and this just in
$ rake routes takes forever [1] to run. So how can we build a Rails site with a
minimum of time and a maximum of awesome? You can use the recently released Sextant Gem [2] to generate routes in your Rails app.
What exactly is OAuth, and how can you use it to access data on sites like Facebook? This introductory video explains the basic flow behind OAuth 2 and how OAuth Clients are implemented.
Ever want to write an App that uses the Facebook graph? You could be the next Zynga, Foursquare, or Causes; but first
you need to create your app. This quick demo shows getting started by generating an app through Facebook and then editing
it. If you’ve already got a working web app it’s simple to add Facebook functionality to it, though
we’ll save that for another day. What are you waiting for, five minutes from now you could have your very own
live Facebook App!
Starting today Heroku will allow you to specify a version of Ruby in your
production app. As one of the most requested features we have been asked for time and time again, we’re happy to
announce that it’s now live. To get started you’ll want to update your version of Bundler locally to
version 1.2.0, or above.
Wicked was featured by Ryan Bates on Railscasts this past week. I’ve learned quite a bit over the years from Railscasts, so it’s a great honor to have my work featured there.
The cats out of the bag, Ruby isn’t immune to legacy code problems. Just because your app is written in a hip,
fun, and dynamic language doesn’t mean that your codebase can’t stagnate, bloat, and quickly turn into an
unmaintainable ball of mud. Before Gowalla was purchased by Facebook, the Rails code
base stood at close to seven thousand files, with the largest model clocking in at around 3,500 lines of code. While
we were somewhat unique, being originally written in Merb and then ported to Rails, applications of this size
aren’t all that uncommon. If you’ve got a large app there are a number of things you can do make your
situation better, one of the simplest with the greatest impact is splitting up models into concerns.
