This is what got me started writing this post: In the Rails world, we are holding up the DRY principle high. One outcome of this is that people do put stuff that has to be done for many applications into gems, to be reused. Authentication is such a case, as…
I am currently working on a project that requires me to scope nearly all database queries by customer_id, because, you probably get the idea, each and every customer has its own set of data. Furthermore, the Customer class does not inherit from ActiveRecord::Base, nor is it an ActiveModel…
We all like the "Fat models, skinny controllers"-rule, but what to do if your models are becoming too fat? Split them up into smaller chunks, exactly. Of course this technique works for other classes, too. The first thing to do, is to check whether the module you're…
As you may know, I sincerely enjoy developing stuff for the web. But I also enjoy using native applications on my iPhone, so learning iPhone development has been on my todo list for a long time. Today, I stroke the item off the list, without having learnt anything about it.…
I know NoSQL is upon us, but some of you might still be stuck with MySQL for the time being. Saying that, the mysql gem is not the best way to talk to your database using Ruby 1.9, at least if you are expecting UTF-8 characters to “just work”…
The recent release of Rails 2.3.5 has fixed some Ruby 1.9 related bugs - which is nice. So I thought this is the right time to try porting an existing Rails 2.3 app to Ruby 1.9. Again, I was out of luck. The encoding problems…
There’s so much exciting stuff coming up in Rails 3. How about giving it a test drive today? Dr Nic has done it before, but his post is a little outdated, so I will give you an update here. The prerequisites First, make sure you are running a recent…
These are the German slides of my talk at the Rails user group Hamburg, which took place on the 9th of December in the XING event room. It is about Cross Site Scripting and how you can protect your application from such an attack with Rails 3 and Rails 2.…