http://matt-beedle.com Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:18:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Well, it's been about 9 months since I last posted. Time's been a little sparse of late. Today though, I have a good work related reason to spend 5 minutes blogging: We need a Ruby on Rails developer ASAP for a 6 month rolling contract to assist ... http://matt-beedle.com/2008/06/20/rails-developer-needed/ Quite frequently in rails I find myself saying something like: def show @photo = User.find(params[:user_id]).photos.find(params[:id]) end Pretty simple right... But it can be the cause of headaches when trying to write rspec tests. Writing the following test: describe PhotosController, 'handling GET /users/1/photos/2.png' do before(:each) do @photo = mock_model(Photo) ... http://matt-beedle.com/2007/09/24/rspec-on-rails-localjumperror-no-block-given/ I have finally gotten around to re-writing the first rails site I ever wrote. So here it is http://www.best-mobile-phones.org.uk, the new and improved best mobile phones. The original was just a simple DB, and literally everything was using page caching. I had used out of the box ... http://matt-beedle.com/2007/08/21/best-mobile-phonesorg-attempt-2/ When developing rails applications using REST, all controllers have only seven actions (index, show, new, create, edit, update and destroy). Occasionally there is a need for additional custom actions. They can be added very simply in config/routes.rb. For example, in part of an application showing a list ... http://matt-beedle.com/2007/07/17/custom-rest-routes/ This link was sent around the office a couple of days ago, and I just couldn't resist posting it. Very amusing. I've definitely witnessed a some of these methodologies in practice... http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2007/asshole-driven-development/ http://matt-beedle.com/2007/06/22/asshole-driven-development/ Quite often when building a site, I find that it would be nice if users could email each other within the site. In my previous post I explained how to set up the models and relationships for this. Today I've gone one step further and packaged them up ... http://matt-beedle.com/2007/06/05/acts_as_emailable/ I am currently working on a flat sharing site. One of the requirements is that users should be able to email each other within the site, a sort of internal emailing system. When one user emails another user that user has an email sent to their actual email ... http://matt-beedle.com/2007/06/02/how-to-model-an-internal-emailing-system-using-self-referential-has_many-through-associations/ It is very easy to end up with an action for every single request. You may find you generate a controller like this for example: ./script/generate controller User create_form, create, edit_form, edit It is not necessary to have 4 actions here. Instead this can all be handled by the same ... http://matt-beedle.com/2007/04/03/refactor-your-controller-code-by-using-postbacks/ Rails default setting is to store sessions on the file system. This is fine during development, but this is not very scalable once an application goes into production. Often the application will be deployed to a number of servers. One good solution to is to use ActiveRecord ... http://matt-beedle.com/2007/04/01/using-activerecord-to-store-session-information-in-ruby-on-rails/ Many web sites require secure user authentication, but a shocking number of them implement it very badly. At the time of posting one of the best ways of dealing with this problem not to store the password in the database, but instead to save a "salt" and a "hash". ... http://matt-beedle.com/2007/03/30/creating-secure-login-code-in-ruby-on-rails/