Real life experience on programming with Ruby on Rails by Ron Jeffries

Ruby on Rails has raised the bar in terms of rapid development of data-driven Web sites. The JRuby project is making Ruby faster and more scalable than ever. One of the great advantages to running Rails on the Java Virtual Machine is that you can leverage other Java libraries, like the Apache Derby embedded database. The combination of Derby, JRuby, and Rails allows for rapid prototyping of dynamic Web applications. Learn how to use these technologies together to help you prototype your next great idea.

Normally, user-related content defeats page caching because the content for each user is subtly different. Using JavaScript with cookies, you can use page caching even when you're displaying some custom user data. This article explores advanced page caching in Ruby on Rails.

ActiveRecord is a fantastic persistence framework, but since the framework hides low-level details from you, it can be prone to performance problems. Discover the most common problems and how you can solve them.

One of the most distinctive aspects of the Rails platform is the Ruby language itself. As a dynamically typed language, Ruby has great flexibility, convenience, and power, but at a cost. Dynamically typed languages do not have a compiler that can catch certain kinds of errors, including relatively common type errors and some misspellings. Very early on, users of dynamically typed object-oriented languages learned that they had to test. Without testing, Ruby applications would have a much higher incidence of error per line of code than they do. With testing, you can have the benefits of dynamically typed languages with much less of the downside. In this article, I won't bore you with basic decisions, like whether you should test at all, or how you can convince your managers that the testing effort is worthwhile. I'll assume you already test. Instead, I'll break down some of the more subtle testing decisions that every Ruby project lead must eventually make. I'll talk about how you can measure your testing coverage, and how much testing you should do. I'll walk you through the basic out-of-the-box testing techniques, and how those compare with the newer mocking frameworks. Rather than providing an exhaustive tutorial, I'll give you a few examples of the techniques we used to build ChangingThePresent.org (see Resources) so you'll have a basic flavor of the techniques in play. Then I'll break through the strengths and weaknesses of the various techniques as we see them.

Ruby on Rails is increasingly showing up as the base framework for sophisticated and scalable applications of medium and large size. Because Ruby is an interpreted language, to bend Rails to your will, you will need to employ many different caching strategies. This article explores the caching strategies that are available to you.

This article proposes a Rails refactoring catalog.

This article introduces RGen, a modelling framework inspired by openArchitectureWare. RGen uses internal DSLs for defining metamodels and offers a full modelling stack for Ruby.

This tutorial will show you how to develop a web-based, database-driven application using Ruby on Rails. Also like the original, it will not teach you how to program in Ruby. On the other hand, if you already know another object-oriented programming language, you should have no problem following along (and at the end you can find links on learning Ruby and lots more).

This is the second part of the "Rolling with Ruby on Rails Revisited" tutorial