Ruby's Open Classes are powerful - but can easily be misused. This article looks at how to minimize the risk of opening classes, alternatives, and how other languages provide similar capabilities.

This article presents the basic concepts used by the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework.

In this chapter from The Rails 4 Way, 3rd Edition, Obie Fernandez and Kevin Faustino wrap up their comprehensive coverage of Active Record by reviewing callbacks, single-table inheritance (STI), and polymorphic models. They also review a little bit of information about metaprogramming and Ruby domain-specific languages (DSLs) as they relate to Active Record.

Rather than preach on about the virtues of testing, I'm going to walk you through a simple example of test-driven development (TDD) using RSpec. The RSpec tool is a Ruby package that lets you build a specification alongside your software. This specification is actually a test that describes the behavior of your system. Here's the flow for development with RSpec:
* You write a test. This test describes the behavior of a small element of your system.
* You run the test. The test fails because you have not yet built the code for that part of your system. This important step tests your test case, verifying that your test case fails when it should.
* You write enough code to make the test pass.
* You run the tests and verify that they pass.

In essence, an RSpec developer turns test cases from red (failing) to green (passing) all day. It's a motivating process. In this article, I walk you through working with the basics in RSpec.

I’ll be straight with you. I want you to cry. To weep. To whimper sweetly. This book is a poignant guide to Ruby. That means code so beautiful that tears are shed. That means gallant tales and somber truths that have you waking up the next morning in the arms of this book. Hugging it tightly to you all the day long. If necessary, fashion a makeshift hip holster for Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, so you can always have this book’s tender companionship.

Rhomobile has revolutionized the process of developing mobile applications. It has enabled developers to become much faster and more efficient, allowing quicker application development. It enables software programmers to build applications for mobile devices using HTML and Ruby instead of proprietary languages such as Objective-C. Currently, the Rhodes framework supports development for the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Google Android, Symbian, and BlackBerry operating systems.

Learn to extend the Ruby programming language using the Rice interface to Ruby's native C API. Using this object-oriented interface, you can create Ruby objects in C++ code, convert data objects between Ruby and C++, and more.

Writing a Web-based data entry UI for a complex application is never fun and is often downright tedious. One key attribute for a good user interface is consistency, but it still takes a knowledgeable and diligent development team to create the Web pages that follow through on that design. Like all other Web application frameworks, Ruby on Rails has this same problem. However the dynamic nature of the Ruby language provides for a solution: ActiveScaffold. ActiveScaffold is a plugin for Ruby on Rails (also known as Rails) that provides dynamic model-based view generation. Instead of having to create pages by hand that display your models, ActiveScaffold will introspect your ActiveRecord models and dynamically generate a CRUD (create, read, update, delete) user interface for managing those objects. This article is based on the latest currently available versions (as of this writing) of ActiveScaffold, Ruby, and Rails. Also, this article assumes that you are familiar with Ruby on Rails and are using Linux® or Mac OS X. Windows® users should modify any commands given to suit their own environment (for example, adding 'ruby' to the start of script commands).

Over the last couple of decades we've seen a growing gap between database-oriented software developers and in-memory application software developers. This leads to many disputes about how to use database features such as SQL and stored procedures. In this article I look at the question of whether to place business logic in SQL queries or in-memory code, considering primarily performance and maintainability based on an example of a simple, but rich SQL query.

There have been many extravagant claims made about Rails. For example, an article in OnLAMP.com1 claimed that “you could develop a web application at least ten times faster with Rails than you could with a typical Java framework...” The article then went on to show how to install Rails and Ruby on a PC and build a working ‘scaffold’ application with virtually no coding. While this is impressive, ‘real’ web developers know that this is smoke and mirrors. ‘Real’ applications aren’t as simple as that. What’s actually going on beneath the surface? How hard is it to go on and build ‘real’ applications?