Tutorials & Tips

Here's a quick Howto on setting up Ruby on Rails for Windows.

After uploading a file to your server/database you may want users to download it, and send_file works great for just that! Lets say you are allowing users to upload "gif" files to your /RAILS_ROOT/images/*usern ame*/*thegif.gif*. Now you want to allow them to download them or other users to download the pictures....
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This plug-in is a great one! I have found a few bugs but it did the job just as i needed it to. I am using this plug-in to connect to three databases, where i am selecting, updating, inserting, and deleting.

One of the coolest things I ran across in RJS was the delay method. This delay method will do just that and delay a number of seconds. So lets say you need to highlight something that was just added to the page after the user submits it.

In a recent application I am building I needed to pull file names and directory names from a local directory. I searched all over the net for this and found nothing. After reviewing a few of rails built in functions I came across Dir.glob(). If you feed this method a path to a directory it will then come back with an array of the names and directories listed....
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Developing Ruby on Rails applications requires an ability to program in the Ruby language. This guide, written by the creator of Ruby, provides an easy to follow guide to the Ruby programming language, covering all the important topics including variables, looping, object-oriented programming, strings, arrays, error handling and much more. This guide is recommended for anyone planning to develop using the Ruby on Rails framework. ...
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This will show how to validate your fields, by adding the lines of code into your controller. Very easy to use and duplicate in your ROR application.

This article contains step-by-step tutorial for creating photo gallery in Ruby On Rails -- basically a list of jpeg images with uploading/editing support. Command-line ImageMagick tools are used to generate thumbnails and determine image width and height. No Rails plugins or Ruby libraries (like RMagick) required....
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This article contains simple Ruby function ae_some_html which allows usage of basic HTML tags and converts everything else to entity-escaped HTML code.

Tips and Tricks for improving your RoR app so it is search engine friendly.

SUSIE is a simple image gallery that is an opensource eRuby application. It is interesting because it shows how Ruby, a powerful and fully object oriented programming language can be used to do the tiniest of tasks. Ruby can be used as a fast procedural code language that rivals PHP and still do things in OOP that Java and C# cannot....
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How to setup a Windows development PC and a shared web host environment so you can start developing Ruby web applications in the same way you do PHP, embedded in HTML. Ruby is easy to learn and has features that make it more useful than other web scripting languages. Now you can use eRuby to create robust web applications and websites....
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Yes, you can run Ruby on Windows and eRuby on Windows IIS web servers. Ruby has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks as languages like Perl or Python do. Ruby is also a great web scripting language. Follow this tutorial and you can use Ruby on your Windows IIS web server by setting up eRuby to process *.rhtml pages....
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If you want create a dynamic web page that works on more than just MySQL then try Ruby DBI. Ruby DBI will help you create a single database interface for connecting your web application to multiple database types like MySQL, PostGreSQL and SQL Server. This article also explains some of the typical mistakes made when installing Ruby DBI....
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Ruby is a great language to use to create a dynamic website. Here's how to use it to do CGI scripting. Using eRuby ERB templating to seperate the HTML from the script makes CGI a perfect alternative to using the Rails framework. Easy and faster than you would expect. So easy in fact that you may forget about using Rails all together....
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Ruby on Rails is Model-View-Controller web-application framework. Rails uses ActiveRecord database abstraction classes to work with SQL tables. However, sometimes it is more convenient to work with plain SQL queries(without any model classes) for specific database operations....
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Over the last couple of months, I have collected over 150 Ruby on Rails links at Top-Ten-Tutorials.com

RoR's default pagination methods have a number of bottlenecks. In this guide you will learn how to use paginating_find to create fast, reusable and good looking pagination code for your projects. This method also works for pagination of find_by_sql queries and even supports find_by_sql with eager loading! ...
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Ruby has many exciting object oriented features, but a large percentage of your code will revolve around arrays. In this valuable tutorial, we’re going to show you some tips and tricks for this powerful data structure.

Because Rails is a young framework, I thought it would be helpful to write up what I consider best practices when coding with it both for my new coworkers and the web at large. Here’s my current draft. Feel free to critique and comment. I’m very open to suggestions....
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