In Rails you can easily use the link_to helper in your templates to create links that will generate HTTP POST, PUT and DELETE requests when clicked. You can do this using simply setting the :method option, but this ease of use hides a very real problem.
I however prefer to poll my project's repositories for changes so that they do not need to be aware of my Integrity server.
Cucumber is great for integration testing but when a feature fails for a web application you just get the content of the page spewed out onto the console.
If only you could see a screenshot of the whole web page that produced the failure.
When setting up Mail.app on OS X to access your mail in your Gmail (or Google Apps) account via IMAP it is worth tweaking your 'Mailbox behaviours' and mailbox mappings to make them work together more smoothly.
However there is conflicting advice on this (from Gmail and Mac OSX Hints for example), so here's my definitive guide.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a neat little an application on your desktop which allows you to search and view ruby docs.
Well it's just 4 easy steps away.
The latest version of Screen (version 4.0.3 port revision 3) that comes with MacPorts has a number of issues.
Most annoying for me were that 'mate' and 'gitx' stopped working from the command line (with the errors 'mate: failed to establish connection with TextMate' and 'gitx: failed to establish connection with GitX' respectively).
The screen port @4.0.3_1 (version 4.0.3 revision 1) is free of these problems and, with a little bit of work, you can install this version via MacPorts. The instructions below are based on Joe Horns' post, install old versions of ports using MacPorts.
When working on web apps, it can really useful to be able to load production data into your development environment.
Textmate's indent functionality does a passable job of formatting your code BUT there is a great deal of room for improvement.
Inspired by the Paul Lutus's ruby beautifier script and Tim Burks's post on making it into a Textmate bundle I've put together a Code Beautifier Textmate bundle
It only supports Ruby at present but does improve upon Textmate's indent functionality, in particular it is better at indenting multiline statements and cleans up white space.
It's all hosted on Github so if you want to make improvements then please fork away.
When working on a rails project I usually have script/server, script/console and autotest all running in GNU Screen. Jamie Flournoy has already described why using GNU screen is better than plain old Terminal Tabs.
I've put together a Screen Textmate Bundle to make it easy to configure and open per project screen sessions.
More tips on how to use Git with a Subversion repository to get some of the Git goodness, local branches, stashes and much more, without having to persuade everyone else on your project to migrate to Git
If you don't already have git installed then see part I (Installation).
CSV Builder is a simple little Rails (v2.1) plugin that makes it easy to write templates to generate CSV formatted output from your Rails application.
You can use Git with a Subversion repository to get some of the Git goodness, local branches, stashes and much more, without having to persuade everyone else on your project to migrate to Git
#find supports select in conditions in just the way you would expect, so
Model.find(:all, :conditions => ["attribute IN (?)", [1,2,3]])generates
SELECT * FROM models WHERE (attribute IN (1,2,3))for MySQL.
Fluid is a site specific browser for OS X, that lets you can take the web apps that you use all the time out of your browser and on to the desktop.
I've been using it with Gmail to give it's own application window, dock icon etc. on my desktop rather than it just being lost amongst the 101 other tabs I have open.
The Money gem is a great little utility for representing money in ruby.
However it's formatting rules assume that the currency symbol will be a dollar ($) which is makes it far less useful for those of us who need to display other currencies, euros, pounds sterling (£) and yen (¥) to name a few.
Shining through has written an invaluable guide to the ruby on rails select helper methods.
Now if only someone would turn these into a documentation patch for rails.
I am very pleased to see that there's a bit of a buzz building around Stephen Bett's most excellent project Comix Influx.
Once installed the exception notifier plugin will send emails to your whenever your application raises an exception.
It's a sinch to install making it no brainer for low/medium traffic rails apps.
Tom Stuart, has been doing his bit to make Rails a household name with this piece on the release of 2.0 in the Guardian today.
I finally got around to deploying the rails port of my site PrepForTests.com this week.
Moving it from PHP/Drupal to Ruby on Rails was surprisingly painless and now I can enjoy working on it rather than putting off new features.
And I don't think I'll ever write another line of PHP again. Never go back.