Anyone who got into Rails a few years ago should remember a very popular "building a weblog in 15 minutes video" by David Heinemeier Hansson. It was potentially responsible for most of Rails' ongoing success as the video demonstrated all of the beauty of Rails in an easily digestible way (if you still want to [...]

A surprising number of applications seem to involve storing a tree of similar items out to some arbitrary depth: managers and employees, assemblies and parts, categories for organizing things. Rails doesn't have any native ability to handle a tree structure - but, as with many other things, plugins fill the gap. And even though this [...]

Do you need to use Microsoft's SQL Server as the database system for your Rails application (or, would you like to)? A group of developers (Ken Collins, Murray Steele, Shawn Balestracci, Joe Rafaniello, and Tom Ward) have developed the Rails SQL Server 2000-2005 adapter for Rails 2.2 (SQL Server 2008 fans may need to wait).
Of [...]

Yes folks, Rails 2.2 is here! Coming just six months after Rails 2.1, Rails 2.2 is still definitely the most exciting Rails release yet - you get internationalization, Ruby 1.9 support, thread safety, connection pooling, and a lot more. The number of people contributing to Rails has never been bigger, the quality of the [...]

Last year we looked at using ruby-prof to gather profiling data for a Rails application. But it's worth revisiting the subject now that ruby-prof 0.7.0 is out: gathering profile test data for a Rails application is almost absurdly easy now.
As detailed by gem author Charlie Savage, hooking everything up begins with creating a profile environment [...]

Java-heads will be familiar with JBoss, a popular Java EE-based application server. Bob McWhirter has been working on a plugin to make it easy to deploy Rails applications to a JBoss app server - something that could be quite appealing if you work in a Java-only zone (common in managed deployment situations) or if [...]

In his "What's New in Edge Rails" series, Ryan Daigle has just written about "default scoping." You're probably familiar with regular named scopes on Rails models, but now there's a default_scope method that defines a scope that exists by default on find methods.
Example:
class Article 'created_at DESC'
end
The default scope also carries across, by default, to [...]

DHH announces the release of Rails 2.2 Release Candidate 2. It's the last stop before Rails 2.2 final!

You've finished the first sprint of your new Rails application and you're ready to show it to the client - or are you? Most user interfaces look better when they're actually filled with data. You could sit down and start entering records by hand, wracking your brain to think of new names and addresses. Or [...]

Webbynode is a new scalable, Xen VPS hosting company whose service is currently in beta. They are looking for further beta testers particularly from the Rails field.