Building authentication for applications is a run of the mill task we have all encountered at some point or another. In the past, most developers would have reached into their tool belt and pulled out restful authentication. Lately, a new kid on…
Continue Reading…In the previous article we thinly disguised a Rack tutorial as a comparison of PHP and Ruby. The aim of the article was to point out that most PHP developers start out on a pretty well thought out learning trail. We head…
Continue Reading…You have built an awesome application. You need to get it out there. Let’s face it, deployments should be easy, repeatable and if it doesn’t work out, you should be able to roll back to the last known good state. If you…
Continue Reading…Class variables in Ruby have a bad name. It’s true, they are considered harmful, borderline evil. So why the bad rap? Well, most groans are about how they behave when inheritance enters the fray. Correction: It’s all about how they behave compared…
Continue Reading…You will no doubt have read one of the many articles out there comparing the merits of PHP against Ruby, or more commonly to my exasperation, PHP vs Rails. I hope, like me, you find such articles pointless exercises and nothing short…
Continue Reading…Ruby and TDD are inseparable. The language lends itself to test driven development to the point that it ships with the Test::Unit library as standard. We all know that we ‘should’ test and that the process will yield more robust, better quality…
Continue Reading…In the last article we had a whistle stop tour of blocks. How they are defined, what purposes they serve and the differences between various Ruby versions. It was all very academic. But practically what benefit do we actually get from blocks.…
Continue Reading…When making the switch to Ruby from a PHP background, one of the grayest areas for me was blocks. Blocks are everywhere in Ruby and not having a good understanding of them will stall your learning past the “novice” stage. When you…
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