The New York Times used Ruby on Rails to pull together, analyze and display election results in near real time on one of its busiest Web traffic days ever. How did nytimes.com scale up Rails — a framework known for quick development turnaround but less than lightning fast performance?

“The secret is, we didn’t,” Ben Koski told a session at the Professional Ruby Conference in Boston Tuesday. Instead, Koski and others in the Times’ interactive new media group used low-level SQL commands for some key data-manipulation tasks. And while some Rails purists might frown upon choosing SQL over Rails’ own higher-level interactions with data, Koski said the direct SQL commands helped slash the time needed to process thousands of records from 30 seconds to about 1 second — a major boost when election result files were literally being updated by the minute.
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In almost every app you create there is a contact form. Since you repeat the same steps over and over. So it’s better to create a ror plugin: contact form generator.

The generator gives you a good starting point for further modifications.
Specs will be generated if Rspec is available.
Dependencies: ActiveForm plugin

Installation
script/plugin install git://github.com/cs/active_form.git
script/plugin install git://github.com/masone/contact-form-generator.git
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Session hijacking

Stealing a user’s session id lets an attacker use the web application in the victim’s name.

Many web applications have an authentication system: A user provides a user name and
password, the web application checks them and stores the corresponding user id in the
session hash. From now on, the session is valid. On every request the application will
load the user, identified by the user id in the session, without the need for new authentication.
The session id in the cookie identifies the session.
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CleverValidation is an extension to the existing rails validation methods that includes the ability to customize your validation error messages and features javascript functionality for adding a bit of interaction to your validations via scriptaculous effects.

Repository: git://github.com/two2twelve/clever_validation.git

Usage Example
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Find weather conditions in your Ruby script or application

Yahoo! Weather API

yahoo-weather provides an object-oriented interface to the Yahoo! Weather XML RSS feed detailed at developer.yahoo.com/weather.

People care a lot about the weather, which sometimes seems ironic given that they can just glance out the window, but we can all understand the fascination with details and forecasting.
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SSL requirement adds a declarative way of specifying that certain actions
should only be allowed to run under SSL, and if they’re accessed without it,
they should be redirected.
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This plugin provides support for themes to the rails application environment. It supports theme specific images, stylesheets, javascripts, and views. The views can be in ERb (rhtml) or liquid formats. Optionally, you can configure the theme system to ignore any templates except liquid ones.

Usage

This plugin automatically makes any patches needed for theme support. You can
use the theme_generator to create the file structure needed, or create it
yourself.
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Engine Yard, the leader in cloud deployment and open-source tools for Ruby and Rails applications, today announced the first major release of its open-source framework, Merb

Merb is designed for building fast, high performance Ruby applications. Ruby on Rails is more featured while Merb aims to be simpler and more modular.
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This plugin will automatically add Google Analytics code to all of your pages, instead of manually having to add it to app/views/application.rhtml. You put your tracker id in config/environment.rb and it Just Works. It will, by default, only work in production mode, and you can switch it off for particular controllers and actions.

To install it, add plugin repository to your rails plugin sources:

script/plugin source http://svn.rubaidh.com/plugins/trunk

and to install the Google Analytics plugin:
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Quick Rails plugin that allows you to send an SMS from your application. This does not require any kind of “gateway” or third-party service to get the job done. The plugin takes in a phone number, the carrier, and a message. From this information, it will format an e-mail correctly that will actually end up being sent to that phone in the form of a text message. How easy is it to use? Very.

You can grab the latest from GitHub.

git clone git://github.com/brendanlim/sms-fu.git vendor/plugins/sms_fu
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