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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Are you using AJAX? Maybe an in-place text editor? Or one of those fancy “click the star to rate this” jobbers? Or see result of arithmetic calculation. It was that latter case for me.

@tatal_payable = (@total_event_payable.to_f – @coupon.value.to_f)
render_text @tatal_payable and return

where the @tatal_payable was a Float. Rails gave this strange error message: (more…)

Hands on Ruby on Rails has become a popular framework for developing database-based web applications using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Before Ruby on Rails, though, PHP was hogging the web-development limelight. Problem was, there was no Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for PHP.
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With just a few lines of code you can give your users that wizard feel that they missed from the desktop. Wow them with the ease of use. Build dynamic wizards on the web with very little code. Sticking to convention over configuration, I think that this plugin will be useful
and familiar to seasoned Rails developers, but easy enough for the new
Rails developers, too.
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This plugin allows you to manage your plugin using browser in a totally non-intrusive manner.

Although it is a plugin I have put up the whole project on the github since it is much easier to play with the plugin in this way. If you want the plugin then go to vendor/plugins directory and copy roll_admin_model directory from http://github.com/neerajdotname/roll_admin_model/tree/master.

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New Relic delivers RPM Lite, a free version of its Ruby on Rails performance management tool. The free tool enables developers to tune performance of Rails applications even from their iPhones.

New Relic, maker of application performance management software for Ruby on Rails environments, has announced a new free version of its performance monitoring solution, as well as new features to its enterprise version.
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This code section will show you how to use mechanize and hpricot to login to gmail and return a list of Unread emails.

Installation of required tools

gem install mechanize --include-dependencies

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This Plugin converts an amount of money from one currency to another. You can convert from and to any of the following currencies:

EUR, USD, JPY, BGN, CZK, DKK, EEK, GBP, HUF, LTL, LVL, PLN, RON, SEK, SKK, CHF, ISK, NOK, HRK, RUB, TRY, AUD, BRL, CAD, CNY, HKD, IDR, KRW, MXN, MYR, NZD, PHP, SGD, THB, ZAR

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There is very useful plugin for Ruby on Rails applications. It is designed with SEO in mind, and it makes keeping your meta title tags, and your <h1> tags in sync easy.

The plugin is hosted at http://github.com/DefV/title_helper/tree/master

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Rails is great for getting ideas prototyped super fast. These tips will slow down development and make apps less portable, but definatly improve speed your system

Ruby on rails coding style: (more…)