I recently needed to index from a local filesystem several thousand static webpages into Solr. I was already using Ruby on Rails for the admin interface, so I quickly threw together an action to index the documents using HPricot and RSolr. To monitor the progress I just output to standard out using puts [code lang="ruby"] [...]

Working at a small company like OSC allows for group bonding “work” activities such as RailsRumble, which create a good working environment and helps develop our skills. If you don’t know what RailsRumble is, it’s a competition where teams of 1 up to 4 members develop a Ruby on Rails application in 48 hours from [...]

As Eric already indicated in a previous post, this past weekend 4 members of the OpenSource Connections team competed in Rails Rumble 2008.  We built a Ruby on Rails app in less than 48 hours, which we called Azimuth and you can see it online here. Azimuth is a fun little app that allows you [...]

I love CruiseControl.rb, but one of the things I’ve found is that it exposes via the web interface a lot of what is potentially confidential data. From the cruise_config.rb containing accounts on our SVN server, to being able to browse source files, which would include database.yml, again, exposing usernames and passwords.

For an agile web developer two frameworks are available for quick and easy deployment of a new website: Ruby on Rails for the Ruby fans and Django for the Python fans. These two tools should provide the same functionality and as someone who’s been working on two projects for the last month, each using one [...]

We’ve been using RimuHosting.com‘s VPS servers for a couple of small prototype style RoR applications that don’t warrent the “full” treatment of their own dedicated servers in a clustered, redundent, scalable, etc environment. An example is my side project learning about the Semantic Web and Microformats: HighTechCville. One of the parts that I really like [...]

Recently, I completed my first Ruby on Rails application, which you can see here. It’s not a complex application, basically it’s a survey of political candidates with three data models: candidate, question, and answer. Pretty straightforward. I built the Ruby app using Scaffolding, which was very easy and I liked alot. Scaffolding gives you the [...]

I just took a spin around the bowls of ActiveRecord Validations trying to create a validator that would check if one, and only one, field of a set of fields is non blank on an ActiveRecord object. While I know I could have put the logic into an overridden validation method, I wanted to use [...]