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What do you get when the power of Ruby on Rails is combined with flexibility of Merb web framework? Rails 3 of course!

We have a very happy news: Rails 3 Beta is ready for testing. The improvements are numerous: ActiveRecord, ActionController, ActionView, and ActionMailer, ActiveSupport have all been redesigned. ActiveRecord got pimped with ActiveRelation scoped queries.

Some components have been refactored into their own: ActionDispatch, ActiveModel. Even better, all components can be used alone and you don’t have to require the entire Rails framework.

A Ruby on Rails web application I’ve been developing uses Dojo-based full AJAX frontend. I learned some new tricks during development, relearned old pitfalls, and found some mistakes that I’d like to share with you.

Our team decided to implement the webapp in a non-conventional approach, using Dojo Toolkit-based full AJAX frontend, without using any ActionView functionality. It turned that it went quite well, but there are some things that we weren’t aware of and now we know how to deal with it, and you will too.
Communication between backend and frontend is done using JSON REST API. Since there is pratically no view code in the server-side app, theoretically it would be more appropriate to use Sinatra instead of Rails. But we opted for Rails because of familiarity with all its eccentricasies and exoticism. It’s not so much about learning the Sinatra framework, but more on what if we need to hack things out? (which we have personally proven to be time consuming)

While using Ruby for your projects, you may need some references.

These are some references that might help you in using Ruby:

• Language

General Syntax Rules

• Comments start with a pound/sharp (#) character and go to EOL.
• Ruby programs are sequence of expressions.
• Each expression is delimited by semicolons(;) or newlines unless obviously incomplete (e.g. trailing ‘+’).
• Backslashes at the end of line does not terminate expression.

Reserved words

alias   and     BEGIN   begin   break   case    class   def     defined
do      else    elsif   END     end     ensure  false   for     if
in      module  next    nil     not     or      redo    rescue  retry
return  self    super   then    true    undef   unless  until   when
while   yield

Type

Ruby is a high level, object-oriented open source scripting language. It has excellent support for regular expressions as a language feature.

In Ruby, a regular expression is written in the form of /pattern/modifiers where “pattern” is the regular expression itself, and “modifiers” are a series of characters indicating various options. The “modifiers” part is optional. This syntax is borrowed from Perl.

Ruby supports the following modifiers:

• /i makes the regex match case insensitive.
• /m makes the dot match newlines. Ruby indeed uses /m, whereas Perl and many other programming languages use /s for “dot matches newlines”.

Advanced Rails offers you an in-depth look at techniques for dealing with databases, security, performance, web services and much more.

O’Reilly Media, Inc. published an intermediate-to-expert Rails book, authored by Brad Ediger:

Chapters in this book help you understand not only the tricks and techniques used within the Rails framework itself, but also how to make use of ideas borrowed from other programming paradigms. Advanced Rails pays particular attention to building applications that scale — whether “scale” means handling more users, or working with a bigger and more complex database.

You’ll find plenty of examples and code samples that explain:

Morph Labs is currently beta-testing their next-generation solution in application deployment, delivery, and management, the Morph Application Platform.

Acquiring hardware and configuring software to support web apps are things of the past. Morph Labs brings you the next-generation solution in application deployment, delivery, and management. Reduce your time to market and lower your startup costs no matter if you are an ISV, a developer or a business.

About Morph Labs

Morph Labs Inc. www.morphexchange.com is a Philippine-based Web 2.0 technology company focused on providing innovative technologies and applications to support Software as a Service (SaaS) globally.

I’d like to express a warm notice that AdaRuby.com might be down intermittently as we’ll be having major rearrangement and server upgrades of our hosting facilities in the coming days.

The upside is, when it’s done (and oh YES it will be done!), I’ll be providing you interesting information on the stuff that we’re doing, especially our experience regarding the hosting services that we have been using all this time.

Looking forward to hearing you share your experience as well!

Canadian Web Hosting provides shared, VPS, and dedicated web hosting for Canadian sites. They operate from a 1st Class Colocation facility located at Harbour Center in downtown Vancouver, BC, Canada. The advantage to international (i.e. non-Canadian) hosting services are obvious: they are much faster to access from Canada (with an added bonus that you pay in your native Canadian Dollars currency! Hence, if your customers and/or your business is based on Canada, hosting your Rails site with them might be a perfect fit.

A common stumbling block for beginner Rails developers is learning the basics required to write plugins. This is made more complicated by the fact that Ruby is inherently dynamic and offers many techniques for code reuse.

Luckily, if you can write Rails applications you can write plugins by simply drawing on a handful of basic patterns.

Why write plugins?

Writing a plugin will:

• Help make sharing code more efficient, whether it’s between projects or within the same project
• Allow you to publish generic code to the community
• Save time and increase your confidence by testing once and reusing many times