Why Rails Controllers need a Double Render

{{{ In one of my last posts I “already discussed the improvements”:http://nicksda.apotomo.de/2010/10/10-points-how-cells-improves-your-rails-architecture/ Cells brings to your Rails app by *providing view components*. The last day I had an lively discussion about the concept of _partials_ or page fragments in Rails. *Partials make me feel sick.* People ordinarily use ’em in order to have “_DRY_ code”.…

Rails Misapprehensions: CRUD is not REST!

While doing some research on Rails and REST, I took stock on two things. It is relatively hard to find a clean, basic and printed explanation of how REST works with Rails. I found thousands of screencasts, and this single great guide. People do confuse CRUD with REST. Especially the latter kept annoying me. While…

Testing your Rails 3 Engine sitting in a Gem

or Making your Rails gem suck less When people refer to gems they usually think of new methods and classes popping up in your Ruby application as soon as you require the gem. However, with Rails 3, gems (and plugins) can also add behaviour, controllers, views, routes and all the other well-known pieces of Rails…

10 Points How Cells Improves your Rails Architecture

The Cells gem has been around in the Rails community for more than four years now. It has hundreds of pleased users who reported all kinds of use cases and how cells improved their apps. Here’s a compilation of the best practices. The challenge A shopping cart in a Rails app. Usually you’d take a…

Getting a bloody Rails 3 generator running. And testing it.

Suck me sideways! It is said the generator layer in Rails 3 got really ohsom, flexible and whatever. I can now confirm “That’s true, somehow.” – nevertheless it took me years to figure out all the internals, conventions and places where to find documentation. What I wanted So here’s my requirement. I have a gem…

Receiving Pingbacks on Rails sites

If you’ve never heard of pingbacks before, you’re out. Go home. Ok, pingbacks are this mysterical feature when you write on your blog A and refer to some article on blog B. After you publish your article on blog A, something happens behind the curtain. Suddenly there’s a new comment on the blog B article…