So I've decided after a few years away, that I want to get back into Ruby on Rails for some of my personal projects. What I'm wondering is what are the best resources to find out what the new features are in rails? I haven't really even touched Rails since 1.2 was new.
Oh yeah, and is TextMate still the defacto editor for RoR on the Mac, or has something better come along?
Check out the official Rails Guides. These should provide a nice overview of Rails (if you are rusty) and are kept up-to-date with the latest versions.
You may want to check out Ryan Daigle's Edge Rails posts which covered features as they were added to the new versions. Use the dates to determine where to start and go through each one. He also has a PDF for $9 which covers upgrading to Rails 2.1.
I have also covered the changes on Railscasts. Check out the various tags for each version to see them: 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3.
Update: Thoughtbot blog has posted about upgrading to Rails 2.1 and 2.3.2.
I found the book Agile Web Development With Rails (3rd edition) to be the most helpful to get me going again earlier this year. In particular it notes some concepts that have changed as well as introducing the new items.
Regarding editing, Textmate still seems to be #1 among the MacRails folks, the text-editing ones, at least.
Beyond that, there are some IDEs around now, if that's your preference. They're starting to become fairly not-awful, which is pretty impressive really. There are plenty of questions here that touch on the topic: try searching for "ruby rails ide"
The Ruby Toolbox is a great and fairly new resource for seeing what gems/plugins/tools are popular for various aspects of your application such as authentication, testing frameworks, search, etc. It's based on the number of watchers and forks each project has on GitHub, which is a reasonably good way of judging popularity.
As for a newer editor ...
I have found that sublime text is a great editor for ruby and rails projects, it has great syntax highlighting out of the box, Vim keybindings available (vintage mode), a sweet package system to add functionality for other languages like SASS or Coffeescript and an excellent file browser that helps with complex folder structure that can happen in a rails project.
Also, it is highly extendible and configurable, I switched to it from Vim.
http://www.sublimetext.com/
Related
How do I update to Rails 3.1 ?
I am using windows xp with ruby console.
And is there a smart way to update a rails app from 3.0.3 to 3.1 or do I need to rewrite it all?
This question has a lot of useful information which might help you out: Upgrading from Rails 3 to Rails 3.1
It doesn't answer specifically for Windows, but there's a lot of advice and insight that you'll find useful for the upgrade.
The only advice I can offer on top of reading the answers in the above question is to have a bit of patience and not expect it to work straight away. There's a lot of changes in the way 3.1 works so expect to spend some time fixing it up.
Good luck!
I created one vanilla 3.0 site, added it to Git, then created a vanilla 3.1 site and copied it over the 3.0 site, deleting existing files first. A diff then showed me exactly what changed.
I would strongly recommend this and the following two railscasts in the series
I have just started using 3.0.7. I am about 2 weeks of development in.
I was wondering if I should keep building for 3.0.7 or switch to 3.1 before I have too much code to port over? I like most of the new features (my only fear is not having good error messages when I use coffeescript), so I'd like to code towards the latest and greatest if it's relatively safe.
The javascript standards look interesting, and the attr_accessible fix sounds like it's very much appreciated.
Is Rails 3.1 compatible with all the gems out there though?
Also, if I go the 3.1 route, is hard or easy to migrate my project towards it? How might one go about that?
I guess this is a lot of mini yet related questions. I'd really appreciate some answers. Thank you.
I think if you want to ride on Rails 3.1 you should do it :). As for me I have some projects on Rails 2.3.5, 3.0.5 and would like to port them on Rails 3.1 but there is to much code there :). So don't be afraid and go to the fresh stuff (unless your code overflow :) ).
Rails 3.1 are pretty stable for now (I didn't have much problems with installing and using it)
If you're only two weeks into a project then it makes sense to stay on the edge and move to 3.1.
The way I'd do it is clone my project to a new dir (you're using git / similar version control, right?), change the Rails version in my Gemspec, run tests and play around to see what got broken (if anything). Based on the results you can figure out whether the effort is too great.
Regarding gem compatibility, hardly anything is compatible with all gems out there. Since you're two weeks in, you probably know which gems you use. Test like I suggested and you'll have an idea whether it's compatible with what you need. If you're using popular gems, then they'll most likely be updated to work with 3.1 soon enough.
is it worth the change from Rails 2 to 3 if im starting to work on a new application? are all the plug-ins and gems available for 2 now available for 3 as well? im used to developing and learning on Rails 2 and I'm afraid of switching over.
Thank You
You can check if the plugins you use work with Rails 3 here. Personally I'd say, if all the plugins that you use work with Rails 3 then you should upgrade, there are some nice changes in Rails 3 that are worth using.
I just started a Rails project a few weeks ago with Rails 3, and I've been quite happy so far.
Some gems/plugins don't quite work yet. For example, Selenium and friends seem to be a little behind, though after trying a few plugins I finally got it working fine through Capybara. In_place_editing isn't working out-of-the-box for me (I suspect because of Rails 3), though there are alternatives and it's not complex at all. And I had some trouble with factory_girl, though apparently there is a version for Rails 3 now.
But in general, most plugins I've tried seem to be working fine at this point. Maarons has already pointed you at RailsPlugins.org if you want to check for a specific plugin.
Finally, there are bunch of things that are just better in Rails 3 (see the release notes). I used Rails 2 for a smaller project a while back, and using Rails 3 now, I was pleasantly surprised by the new routing (much less confusing), and the added bundler support (makes deploying much less scary).
Since you're setting up a new project, I'll also mention that I've been quite happy with Ruby 1.9.2 (as opposed to 1.8.7). Check PragDave's blog post for some major changes. The only thing that I recall needing explicit tinkering was the debugger -- just use the ruby-debug19 gem and you'll be fine.
Fear isn't a good enough reason not to switch.
There are quite a few plugins that only work on Rails 3, so I'd recommend starting a new project with 3, if you're starting now.
I would expect this question the other way around :)
If you are starting a new application then I'd say always try to go for the latest stable versions unless there is some really good reason not too.
Not only does it save you the trouble of migrating at a later stage (which in a likely hood will happen sooner or later), but you get to improve on a personal level as well by learning something new. And the later is something I find very important. If it's not challenging, it's not fun, and if it's not fun, then it's not gonna be good (for me at least).
As for all plug-ins and gems being available, probably not but the ones that are still being develped and improved will be if they are not already.
You will have to switch eventually, so this is a good time. Why waste time on something you will have to change sooner or later? Rails ecosystem is quite responsive, and most plugins and gems are already 3.x compatible. Many have even deprecated 2.x support.
I want to get into rails by examining well built code
where can i find typical open source rails project that i can download
and learn from ?
i'm interested in facebook connect integration (facebooker), tag clouds, searching in
my website
I'm not looking not tutorials or screen casts
Thanks!
This question gives a good list
a list of projects with good test-suites
a list of open source rails apps to learn from
Have a browse of ruby tool box and download some open source. For example there's refinery and zena, two content management systems and Rboard, a forum. Depends what you want really but there's plenty out there. Ruby toolbox entries are ordered by github watchers and forks to give you an idea of their popularity.
I really like looking at the commits in teambox.
I find it a bit more complicated. But there's also spree.
There's also devise which is really interesting to look at too.
Finally, I'd recommend you to follow the rails commits (it's the only commits feed I have in my Google Reader).
Gady, this is an extremely rich topic you're asking about and resources are all over the internet. Try starting at http://rubyonrails.org/.
You should be able to find tens of questions just like yours (asked and answered) by searching SO at the top bar.
For Rails, part of it is the building process, so one feasible approach is to read a tutorial like http://railstutorial.org/book
then when in Chapter 2, you will use Scaffold, and at that time, you will have some basic code to look into how a basic Rails app is.
I also suggest you use source control like Git, Mercurial, or SVN to commit different phases of the project, from creating the rails project and then after each step, so you can diff what the changes are during each step.
If you already have Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3.0.1, and sqlite3, then you can
rails new myproj
cd myproj
rails generate scaffold foo name:string salary:integer gpa:float note:text
rake db:migrate
rails server
and now you can use http://localhost:3000/foos to create, display, update, delete the foo records, and have quite a bit of source code to look at. Most of the customizable code is in app, with css and javascript in the public folder.
Ryan Bates has an excellent series of videos.
http://railscasts.com/
An extremely valuable resource.
Radiant is a CMS that you can download for free and see how it works. It is a great piece of code to look at and see how it works.
I guess that most open source Rails projects are shared on Github, so it may be interesting to browse its Ruby section and look for most watched or most forked projects:
http://github.com/languages/Ruby
Steady stream of new interesting projects to take a look at :)
And don't forget the official:
guides.rubyonrails.org
well there is one "bigger" project on github, waiting for downloading and contribution...
but it's a little controversial because of the security issued they have (had?)
It's still worth a look:
http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora
I'm one of those developers who isn't using TextMate with any of his Ruby/Ruby on Rails work. My particular loyalty in this arena lies with vim. What are your favorite tips/tricks for using vim with Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails to make you as efficient as possible when working?
Most important
Get a copy of rails.vim it is awesome on millions of levels. Read the doc. There are way too many tips, :Rview customer, :RSmodel foo, :Rinvert, gf, :Rextract, :Rake and the list goes on and on. You will probably want NERDTree as well for easy navigation (which you can access using :Rtree)
Second most important
Follow tpope on twitter (the author of fugative, rails.vim, haml.vim, vividchalk theme, cucumber.vim and so on), he seems to be posting new related to Rails vim plugins quite regularly (be it syntax highlighting or git integration).
You might want to checkout my ruby/rails specific vimfiles.
Its a useful starting point and has many useful Ruby/Rails plugins bundled and configured.
The one thing that really sucks about Textmate is that it doesn't run on Linux. My vim/gvim config is the same on Mac, Windows and Linux. Same fonts, same themes, same plugins and same customizations.
I mostly use Textmate for snippets and quick evaluations for posting here.
I wrote an in depth guide on using Textmate features (especially Rails related features) in VIM. It's very relevant to this question.
http://www.jackkinsella.ie/2011/09/05/textmate-to-vim.html
I don't use vim, instead, I'm like those millions of developers using Textmate. Nevertheless, a colleague does use vim/gvim.
By looking at him work, one of the things I wish I could do in Textmate is the ease of working on multiple files at the same time. Basically, you can easily manipulate multiple windows, which is quite handy.