by derek
Top 5 Rails Stories of the Week (8/28 - 9/3)
Here’s a look at the most thought-provoking Ruby on Rails news items of the week as determined by the always unbiased (but not beyond bribes) team at Highgroove:
1. The Enterprise Rails Debate
The best result of the latest “is Rails/Ruby ready for the enterprise debate” (see Joel Spolesky’s and DHH’s original cross-fire) was Justin Gehtland’s clarification of enterprise software. Frankly, Highgroove wouldn’t be in business (and growing) if Rails wasn’t a good choice in building software for the enterprise.
*2. Ruby God Jamis Buck emerges from Idaho, releases Capistrano 1.9.1
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Everyone’s favorite Rails Deployment tool, Capistrano, gets a major update. Jamis also clears up any confusion on the future development of Capistrano.
3. Are Mocked Models the New Testing Trend?
RubyConf Speaker Kevin Clark looks at a way to speed up your tests in an article on mocking models rather than using fixtures. We’re Test-Driven-Development (TDD) addicts here (it’s true – my recovery group class meets tonight), and faster-running tests is perhaps the greatest way to encourage TDD. Fixtures are great, but when refactoring is needed on a large application, they can be a major pain.
4. Class Variables in Rails
CNET Rails Guru Chris Wanstrath takes a look at class variables in Ruby and in Rails. Class Variables in Rails are often a constant source of confusion for many developers – take a look at this post for some clarity. James thinks Chris should have come right out and said: “Don’t use class variables. Use instance variables of the class instead.”
5. Embrace the CRUD (sounds like a good name for a t-shirt)
This is a little old, but worth noting. Scott Raymond gives a full report on the process of embracing the CRUD and becoming RESTful with a report on refactoring IconBuffet.com to REST. This is the most useful article we’ve seen because it walks through the conversion process rather than starting from scratch.