Steve Klabnik wrote a great article called Rails has Two Default Stacks. This is the best mental model I’ve found for the major factions within the rails community. It breaks down if you start considering various deployment options, but I realized that it’s better not to. Deployment stacks can change more rapidly, and have more [...]
Today I upgraded to rails 2.3.5 on a server that had an old version of Ubuntu. This is with an old version of ruby 1.9 that was installed using the Ubuntu packages rather than rvm. Here’s what I had to do: 1. Change the rails version I changed the version in config/environment.rb to 2.3.15. More [...]
There are a lot of rails 2.3.x apps that have slipped out of maintenance but are still used. When it comes time to add a feature to them, the original developer may be unavailable or may not have the same configuration for running it in development mode. I found myself in that situation and here’s [...]
I’m working on a project where I think I’ll be using a parser library so I’ve been looking at the options. One thing I’ve noticed is that treetop is installed when Rails is installed. I didn’t know why, though, so I looked around. First I looked at the Gemfile.lock. Had I known the format I [...]
Rails 3.1 has a serialize function that can take a custom column coder. A custom coder needs to have dump and load methods set, or else it will be recognized as a required type for the built-in YAML coder called YAMLColumn. While the JSON class has the two required methods, it doesn’t allow specifying a [...]