If you don’t already know, ’delayed_job’ is a database based asynchronously priority queue system extracted from Shopify. I was seeking for a lightweight, easy to use solution for queueing tasks, ‘delayed_job’ fits the bill almost perfectly. ;) One thing we needed to do for a Rails 2 project at Envato, was to queue the tasks and to run them one after another, at a set interval. 'delayed_job’ unfortunately doesn’t come with this feature. So, instead of searching for more complicated solutions o...

Rails 3 has recently renamed key method to to_key, which consequently rendered MongoMapper unusable. You might see an error that looks like: ActionView::Template::Error (undefined method `to_key' for #<Post:0x000001066e4020>) After some twiddling I’ve submitted a patch to address this issue. Feel free to pull my fork until the fix makes its way into John Nunemaker’s main repository.

Web applications normally have many forms. Building forms is always a mind-boggling task because it involves repetition and chaos. A shortcut is to use a form builder / DSL, such as Formtastic. As I am using Rails 3, and the Rails 3 port of Formtastic isn’t complete yet, I thought I’d just use the plain vanilla Rails built-in form helper. First of all, I am using Haml instead of ERb. Already, I got the out-of-box clean looking Haml markup. Some of you might not be aware of the fact that Rails...

So we want to dynamically instantiate an object (i.e. convert a string to a class constant). Instead of doing this: @dynamic_var = "User" eval(@dynamic_var) You can do this: @dynamic_var = "User" @dynamic_var.constantize See more about the constantize method in Rails’s API.