Sometimes we would want to throttle certain application actions. For instance, a user should only be allowed to send x amount of emails to other members of the site in order to reduce the spam risk. Since this is a quite common task, I thought I might as well make it as a Rails plugin for better code reusability. I am now releasing Action Throttler, an easy to use Rails plugin to quickly throttle application actions based on configurable duration and limit. Go check out the code now! :) There ...

Yesterday we have launched the new design of Creattica. It runs well during the testing and staging phase, unfortunately the server quickly became overloaded and unresponsive after the relaunch was made public. The site was running fine with its old design, but because the new design has many added features such as search filters, followers and more, system resources were very quickly drained. After some optimisation of the database (which itself has increased the site performance by up to 300%...

A simple Google search will reveal that there are a number of different App_Config plugins for Rails. After comparing them side by side, I have decided to use the one by Christopher J. Bottaro. It features: - simple YAML config files - config files support ERB - config files support inheritance - access config information via convenient object member notation I just fixed a bug last night (which was pulled in to the main repository) where it could throw errors when used as a Rails plug...

So you were wondering why some of your model attributes weren’t updating properly? Well, it is perhaps because the db schema has changed but the changed schema has not been passed onto ActiveRecord, as is often the case in DB migration. Taken from the ActiveRecord documentation: Resets all the cached information about columns, which will cause them to be reloaded on the next request. The most common usage pattern for this method is probably in a migration, when just after creating a table you ...

It was confirmed that DataMapper is incorrectly setting table names in SQL JOINs. So for instance, the following code would generate an SQL error: type.jobs.all(:"country.name".like => "%#{params[:location]}%") There is a workaround, however the workaround requires manual looping of the dataset thus produces N+1 queries. type.jobs.all.reject do |job| ! job.country.name.downcase.include?(params[:location].downcase) end But at least it works. ;)

It has been confirmed by DataMapper’s core developer Martin Gamsjaeger (snusnu) that it is a bug. In short, created_[at|on] can be manually overridden, but updated_[at|on] cannot. The workaround is simple, do it in two steps, for example: job = Job.create( title: "Web Developer", created_at: Time.now - 2 ) job.update!(updated_at: Time.now - 1) Please check the bug ticket to see when it’s getting fixed.

If you are using rake spec to run the specs. Try using spec spec instead! It avoids doing some preliminary tasks and therefore is quicker to execute. You can verify the difference using Unix’s time command, i.e. time spec spec and time rake spec.

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...

Initially developed by Yehuda Katz, the Textmate gem is an extremely handy tool for installing and managing your Textmate bundle files. The tool works very well, for the most part. But due to the way the GitHub search query was built, the tool failed at finding Textmate bundles that do not honour the ’-tmbundle’ suffix in the name of their repositories. I was waiting for GitHub to fix their API bug which I reported here, but today I discovered a workaround that solves this issue. So, here, I p...

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...