Post tagged: Ruby-on-Rails

Tools for data

How to store data, what to use

Prompted by a recent tweet asking what people used for storing and managing their data, I wrote down my own hard-won lessons on the topic. In rough order of preference and data complexity:

A hierarchical strategy

Use restructured text for documentation

Or markdown / asciidoc. The advantages of this being:

  • It's …

Using Paperclip for attachments

Doing something more than a toy example

This is not as straightforward as it seems.

In development, it works fine. Simply declare that the model has an attachment:

class Download < ActiveRecord::Base
        ...
        has_attached_file :attachment

and stuff will work automagically. A directory “system” will be created in your public folder and the attachments will be created in there …

Can I use RMagick?

A simple question, with the answer simply laid out for you.

RMagick is necessary for a lot of Ruby packages, so the restrictions on using it are critical (and very annoying). Here are the constraints on what can be used where:

     
Ruby 1.8 RMagick 1 RMagick 1
Ruby 1.9 RMagick 2

Or to put it another way: if you …

Creating a Hobo project

A step-by-step guide to setting up Hobo development.

Hobo is a nifty thing, a better Rails than Rails, but there are a number of small roadbumps to getting a project started. This is a list of one possible way through the maze.

Assumptions

  • You're working in a Unix-like environment
  • For development purposes, you will be building a sandboxed …