If you‘re diving into Rails development, two commands you‘ll quickly become familiar with are rails new and rails generate. While they may seem similar at first glance, these commands serve distinct and important roles in the Rails ecosystem. As a full-stack developer who has built numerous Rails applications, I can attest to the fact that…
Ruby on Rails, often simply referred to as "Rails", is one of the most popular web application frameworks in use today. It allows developers to create powerful web applications quickly by abstracting and simplifying many of the common tasks in web development. In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll take an in-depth look at what Rails is,…
Authorization is a critical component of any web application. It ensures that users can only access the resources and perform the actions they are permitted to. While authentication verifies a user‘s identity, authorization controls what they can see and do once logged in. In the Ruby on Rails ecosystem, Pundit is a popular and powerful…
With the highly anticipated release of Rails 6.0 just around the corner, there‘s a lot of excitement in the Rails community around the powerful new features and enhancements coming in this version. One of the headline additions is the brand new Action Text framework, which brings rich text content and editing capabilities to Rails applications….
If you‘ve been working with Ruby on Rails for a while, you‘re probably familiar with the basic active record associations – belongs_to, has_one, and has_many. These relationships allow you to efficiently connect models together. But what if you have a model that needs to belong to multiple other models? For example, say you‘re building a…
As a Ruby on Rails developer, getting your local development environment set up can often be a time-consuming and frustrating process. Between installing the right versions of Ruby, Rails, and various dependencies, troubleshooting issues, and repeating the process for each new machine or team member, a lot of valuable development time gets lost in the…
If you‘re building web applications today, chances are you want to reach users beyond a single language or locale. Internationalization, often abbreviated as i18n, is the process of architecting your application to be capable of adapting to various languages and regions. Localization (l10n) involves actually translating your app‘s content to specific locales. Fortunately, Rails has…
Ruby on Rails has long been a popular choice for web developers looking to quickly build powerful web applications. As a batteries-included framework, Rails provides a solid structure for creating web pages, APIs, and databases out-of-the-box. Developers praise Rails for its convention-over-configuration approach and the productivity boost it provides. In this tutorial, we‘ll learn the…
WebSockets have revolutionized the way we build real-time web applications. They enable seamless, bidirectional communication between the server and the client, allowing for instant updates and enhanced user experiences. In this article, we‘ll dive into the world of WebSockets and explore how to implement them in a Rails 4 application. Understanding WebSockets Before we dive…
Uniqueness is a fundamental concept in database design and plays a crucial role in maintaining data integrity. When developing applications with Ruby on Rails, ensuring the uniqueness of certain attributes is a common requirement. While Rails provides built-in uniqueness validations, they alone are not sufficient to guarantee uniqueness at the database level. In this comprehensive…
As a full-stack developer, I‘ve come to appreciate the vital role that testing plays in building robust, maintainable applications. Automated tests give us the confidence to refactor and extend our code, knowing that if we break something, our tests will catch it. However, as our application grows, so does our test suite. And if we‘re…
Behavior-driven development (BDD) has gained significant traction in the Ruby on Rails community over the past decade as an effective way to deliver high-quality, well-tested web applications. By focusing on the behavior of a system from the outside-in and encouraging collaboration between developers, testers, and business stakeholders, BDD helps teams build the right thing while…