Practical Rails Plugins

The Rails framework empowers developers with unprecedented levels of productivity by embracing principles such as “convention over configuration” and “don’t repeat yourself”. This paradigm is even apparent at the community level, where developers regularly share their custom framework extensions by way of Rails’ plugins feature. Plugins offer a way for developers to extend the core Rails framework with their own custom features, allowing for rapid integration of features such as authentication, user ratings, and search. Practical Rails Plugins shows you how to capitalize upon the wide variety of plugins at your disposal by guiding you through their integration into a number of interesting projects. You’ll learn how to rapidly augment projects involving asynchronous video transcoding, geocoding and mapping, content management, community ratings, and PDF generation. You’ll also learn how to create and distribute your own plugins. The ultimate guide to building powerful web sites faster using Rails plugins Demonstrates how to use popular plugins within a number of practical (and fully functional) projects and mini–applications Shows you how to create and distribute your own plugins

This book provides intermediate Rails users with an essential learning aid to take them to higher level, teaching them countless real world techniques via a series of practical project-based chapters. Each chapter takes the reader through the complete process of building up a full-functional Rails web application. Projects taught in the book include a blog, a REST-based task manager, an online IT help desk, a web comic (including image upload facilities,) Wiki, and much more. Techniques learned include speeding up development with plugins, engines and Ruby Gems, styling with CSS libraries, and adding dynamism using Ajax.

Practical Ruby on Rails Social Networking Sites shows you the complete development cycle of a social networking community web site. You will learn how to make the best use of the Ruby on Rails framework within a large project and how to implement and adapt features specific to a community. The book offers practical advice and tips for developing and testing, along with guidance on how to take your site live, as well as optimize and maintain it. It also explores how to integrate with other community sites and how to make good use of Rails' Ajax features. You will also learn how to optimize and adapt your site to work well on mobile browsers.

Practical REST on Rails 2 Projects is a guide to joining the burgeoning world of open web applications. It argues that opening up your application can provide significant benefits and involves you in the entire process—from setting up your application, to creating clients for it, to handling success and all its attendant problems. This book is the essential resource for anyone who wants to make their web application a full participant in the new Internet This book is intended for intermediate–to–advanced Rails developers—people who use Rails regularly for sites and applications more complicated than the prototypical roll–your–own blog In particular, it's targeted at Rails developers who want to be good Web 2.0 citizens—sharing the functionality of their app with other sites to the betterment of everyone Application projects include iPhone, Facebook, and REST for the enterprise

This book is a comprehensive guide to utilizing and creating Ruby Gems. Coverage provides an enormous code library that will help developers improve their projects. It details 34 of the best and most useful Gems, including ones to speed up web applications, process credit card payments, produce PDF documents, read and update RSS feeds, and acquire real-time shipping prices from FedEx and UPS. Each of these also comes complete with actual use cases and code examples that readers can immediately use in their own projects. In addition, the book describes how readers can package and distribute their own Ruby Gems.

In this book, JRuby core developer Ola Bini covers everything you need to know to take full advantage of what JRuby has to offer. It provides complete coverage on how to use JRuby to create web applications faster and more efficiently, while continuing to take advantage of the vast power of the Java platform. The book also provides several real-world projects that illustrate the crucial specifics you need to know about the interaction of Java and Ruby. In addition, it offers helpful, practical instruction and discussion on how web applications can be deployed using a variety of popular servers such as Apache and Mongrel.

Get ready to see Rails as you've never seen it before. Learn how to extend the framework, change its behavior, and replace whole components to bend it to your will. Eight different test-driven tutorials will help you understand Rails' inner workings and prepare you to tackle complicated projects with solutions that are well-tested, modular, and easy to maintain. This second edition of the bestselling Crafting Rails Applications has been updated to Rails 4 and discusses new topics such as streaming, mountable engines, and thread safety. Rails is one of the most extensible frameworks out there. This pioneering book deep-dives into the Rails plugin APIs and shows you, the intermediate Rails developer, how to use them to write better web applications and make your day-to-day work with Rails more productive. Rails Core developer Jose Valim guides you through eight different tutorials, each using test-driven development to build a new Rails plugin or application that solves common problems with these APIs. You'll learn how the Rails rendering stack works and customize it to read templates from the database while you discover how to mimic Active Record behavior, such as validations, in any other object. You'll find out how Rails integrates with Rack, the different ways to stream data from your web application, and how to mix Rails engines and Sinatra applications into your Rails apps, so you can choose the most appropriate tool for the job. In addition, you'll improve your productivity by customizing generators and responders. This book will help you understand Rails' inner workings, including generators, template handlers, internationalization, routing, and responders. With the knowledge you'll gain, you'll create well-tested, modular, and robust solutions for your next project.