Johan Sørensen

Rails Weekly

eXPlain Project Management Tool

eXPlain is a GPL licensed project management tool for XP (as in eXtreme Programming) based projects.

This tool is designed for those who wish to employ agile development, but either can’t or just don’t wish to keep track of index cards as one normally does when following XP.

(John Wilger, the author of eXPlain, will be talking about DB-mapping with ActiveRecord at the next xp-cincinnati if you’re in that area)

Production Log Analyzer

The Rails Production Log Analyzer by Eric Hodel, is a log analyzer for Rails applications. It analyzes your logs to figure out which parts of your site is dragging you down, it currently requires the use of SyslogLogger (instead of the standard rails Logger). But it looks clean enough to adapt to other logging methods, as long as there’s a way of associating lines with a request, which the default Logger currently hasn’t got. Download it here

TaskTHIS

Matt McCray has created a demo of some of the new 0.11.x Ajax functionality in Rails. The application is opensource and can be downloaded here. I like this and I’ve been thinking about putting together an “Ajaxterbation” demo myself.

Collaboa

Now for some shameful horn touting; I’ve been working a bit on Collaboa a little bit every night in the past week or so, generally a code fresh-up from being in hibernation since 0.9.5 to being up to date on the latest Rails. But also some general refactoring and rewrite of some sections. Check it out, but be warned that most of the enduser related text is still in swedish, localization is yet to begun.

LinuxJournal on Rails

The Linux Journal has an interview with Doug Fales, which is mainly about why you should choose Rails and the basic lowdown on how Rails work. The interview is written in an almost talkshow-style way and it’s a good read, even if you heard/know it all before.

Rabble on Rails

Rabble, the primary developer of soon-to-be-released-in-public Odeo.com has written a nice blog post on how Rails, and ruby in general, handles itself outside of projects bigger than your average todo-list application.

Ruby helps to make rails work. But what everybody forgets is the cultural baggage which each community brings to it’s work. Rails works because it’s a product of standards and agile focused web developers working on web 2.0 style apps who have adopted ruby which inherits from the smalltalk community’s legacy. Rails doesn’t succeed because there aren’t other ruby web frameworks, or because ruby is the perfect language. It works because it’s the right combination of two traditions with some hype and an open and cooperative community supporting the framework.

I don’t think I could agree more with this and it’s exactly the reason I chose Rails as my primary “weapon of choice” for most of my new projects.

O’Reilly article on Ajax and Rails

Rael Dornfest has a nice article on Ruby on Rails and it’s freshly squeezed Ajax implementation.
bq. The web development world is about to enjoy one of those chocolate-and-peanut-butter moments, the convergence of two individually flavorful technologies to form a scrumptious new taste sensation.

That’s all for now, see you next week!

Disclaimer: This is by no means a complete coverage of all events related to Rails, but rather a selected pick of things I’ve found worth mentioning in the past week or so. You’ll also note that these posts are mostly free from any subjects of Rails VS. [some language] and similar “drama”, because frankly I don’t find them interesting at all, I prefer to get my projects done and I feel happy enough about my tools that I don’t feel the need to complain on others. At least not in these posts.