Hot on the heels of the Rails 2.3 release is the new version of Reverse Proxy Fix. This new version only adds support for Rails 2.3 applications while continuing to support all previous versions.
Learn more about the Reverse Proxy Fix plugin.
My book Web Design for Developers is now available in Beta form.
You’ll learn how to design a web site from start to finish, and you’ll use many of the techniques and thought processes you’ve come to rely on as an application developer. You’ll learn some color theory, some typography basics, some XHTML and CSS, and how to incorporate Photoshop and Illustrator into a work flow that works for you, not against you.
You can buy an early copy and then contribute to the feedback cycle to help make this an even better book when it eventually ships. You can purchase the PDF and start reading now, or preorder the printed book which will ship after the beta process finishes up.
The reverse_proxy_fix plugin allows a Rails application to live behind a proxy like the one provided by HeliconTech’s ISAPI_Rewrite plugin as outlined in Deploying Rails Applications. It allows you to configure the base URL that will be prepended to any URL generated by the Rails link_to method and friends. This is useful if you want to force all requests through a frontend or if you want to graft your Rails application onto an existing IIS URL scheme.
This release fixes an issue with named routes and Rails 2.0. Previous versions of the plugin did not support rewriting of named routes in Rails 2.0 due to the optimization code for named routes. This version of the plugin disables the optimizations.
Installation is simple:
ruby script/plugin install http://svn.napcsweb.com/public/reverse_proxy_fix
Then provide your base URL, which is the URL you want prepended to all of your URLs. For example, if you are trying to mount your Rails application at http://www.mydomain.com/myapp, you’d enter that as your base URL.
Next you need to specify which version of Rails you are using.
Comments are welcome, and so are patches if you see something that doesn’t make sense.
I’m happy to announce the release of the ScafoldForm Generator plugin for Rails. This plugin takes the most useful piece of scaffolding, the form creation, ad makes it available as a separate generator.
You can install it with
sudo gem install scaffold_form_generator
Then just generate the forms for your models
ruby script/generate scaffold_form Project project ruby script/generate scaffold_form User accounts
You can read more at http://scaffoldform.rubyforge.org/
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There are a few neat tweaks I made to it to make the forms a bit more useful.
After about three months of testing, I’m releasing the Rails Config Model gem. It’s been available on RubyForge for some time but I’ve never advertised it.
The generator will create a configuration table and a form for a system admin to modify system settings for an app. Here’s an example:
ruby script/generate rails_config_model setup logo_url:string welcome_message:text contact_email:string
@setup = Setup.load
<%=@setup.welcome_message %>
You can read more at http://rconfig.rubyforge.org/
We’re gearing up to release one more version of Eclipse for Rails. It should be available this week. It will include support for some Rails 2.0 features such as the new scaffold generator, updated templates, and updated templates. Of course, there’ll also be an update to the Eclipse core.
The space for Windows-based IDEs is filling out nicely. The folks behind the NetBeans Ruby IDE really have something they can be proud of and I am considering ceasing further development of the standalone Eclipse For Rails package. What do you think?
It looks like RadRails, the Eclipse-based IDE that has become quite popular, has shut down completely. The codebase is to be incorprated by Aptana for inclusion in their open-source web development IDE, but it’s not apparent when that will be. As of today, radrails.org is now offline meaning that getting a copy of the software is much harder.
Those missing the plugin repository should be using the one by Ben Curtis at www.agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins.
Don’t hesitate to use Eclipse for Rails if you need a good replacement, or use the article that started it all to build your own environment. My upcoming book will recommend that in place of RadRails and will also mention several other free and commercial Rails IDEs.
I look forward to Aptana working on this project, as I believe they have the ability to make RadRails work the way it should work. I never used RadRails, nor have I ever recommended it to any clients, friends, or coworkers, but I do wish the RadRails team the best of luck in their new endeavors.
I’m spending more time with Ubuntu for Rails development and I started to miss some of the tools I use. I know RadRails has a Linux version but I’m still not completely happy with that offering.
I’m not releasing this on the public site just yet because I think I might want to test it out a little more. If you’re interested in trying this out, read on!
I’ve decided to release Rails for Eclipse to the community for free. Now you can use this great flexible development environment without building it yourself.
You need the Java Runtime Environment from Sun installed. If you don’t have it, the installer will show you how to get the files you need.
Read more at the source.
The new version now supports Page Caching. If you use this in production and you plan to use Page Caching with your application, please update now.
This is a plugin I wrote that is designed to be used when proxying requests through IIS or another web server that doesn’t gracefully handle reverse proxying.
See the original release post for more information on this plugin. Basically, it allows you to prefix the URLs that Rails creates with the base URL of your proxy server.
ruby script\plugin install http://svn.napcsweb.com/public/reverse_proxy_fix
Documentation is available online at http://www.napcsweb.com/rdoc/reverse_proxy_fix/index.html
