I just tried out some simple filters in Rails, and am blown away. Up until now, I'd only embraced those features of Rails (like ActiveRecord) that allowed me to omit steps in the application without actually adding any code on my part. Filters are a bit different — you have to identify patterns in your data flow and abstract them out into steps that will be called before (or … [Read more...] about Rails: A Short Introduction to before_filter
rails
Progress Report: Work and Page Administration
As I said earlier, I've been making really good progress writing the kinds of administrative features that Rails excels at. Despite my digression to implement zoom, in the last two weeks I've added code for: Converting a set of titled images into a work composed of pages Creating a new, blank work Editing title and description information about a work Deleting a work … [Read more...] about Progress Report: Work and Page Administration
Rails: acts_as_list Incantations
In my experience, really great software is so consistent that when you're trying to do something you've never done before, you can guess at how it's done and at least half of the time, it just works. For the most part, Ruby on Rails is like that. There are best practices baked into the framework for processes I never even realized you could have best practices for, like the … [Read more...] about Rails: acts_as_list Incantations