Ruby on Rails resources

Installing Ruby

For Windows users the quickest way to get Ruby running on your box is to get Instant Rails which provides you with a development platform right out of the box. Mac users can use Locomotive. If you're using Linux and don't know how to manage packages then install a GUI, shave your head, and pretend you actually like Macs.

Getting started

If you're like me you will want to try Ruby before reading a more thourough guide or online book. Then maybe have a look at database access before spending some time reading a Ruby blog. There are a number of Ruby forums online.

Cheating at ruby

This Ruby cheat sheet is a 14 page PDF that will act as a quick reference. This resource website will also allow you to quickly develop your skills.

Comments

Separating business logic from persistence layer in Laravel

There are several reasons to separate business logic from your persistence layer. Perhaps the biggest advantage is that the parts of your application which are unique are not coupled to how data are persisted. This makes the code easier to port and maintain. I'm going to use Doctrine to replace the Eloquent ORM in Laravel. A thorough comparison of the patterns is available here . By using Doctrine I am also hoping to mitigate the risk of a major version upgrade on the underlying framework. It can be expected for the ORM to change between major versions of a framework and upgrading to a new release can be quite costly. Another advantage to this approach is to limit the access that objects have to the database. Unless a developer is aware of the business rules in place on an Eloquent model there is a chance they will mistakenly ignore them by calling the ActiveRecord save method directly. I'm not implementing the repository pattern in all its ...

Solving Doctrine - A new entity was found through the relationship

There are so many different problems that people have with the Doctrine error message: exception 'Doctrine\ORM\ORMInvalidArgumentException' with message 'A new entity was found through the relationship 'App\Lib\Domain\Datalayer\UnicodeLookups#lookupStatus' that was not configured to cascade persist operations for entity: Searching through the various online sources was a bit of a nightmare. The best documentation I found was at http://www.krueckeberg.org/ where there were a number of clearly explained examples of various associations. More useful information about association ownership was in the Doctrine manual , but I found a more succinct explanation in the answer to this question on StackOverflow . Now I understood better about associations and ownership and was able to identify exactly what sort I was using and the syntax that was required. I was implementing a uni-directional many to one relationship, which is supposedly one of the most simpl...

Grokking PHP monolog context into Elastic

An indexed and searchable centralized log is one of those tools that once you've had it you'll wonder how you managed without it. I've experienced a couple of advantages to using a central log - debugging, monitoring performance, and catching unknown problems. Debugging Debugging becomes easier because instead of poking around grepping text logs on servers you're able to use a GUI to contrast and compare values between different time ranges. A ticket will often include sparse information about the problem and observed error, but if you know more or less when a problem occurred then you can check the logs of all your systems at that time. Problem behaviour in your application can occur as a result of the services you depend on. A database fault will produce errors in your application, for example. If you log your database errors and your application errors in the same central platform then it's much more convenient to compare behaviour between...

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