The last while I heard a lot of good things about Meteor, a Javascript application framework. Over the last few years, starting with sammy.js and then backbone, a million others similar frameworks have been popping up all over the show.  To get an idea, just have a look at all the available framework demos TodoMVC, or all the previews at TodoMVC labs. Enter Meteor So with all these options, what makes meteor special? To get a sense of the magic, I urge you to head on over the website and watch the screencast. No really, go and watch it, it’s really worth it.…read more

Ruby on Rails has recently announced that the HTTP patch method will become the new primary HTTP method for updates. A lot of discussion as well as general Rails bashing ensued all over the internet, as well as a storm of tweets. My favorite however, was from Ryan Dahl, the creator of node.js:     And so to the possible annoyance of Mr Dahl, I would like today to delve deep into realms of Http nerdom, and discuss the new  hotness in REST: The Hypermedia API. I have seen it being mentioned more often lately and I decided to try…read more

This is the first of hopefully many tech chats with leaders in the development community. It was also my first try at video editing, so it’s very raw – be warned! If you want to get in contact with Luke: https://twitter.com/#!/lukevenediger Here’s some of the key discussion points in the video: JavaScript’s rise in popularity on the server side node.js Map/Reduce CoffeeScript HTML5 adoption Amazon’s development approach

So why would you want to host your own gem server? Well recently, I had to share some in-house code between different proprietary rails apps. We needed this code and all it’s dependencies to be easily installed on different development machines and we wanted to support multiples versions of the code in the Rails apps. Does this sound like a job for rubygems and bundler? Yes? Well that’s what I thought too, except for fact that for bundler to find a gem, it needs to be available in one of the sources in your Gemfile. Like I mentioned, this was…read more

Why this particular mix? Sometimes you don’t want to lay down the almighty rails. Sometimes you just want a simple, straight to the point, no BS web app with some sort of persistence.  Perhaps with a sprinkle of JSON for some AJAX. Nothing more. Perhaps even all in one file… So I thought giving a quikstart walkthrough tutorial of Sinatra coupled with MongoDb would be a good idea. If this sounds like something you would want to do, then Sinatra coupled with MongoDb is a perfect fit for you! Sinatra Sinatra has a very succinct syntax for defining routes with…read more

There are quite a few ways to consume MongoDB using Ruby out there, so much so that it can actually be a bit confusing. In this post will attempt at giving a brief outline of all the options available to you. To decide which are the most popular mongo gems worth mentioning, I had a look at what ruby-toolbox has to say and used some of my own research and experience. It seems that most mongo gems tends to fall in one of three camps: High-level ActiveRecord/Datamapper  like: Mongomapper & Mongoid Lightweight: mongomatic & mongo_odm Native driver: The MongoDB Ruby driver Mongomapper and Mongoid The…read more