Tonight, I presented at the East Bay Ruby Meetup on invitation of Jon Seidel, the host, a talk about a very cool new feature in Rails 2.3.

When we decided to hire to some help for the design and copy writing on our web site, I was particularly pleased with the hunting references Anita came up with for our recruitment services at RubyFocus. What does it take to hire a Rails Developer?

I've just recently run into a situation where I wanted to add an alias for an accessor method that ActiveRecord creates on the fly.

As you know, if you have a column in your schema, then ActiveRecord will automatically set up the accessor methods, like so:

Now, if you want to access the user's name also by, say, "display_name", then you might ordinarily think you could just:

alias_method :display_name, :name

The Ruby 1.8.7 interpreter

$> ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [x86_64-linux]

has a built-in method named "chars" which clashes with Rails 2.0's String extensions. The problem does not happen for Rails 2.1 or later.

The fix is simple. Add a file to config/initializers/ruby-1.8.7-string-workaround.rb as follows:

RSpec::Rails (I'm using version 1.2.2 as of this writing) has a really cool feature to test view templates. This is one of the features where RSpec really has a leg up on standard Rails functional tests.

You can test the view templates without the controller actions running, which has the nice side-effect that your actions and your views become less tightly coupled—and you're doing BDD, right?

Here is an example of testing a layout, you can do this without even relating to an action or a view template:

  describe 'layouts/application' do

    before(:each) do
  

When I first started talking with Eric about founding RubyFocus, I've always had a strong sense of the story and beliefs I held that I wanted my clients to learn. I felt that just going around talking is one way, but it's one-on-one, and it also is just talking.