When writing Crafting Rails Applications, I knew exactly which parts from Rails I wanted to talk about. However, I didn’t want the book to simply describe how everything works, I actually wanted everyone to build something useful from each part of Rails. One of the hardest areas to come up with an useful tool as … »

A while ago we were working on an application that had an entire version specially created for mobiles, such as the iPhone. This specific application was entirely tested with Capybara, Steak and Selenium Webdriver. Although the test suite wasn’t the fastest one in the world, the web application was very well tested, and to guarantee … »

Erik DeBill has put two interesting benchmarks on his blog. The first one compares the performance of different Ruby implementations in Rails development mode while the second compares their performance in Rails boot time. If you haven’t read them yet, please do it now. Benchmarking code is an important practice, but it can be misleading … »

This year is coming to an end and it was amazing for us at Plataforma Tecnologia. We are proud to share with you, faithful reader, our accomplishments in 2010, which weren’t few. Open Source The year has begun on fire. In February, José Valim made his way into the Rails Core team and has been … »

Most of the applications we create these days usually have an admin interface where an user with necessary privileges is able to manage the application content, respecting some business rules. Thus it is required that part of this content is easily manageable, which means the user needs to be able to add some formatting to … »

Sometime ago we were working on a project together with a designer, and that specific application was full of forms, each one having a different layout, but most of them sharing the same features: inline errors, hints, specific label markup for required fields, etc. To start prototyping the application faster, we used the markup the … »