thewebfellas - ruby on rails development specialists uk

Rails 2.1 has just been out a week and so far something that seems to have passed most people by is that it now includes much better caching capabilities, including built-in support for memcached.

Last week I reached the point with an application where I needed to cache some models in memory to get a performance boost and decided to check out the current status of plugins like cache_fu and CachedModel to make sure they’d work with Rails 2.1. It was completely by accident that I stumbled across this innocent looking commit by DHH from start of this year and realised that Rails already had everything I needed!

Back in December I posted about ImageScience and RubyInline on Windows. Turns out I wasn’t the only one trying to get this combination working: according to Google Analytics it has become our second most popular blog entry (for the naturally curious this is the most popular).

Earlier this year I started using RSpec and loved it immediately. Testing is not the most exciting or glamorous part of software development but a behavioural driven approach really appealed to me, as did the much more readable RSpec syntax.

To get me started I bought the RSpec Basics screencast from PeepCode (which has since expanded into a 3 part series). It was a good introduction but, as is often the case in Rails-land, it left me with a case of Mac envy.

The screencast includes a section on using autotest (part of the ZenTest package) and Growl to get instant pop-up notifications when specifications pass or fail. But what about me on my trusty Dell laptop? Where are my shiny notifications?

The good news is that autotest also includes support for Snarl, a Windows alternative to Growl. Hurrah!

According to the website ImageScience is a clean and happy Ruby library that generates thumbnails – and kicks the living crap out of RMagick. What it fails to mention is that by the time you’ve jumped through all the hoops necessary to get it running on Windows you’ll be qualified to start working as a professional acrobat.