Latest Free Screencasts

Rails 3.2 sports many new features including automatic explain queries, tagged logging, key-value store in Active Record, improved migration generator and more. Learn all about these new features in this episode.

Mercury allows you to edit a section of HTML directly in the web browser through a WISYIWYG editor. Here I show how to integrate Mercury into a Rails app and save the changes back to the database.

Vagrant allows you to run your Rails application and all of its dependencies in a portable, sharable environment. Use for development, set it up as a staging server, or experiment with a production setup.

Communicating with a SOAP API can be a daunting task. Savon makes this easier by presenting the SOAP API through a Ruby interface.

I’m working on another Cassandra demo, but didn’t have time to finish, so I decided to show you Ruby Koans. It’s a very interesting test-driven approach to learning Ruby. I hope you enjoy it.

You can get cassandra at cassandra.apache.org and the ruby gem by running: gem install cassandra I did run into a problem with the trift_client gem when installing. If you get a Load Error, run this. sudo chmod 644 /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thrift_client-0.6.3/lib/thrift_client/*.rb sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thrift_client-0.6.3/lib/thrift_client/connection Here are some of the Cassandra commands from the video: #connects to [...]

With the recent release of the Google Plus beta (ask me for an invite if you want one), I felt it appropriate to show a simple way to create a Like or +1 button for your Rails application. The app and concept is pretty simple, so I won’t worry about posting the code below. Install: [...]

Specification Clicking a star rating turns on the stars to the left of the star I clicked. Clicking a star submits the star rating. When I refresh the page, the star ratings should be persistent. We’ll be using Rails’ functions including: form_for hidden_field Rails Helpers We’ll be using jQuery functions including: click each ajax <code> [...]

Here I show off three new features in Rails 3.1 that will help with authentication: easier HTTP Basic, SecurePassword in the database, and forcing SSL.

In Rails 3.1 the controller inheritance also applies to the view layer. Here I show how to add an application template which is shared by all views, and a lookup path for overriding templates based on the subdomain.