Ruby flew too

Rails has a lovely feature as part of ActiveRecord - Callbacks; to wit: Callbacks are hooks into the life cycle of an Active Record object that allow you to trigger logic before or after an alteration of the object state Basically, that means that you can instruct Rails to execute your own code throughout the process of creating, updating and destroying objects/records. You can, for example, use them to set some default values on create, or perhaps do some last minute validation, or even fire an event just after you've saved a record. The available callbacks are: after_initialize after_find after_touch before_validation after_validation before_save around_save after_save before_create around_create after_create before_update around_update after_update :before_destroy around_destroy after_destroy after_commit after_rollback At the same time, Ruby methods have the concept of implicit return values. That is to say, any method will return the value of the la...

If you work with Ruby on Windows in a corporate environment, sooner or later, you will hit an error when you are trying to install or update Gems. In my case, I simply had to set a few environment variables and I was good to go. RubyGems uses the HTTP_PROXY, HTTP_PROXY_USER and HTTP_PASS by default so if you open up a command prompt and set these as follows, it will use them to find the proxy and authenticate you to your proxy server: set HTTP_PROXY=http://pr.oxy.ip:port set HTTP_PROXY_USER=domain\user.name set HTTP_PASS=sUp3rS3curepAs$w0rd Extra points: A reader sent me a comment that this will only work when the proxy is using basic authentication. If you're having trouble using this method then you can give ntlmaps a shot. It's basically a little bit of python magic that sets up a proxy on your localhost through which you can route traffic and it will handle the authentication with your proxy server for you.

There are always times when you need to override the default RESTful routes in Rails. The most common case for this is mapping a /logout url to a session#destroy controller and action. However, this simple example doesn't really help when you want to achieve something a little more intricate - for example using a completely different url for a resource. Examples include a blog when you want your urls to add blog posts to be /add rather than blogs/new. Or what about a application with a Users model that has different types of users that can be added - perhaps it is a medical database and you have Doctors and Nurses - you want your urls to reflect the kind of person you are adding or editing - so doctor/new or nurse/new rather than users/new. Mapping urls like this is easy. However there is a little gotcha that you have to be aware of. Let's walk through an example and we'll see how to make it work New project We'll create a simple project for this example - a hypoth...