Top 12 Ruby on Rails Tutorials
Here is a nice list of Ruby on Rails tutorials that I found on another blog. It's a good place to start learning about Rails and see what others have done with this wonderful little (not so little anymore) framework.
Archive for Ruby on Rails
Rails 1.0, Rails Plugins and Rails Engines
If you aren't on the Ruby on Rails mailing list, you have no idea at the level of activity that is currently going on in the Rails community. There are new features, plugins and versions popping up just about every week. On average, I see around 50 new messages a day and about 5 new "annoucements" a week (give or take.)
The last few annoucements (both from DHH himself and from the community) have been very exciting. The two most notable are the annoucement of the final release of Rails 1.0 (which will happen very soon!) and the Rails Engines feature. With all the great plugins being developed, the Rails Engines (which is a plugin itself), allows you to keep your plugin code (Models, Views, Controllers, configurations, etc.) separate from your actual applicaiton code. This way, you can simply upgrade to the latest version of that plugin w/o any fears of overwriting your custom application code.
One of the first Rails Engines powered plugins is the Login Engine, which is simply the original Salted Login Generator, minus the i18n stuff, packaged into a plugin and installed via the Engine. This is a lot to take in at once, so the best way to understand it all is to watch a nifty video. All will be explained my child. Enjoy. 
Ruby on Rails Plugin Architecture
Very recently I learned about a new plugin architecture that Rails supports which allows developers to easily develope plugins for the Rails framework. In the past, when developers wanted to introduce new functionality into Rails, they had to either create a "patch" and commit it using SVN or create a gem that you needed to download and install (much like how you install Rails itself.) The difference now is that there is a plugins folder within the vendor folder to hold all plugins and these plugins allow you to extend Rails beyond its core functionality.
I wasn't able to find any concrete documentation about this new feature (it isn't part of the stable release of Rails, but part of "Edge Rails" which can be obtained from the repository), but I did find this post by Jamis Buck (37signals team) which describes the process of Plugging into Rails.
Some publicly avaible Rails plugins announced in the Ruby on Rails mailing list:
- acts_as_enumerated, has_enumerated and ActiveRecord::VirtualEnumerations
- security_extensions and asset_timestamping
- inherits_from
Unfortunately, these plugins don't have official websites (yet), so the best way to learn about them and their usage is to try and search the Ruby on Rails mailing list archives.
UPDATE: I found the wiki page with a bunch of plugins that people have written so far. http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/Plugins
Installing Ruby and Ruby on Rails on Shared Hosting
Would you like to play around with Ruby and RoR but your hosting provider doesn't have either one installed? No problem! If your host allows you to run CGI scripts, you're all ready to install them both. Use ssh (PuTTy) to login to your account and type this in your home directory:
curl http://home.leetsoft.com/dropbox/private-ruby/install | sh
Yes, it's that simple. If you would like more details about the process, visit the original article.
Ruby on Rails is cool, but can it Scale?
I've been following the development of Ruby on Rails ever since the earlier versions. Like many others, I was very impressed with the videos, but was a little skeptical about the syntax, the popularity (or lack of) the Ruby language and basically how simple it was to create a CRUD application. If creating a web application is as easy as Rails makes it seem, then it CAN'T be used for large scale sites or enterprise applications; or can it?
Well, Rails just released version 0.13 (and 0.13.1 a couple of days later - yeah, the developers are very good at fixing bugs, listening to the community and releasing new versions.) They are fast approaching the final release of 1.0, which the current book is based on, and the ease of use and number of features that are packed into this framework are simply amazing.
So with all these amazing features, can Rails scale and be used for large sites and enterprise applications? David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails) and many others seem to think so, and I tend to agree with them. And for you Java fanatics who think that Ruby on Rails is just a fad and not worth the time and effort, try asking Matt Raible about his thoughts on the matter. And if that doesn't convince you, try reading this and this.