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Rails Middleware Walkthrough
Episode #319Jan 23, 2012117 comments

Rails Middleware Walkthrough

Here I describe each Rack middleware that is included in a Rails app which will give you a better understanding of what a request goes through behind the scenes before it hits your application. (14 minutes)
Upgrading to Rails 3.2
Episode #318Jan 23, 201252 comments

Upgrading to Rails 3.2

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. (9 minutes)
Adding an Environment (revised)
Episode #72Jan 19, 201245 comments

Adding an Environment (revised)

Rails comes with three environments: development, test, and production, but it is easy to add your own. Here I show how to add a separate staging environment and how to start up Rails under this. (4 minutes)
Rack App from Scratch
Episode #317Jan 16, 201242 comments

Rack App from Scratch

Rack comes with many helpful utilities such as request and response objects, various middleware, and MockRequest for testing. Here I cover all of these while building a Rack app from scratch. (15 minutes)
Private Pub
Episode #316Jan 16, 2012133 comments

Private Pub

Private Pub makes it easier than ever to publish and subscribe to real-time events in a Rails app. You can use publish_to with a block of JavaScript or supply a hash for use with JSON. (7 minutes)
Subdomains (revised)
Episode #123Jan 13, 201266 comments

Subdomains (revised)

In Rails 3.1 subdomains are easier than ever to use. Here I show how to route a subdomain to a specific controller action, generate links, nest resources, and more. (7 minutes)
Rollout and Degrade
Episode #315Jan 09, 201247 comments

Rollout and Degrade

Learn how to use the Rollout gem to deploy a feature to a select group of users and the Degrade gem to automatically disable it upon failure. Also included is a way of doing this from scratch. (13 minutes)
Pretty URLs with FriendlyId
Episode #314Jan 09, 201299 comments

Pretty URLs with FriendlyId

If you are tired of model ids in the URL, overriding to_param can only get you so far. The friendly_id plugin can help by making it easy to generate a URL slug and maintain a history. (7 minutes)
Delayed Job (revised)
Episode #171Jan 07, 201262 comments

Delayed Job (revised)

Long requests should be moved into a background process, and Delayed Job is one of the easiest ways to do this because it works with an Active Record database. (8 minutes)
Receiving Email with Mailman
Episode #313Jan 02, 201289 comments

Receiving Email with Mailman

The Mailman gem makes it easy to receive email in a Rails application. Here I show how to write a script to run Mailman in its own process and pull down mail from a POP3 account. (11 minutes)