#195 My Favorite Web Apps in 2009

Thanks Ryan!
I've bookmarked some of your resources.
I also would add apidock.com where you can browse information on Ruby, Rails and Rspec as well.
I would also recommend rubyinside.com for interesting articles.

Nice episode Ryan... definitely will be checking a few of those out.

I am a massive fan of
apidock.com,
railsforum.com and good old
api.rubyonrails.org
They have all been very good to me and much help when stuck on what options i have with certain methods.

A nice site i like to watch every now and then is also railsenvy.com some of the topics they cover a quite interesting and very handy.

Cheers
Coops
AUS

I would also add www.opensourcerails.com, where developers upload thier new app. guides.rubyonrails.org a very good site for helping you understand everything you need to know about RoR.

The gemspecs files might be more useful than just some data for creating gems. Check for examples these http://github.com/botanicus/nake/blob/master/nake.gemspec & http://github.com/botanicus/nake/blob/master/nake.pre.gemspec

As you can see these files are executable and I'm using them for releasing gem & the prerelease gem. I just do ./nake.gemspec resp. ./nake.pre.gemspec and that's it, I get the gem. Unfortunatelly bundler can't handle more gemspecs in one directory, so if someone use git: path/to/your/repo, it won't work, I already created a ticket for it ...

In my opinion you should write gemspecs rather than have some fucking rake tasks for it, because you can just build it and it works, but the rake tasks, you usually depend on some other gems etc. And mainly, when your tasks generate the list of files rather than put Dir.glob directly into the gemspec, then when you add/remove a new file, the gemspecs is old and if you have the gemspec in your Git repo, then if someone build it, he get broken gem which is really very, very bad practice. So please don't do it folks.

Hi Ryan, thanks for this cast. I think you missed a site I saw you mentioning in other casts which is:

railstips.org

I really enjoy using Heroku for hosting of my rails apps. There are many solutions for rails hosting on the web, but I find Heroku's zero-configuration, Git-centric workflow to be the missing link in my applications' life cycles.

There are some limitations to Heroku such as a read only file system and they only support PostgreSQL, but thanks to the nature of cloud computing, many of these minor roadblocks can be overcome.

Heroku is at http://www.heroku.com

They have free hosting for smaller applications and a dynamically scaling architecture for larger apps, so the theory is that you pay for only what resources you need.

huge fan of railscasts.com, ever herd of it? :)

apidock.com, newrelic.com

Not rails related, but if you need to find a domain, bustaname.com is super useful.

I am biased, but I love http://www.TeachMeToCode.com (screencasts on demand). Learnivore.com is also an excellent site and will soon have a full iPhone interface as well. And of course, my all-time favorite website is http://RailsCasts.com!

As other have mentioned, apidock.com.

I love http://railsapi.com. I run it locally at http://rdoc.local which makes looking up Ruby or Rails stuff super fast and convenient when I don't have internet.

Not quite rails specific but I've been loving http://rubular.com for playing with ruby regexes, has really helped with some tricky validations on a recent rails app.

Railscasts.com :)

ah i see

I feel you have missed my all time favourite Heroku www.heroku.com

I also like rubypulse.com for it's screencasts on Ruby related topics.

Loving GitHub as well, seems like everything I use is housed there.

By far this is my favourite site though (and I'm assuming it's build on rails). Happy New Year, look forward to the screencasts of 2010.

@Emerson

http://github.com/ryanb/railscasts

Open-sourced and good-looking ;)

I prefer railsbrain.com for the API, but I do use railsapi.com for ruby stuff...

As well as the ones you mentioned Ryan, I also found the following really great.

http://apidock.com <- You can save the search prefs to your Firefox search bar, which makes finding things very easy

http://lighthouseapp.com <- sometimes Githubs issue tracker doesn't cut it :-( A very nice alternative.

http://www.confreaks.com/ <- heaps of great vidoes, including recent ruby conf 2009.

http://rubypulse.com <- Discover new libs

http://ruby5.envylabs.com/ <- keep up to date with ruby news

http://doctype.tv/ <- html/css/js tips and tricks

Ryan, in a few days, would you compile comments, because there is also "must seen" websites in all the comments ?

With your site selection, this will be one of the best Ruby development sites bookmark page (-;

Netbeans for for code development is awesome.
http://netbeans.org/

RailsPlayground for hosting
http://railsplayground.com/
Totally brilliantly helpfull. There is no way I would have got my app running the way I wanted without their help.

As a RailsPlayground customer I got a free sourcerepo account with redmine for secure source code repository and project managemant.
http://sourcerepo.com/
Having used this set up in anger I would happily pay for the service.

Last but not least http://railsforum.com/index.php as a superb place to ask for help

@jamesw

Seems like Netbeans lack support for HAML though. I've searched around for plugins to get it working, but no success.

Seems like right now the only editor working (at least for me) is RadRails on Windows.

Gosh sometimes I just hate that I aint on textmate/OSX.

I'd add http://guides.rubyonrails.org and http://heroku.com :)

@Fredrik:

There is a netbeans haml plugin: http://mediacast.sun.com/users/tnorbye/media/org-netbeans-modules-haml.nbm/details

I'd like to add http://www.MyTaskHelper.com
to this great list. Great free online database application. Very useful if you need simple form but don't want to develop it in Rails, but instead you can make in a few clicks.

Lovely.

Can't wait to see some Rails 3 specific stuff :)

@nico:

Of what I saw when using that plugin it never supported auto-indentation. Kinda pain in the ass to always press tab 5 times just to get to the right line.

For those looking for a full IDE I believe you can't, by a long way, do better than RubyMine 2.0. Features are added super fast. Within a few months of becoming aware of HAML and Cucumber the team had integrated and shipped support.

Check it out at http://www.jetbrains.com - it is commercial but a license is not that far off the price of TextMate.

Thanks a lot. It was a great collection

cool

Ruby Tube: http://rubytu.be/ is also a great place for finding screen casts.