Sooner or later, for most large websites you have to bite the bullet and implement some form of asynchronous processing to deal with long-running tasks For example, with...

If there were such a thing as the Ten Commandments of programming, code reuse would surely be included Now you're probably thinking I've lost my mind, because any good...

Update - It turns out that Rails does cache column data dictionary queries (which is what you would expect), but not for :has_and_belongs_to_many associations (HABTMA) I know...

ActiveRecord is a funny thing On the outside it looks great - it neatly maps relational data to Ruby objects and provides an easy to use API via its domain specific language But...

Last week I showed how to profile a Rails application using ruby-prof The post was driven by our desire to improve MapBuzz's map rendering speed Our nightly log analysis showed...

While analyzing Rails performance, I stumbled upon the fact that parsing timestamps in ActiveRecord is very slow (I'll post more about that in an upcoming blog) A bit of...

Yesterday I mentioned that ruby-prof now supports profiling rails applications Lets see how that works But a word of caution before beginning Like all web applications, Rails...

One reason developers like ActiveRecord is that it automatically generates the SQL needed for querying a relational database Obviously, there are various knobs for controlling...

[Tom Fakes](http://blogcraz8com/) was kind enough to point out that the Rails Rest controller and content negotiation plugins I posted a couple of weeks ago can no longer be...

Rails support for HTML and XHTML is less than exemplary For some reason, the 111 release considers the application/xhtml+xml mime type to be a synonym for text/html Ummwhy And...