See One-line web server in Ruby on dzone snippets for exactly as described…a one line web server in Ruby.

When you need to toggle the odd or even class names to stripe your table rows, or any similar functionality, you can skip using a counter and checking if its divisible evenly and instead use the Ruby on Rails helper called cycle. It cycles through whatever values are in the supplied argument list each time its called, so it can also be used in other situations. Here is an example for marking your table rows with odd and even classes:

cycle('odd', 'even')

I am a very visual person. I like to see graphical representations of large sets of data and complex problems, structures, or processes. This includes application databases, so I was immediately drawn to a new Rails plugin, written by Tom ten Thij, called Schema Browser. It’s as easy as pulling it from git, and running a generate command. The screenshot below is from Tom’s mephisto blog and it illustrates the very nice schema graphic produced from the plugin. Installation instructions on Tom’s blog post, Rails schema browser plugin: proof of concept.

I’m about a month overdue on this, but I have to take a moment and outline the many changes I’ve made in the last month. First, I changed jobs. For the last two years I worked with Jeevan Nomula over at GCA in New Tampa, FL. We were a group of about 10 contractors working for Intercontinental Hotels based out of Atlanta. I served as a Team Lead and Designer for a Java ESB for the company’s reservation and availability apis. It was a great team to work with and Jeevan was a fantastic boss. But as you may know from following my blog, I have really fallen in love with Rails over the last year, and I really wanted to spend some time working in that full time, so I took a new position with Interactive Media Marketing. They are based five minutes from my house and develop Miley Cyrus’s official web site and fan club.

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If you create a lot of Rails sites like I do, for odds and ends information tracking, or to try out new ideas, setting up your Rails application each time can be a pain, as Nicolas points out in his post, Creating a new rails app shouldn’t be boring. Though I would point out that its only boring because as Rails developers we expect to get so much done so quickly. Eventually, Rails developers want to automate everything, because we know we can, and we expect to never have to do by hand anything redundant anymore.

So creating your Rails app, configuring it and installing your favorite plugins is no exception. Nicolas shows his solution to creating a script to build his Rails apps skeletons. I plan on doing this as soon as I have some free time. I love the idea of running one script and having a skeleton app checked into source control and deployed out on to my slice in minutes. No overhead. Have an idea and five minutes later I’m coding.