Brian began developing applications for the Internet in 1995, and has continued to architect, design and develop Internet software for the last 11 years, including projects for IHG, IBM, Brighthouse, and Cox Target Media (Valpak).

Here he shares his thoughts and opinions on Internet Software Architecture and Development, chronicles his current projects and areas of research, and give tips and tricks he discovers along the way.

Ruby On Rails



One-line web server in Ruby

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

Toggling Odd and Even classes in Rails

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')
Database Schema Browser Rails Plugin

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.

Lovdbyless Schema

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