Friday Rails Links

It’s been a week full of Rails joy, and a little pain as well, but that’s not to looked for in Rails itself, but just some code.

Inbox Zero

A while ago I picked up Merlin Mann’s (of 43 Folders fame) Inbox Zero philosophy and since, have been recommending it to friends. It’s a great way to deal with your daily load of email, still one of the biggest distractions in the digital life.

Webistrano Released

During the last meeting of the Ruby User Group Berlin, Jonathan Weiss presented Webistrano, a web application for easy deployment based on Capistrano. It was pretty impressive, and now he’s released it to the public. On the site you’ll find some screencasts explaining the features and the user interface, and the download of course.

Storing Images with Oracle and Hibernate

All I wanted was to store images in the database through Hibernate. It all look so easy. Add a byte array property, add it as a binary type to the Hibernate mapping and off you go. So far so good. I’m developing with MySQL where everything worked the way it’s supposed to. Image data goes into the database and comes out when required, no problem.

Random Rails Links

• Chad Fowler and Marcel Molina are holding a full-day Rails testing tutorial on the day before the sessions of RailsConf Europe. That would be September 17th. You’re expected to fork over $75 for the entry, but fear not, the money is for a good cause and the donation is tax-deductible.
• A while ago Ola Bini called for an implementation of Hibernate for JRuby. Johan Andries is giving it a try: ActiveHibernate on Google Code (via InfoQ)
• A year after the initial listing on their website, The Pragmatic Programmers announced “Deploying Rails Applications”. Written by Ezra Zygmuntowicz (of BackgrounDRb fame) and Bruce Tate it aims to offer all kinds of wisdom about running Rails applications in the wild. It’s still in beta, but I know I’m gonna grab a copy.
• Adding time zones to a Rails application is something I was doing this week. Of great help were the introduction by Jamis Buck and an article by Courtenay of caboose fame