Rails Inside has the details on Paperclip as an alternative file upload/association plugin, I’ve tried them all and paperclip covers all your file upload bases.

*I’ve been busy with Fatherhood 101 and my new job as a Flex Dev at Captial Group (the largest company you’ve never heard of).

In the example below there are two models in Rails, ‘Group’ and ‘Category’, Group has_many Categories and Category belongs_to Group. Here’s the Flex code for the Categories DataGrid, groupName is the labelFunction that spits out a Category’s Group name (equivalent to @category.group.name in ruby):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:VBox xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" width="100%" height="100%">

    <mx:Script>
        <![CDATA[
            import mx.controls.dataGridClasses.DataGridColumn;

            private function groupName( item:Object, column:DataGridColumn ):String
            {
                return item.group.name;
            }

        ]]>
    </mx:Script>

    <mx:DataGrid id="dataGrid" width="100%" height="100%">
        <mx:columns>
            <mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Name" dataField="name" />
            <mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Group" labelFunction="groupName" />
        </mx:columns>
    </mx:DataGrid>

</mx:VBox>

Ruby Inside has a post on Ebb a small and fast web server for hosting Rails and Merb applications (and soon Django).

Ebb is a small, extremely high performance Web / HTTP server designed specifically for hosting applications built upon Web frameworks such as Rails and Merb (and, in future, apps on other non-Ruby frameworks.) The design is event based (similar to that used by Ruby daemons that use EventMachine) but Ebb itself is written in C and dispatches requests to Rack adapters. This is a real leapfrog over the popular Mongrel and Thin daemons which are primarily written in Ruby, and results in scary levels of performance.

It’s the deal of the century!? a bonus $15/month to get back to their old limit of 80GB. Still no shell access, and still $25-85/month per Rails site.

I had high hopes for Mosso and Rails but after trying them I felt I was being nickeled and dimed, the lack of SSH didn’t bother me as they’re good about installing stuff for you, the kicker was $20/month if you wanted to add SSL. I also didn’t see marked speed improvements over shared (or grid) hosts like Media Temple (who host this blog, but not on the grid on a VPS).

All my Rails sites continue to be hosted on SliceHost, actually my secret recipe is a combo of Media Temple for email, FTP, and static stuff then either DNS trickery or .htaccess rewrites to apps on SliceHost. The best of both worlds.

Anyway I call shenanigans on Mosso.

Ted introduces the Yahoo! map components for AS3.

Combine the two and you could build a Flex/Rails app that tracks someone’s position in real time.

Here are the LiteSpeed update instructions:

1. Click ‘update’ in the LiteSpeed administration console
2. There is no step 2
3. see #2

Why more people don’t use LiteSpeed is beyond me. Hosting a Rails app takes only a couple more steps with no mongrel_clusters or load balancing shenanigans.

For the Rails rate I’d guess that Rails is to Ruby as Flex is to ActionScript. I threw PHP in there as well to mix it up.

ActionScript hourly bill rates
ActionScript bill rate (low): $50.00
ActionScript bill rate (high): $75.00
ActionScript pay rate (low): $32.50
ActionScript pay rate (high): $48.75
Average hourly bill rate: $62.50

Adobe Flex hourly bill rates
Adobe Flex bill rate (low): $75.00
Adobe Flex bill rate (high): $125.00
Adobe Flex pay rate (low): $48.75
Adobe Flex pay rate (high): $81.25
Average hourly bill rate: $100.00

Flash hourly bill rates
Flash bill rate (low): $50.00
Flash bill rate (high): $75.00
Flash pay rate (low): $32.50
Flash pay rate (high): $48.75
Average hourly bill rate: $62.50

Flash Design (no full data but this was the average)
Average hourly bill rate: $50

Flash Remoting hourly bill rates
Flash Remoting bill rate (low): $60.00
Flash Remoting bill rate (high): $80.00
Flash Remoting pay rate (low): $39.00
Flash Remoting pay rate (high): $52.00
Average hourly bill rate: $70.00

Ruby hourly bill rates
Ruby bill rate (low): $75.00
Ruby bill rate (high): $95.00
Ruby pay rate (low): $48.75
Ruby pay rate (high): $61.75
Average hourly bill rate: $85.00

PHP hourly bill rates
PHP bill rate (low): $70.00
PHP bill rate (high): $90.00
PHP pay rate (low): $45.50
PHP pay rate (high): $58.50
Average hourly bill rate: $80.00

Flex had an average hourly bill rate of $70 a couple of months ago so it’s on the move (what recession?), if you’re an ActionScript Developer still doing Flash work get on the Flex train and raise those rates!

The rates seem about right to me (actually remoting seems low), what do you think?

<%= link_to_remote image_tag('cms/add_16.gif', :id => "color_add"),
      :url => { :controller => "colors", :action => "new_ajax",
      :id => @product.id },
      :with => "{ color_id: $F('color_id') }"
%>

But in Rails 2.0 the parameter wouldn’t go along for the ride, it seemed that the new authenticity_token that gets sent with Ajax calls was messing things up. Here’s the fix

<%= link_to_remote image_tag('cms/add_16.gif', :id => "color_add"),
      :url => { :controller => "colors", :action => "new_ajax",
      :id => @product.id },
      :with => "'color_id='+$F('color_id')"
%>

I freely admit JavaScript/Ajax is my weakest language so if I was doing it wrong the entire time let me know

As he mentions previously you did something like

<% form_for(@client) do |f| %>
    <%= render :partial => 'form', :locals => {:f => f} %>
    <%= submit_tag 'Create' %>
<% end %>

but now you can just do…

<% form_for(@client) do |f| %>
    <%= render :partial => f %>
    <%= submit_tag 'Create' %>
<% end %>

Cleaner and more intuitive, nice!