Jon Kinney, WebApp Pro!

JQuery adopted by Microsoft for VS 08

Javascript libraries like prototype, it's friend scriptaculous, and the newcomer jQuery have been making web developer's lives easier for a few years now. With a javascript library you can turn a verbose DOM selection like:

   1  document.getElementById('products')

into something a little shorter and sweeter:

   1  $('products')

They allow for so much more including animations, but that is the subject of another blog post entirely.

Active directory authentication in rails with the restful authentication plugin

The restful_authentication plugin by Rick Olson is THE defacto standard for authentication in rails apps. Nearly all mid-sized and small rails apps use it. It works right out of the box with MySQL, is REST compliant, and has some really nice code and test cases (specs now actually) to make sure everything is working. Rick does a good job of keeping it up to date as well and addresses security concerns of the community as they are brought up.

Rails in the enterprise

The first website that I built for Inacom using ruby on rails was deployed to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server and I hand rolled my own install for everything (it was painful). We had MySQL on the same 256 MB VM as the rails code was running from, and we setup a proxy with Apache and Mongrel. Deploying from Capistrano 1.4 made things a bit easier once everything was setup, but the initial build was not an easy task. It was also my first time doing what some would consider fairly heavy Linux command line system administration, so that didn't speed up the process either.

Welcome to my new home on the web

It’s been a long time coming but I finally got my new site up and running on the open source Rails CMS engine Radiant. I installed a ton of plugins to get the site tweaked out just how I wanted it, and it’s now a full fledged blog with comment and archiving support, tagging, etc.