Googling for information on how to use PDF::Writer shows that there are many european developers frustrated with the lack of UTF-8 support in PDF::Writer. As Ruby on Rails works great with UTF-8 these days this can be a bit of an issue.
Part of the problem lies in the fact that the PDF specification (at [...]

You may wonder if the title is supposed to be ironic. Wasn’t “enterprise” and “rails” forbidden to be mentioned in the same sentence?

Let’s forget about that for a while. Ola Bini and the JRuby team is quickly moving forward with something I would consider a breakthrough in Rails deployment options. In fact, it could well mean a breakthrough in Rails adoption in many organizations.

Maybe a better title for this post would be “Why Accessibility in Rails is Currently a Non-issue”. Last night was the core team panel discussion at RailsConf and there was a question about what the core team was doing to increase accessibility in Rails.
Someone in the core team answered rather vaguely (or maybe I misunderstood [...]

Here is a cool thing which I didn’t hear of until today. Amazon provides a service where you can upload a machine image (think VMWare), deploy it to as many instances you need and pay Amazon 10 cents for every hour you use it and 20 cents for each Gb data transfer. This will allow [...]

Stefan Kaes is at it again with some interesting code to optimize Rails template helper methods. I have always wondered about some of the helper methods e.g. “< %= end_form_tag %>“. Why would you need that when it is easier to write “”?
Anyway, Stefan has shown that there is a cost to using many of [...]

There have been a number of issues with Rails popping up yesterday and today. First there was the announcement that Rails 1.1.4 had a security issue. Discussions emerged on why the core team did not disclose the details of the vulnerability. Evan Weaver had a quick look at the diff between 1.1.4 and 1.1.5 and [...]

I received an interesting email from the organizers of the european Rails conference yesterday. My talk proposal “Building Accessible Web Sites on Rails” was accepted and I will be giving a talk with the following description:
As an agile Rails developer you are expected to know a bit of everything in the MVC paradigm. The V [...]