Rails

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 the answer) how they had used Rails in a project that required high accessibility. My view is that for the Rails framework accessibility is currently a non-issue....

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 you to instantly scale an application if your demand temporarily increases. With the risk of sounding like an Amazon marketing droid here are some highlights of what you get for those 10 cents:...

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 the helper methods and that optimizing them may give you a performance increase. Methods involving routes are the worst performers....

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 described the problem: It looks like, for example, that if your Rails installation is in /www/rails/, passing a string such as /www/rails/....

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 (View) is typically considered the least attractive area as it is “only HTML” and is best taken care of “by someone else”....

A couple of days ago I released RAAKT - The Ruby Accessibility Analysis Kit gem (I know, it really needs a better name). RAAKT is a gem that can be used independently of Rails and my plan was to make a Rails plugin that would add a custom assert method that did the check. It turns out that it only takes five lines of code so there is no need for a plugin....

At RailsConf in Chicago I realized that it would be a good idea to port PAAKT to Ruby and make sure it can be used for automatic accessibility tests in the Rails testing framework. Work has begun and I hope to release it at the end of this summer if all goes well. The project is registered at Rubyforge. Now, all I need is a good name. Maybe RAAKT? Suggestions are welcome....

In an article over at Dancingmango Marc McNeill writes about how new web development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails will have an impact on usability testing practices (“What’s the point of usability testing”). The only real reason to test a mockup instead of a real application is of course that it used to be more expensive and time consuming to create an application. With Rails there is no such barrier anymore and usability tests can (and should) be using the real application instead....

At the opening keynote here at RailsConf in Chicago Dave Thomas (of Pragmatic Programmer fame) presented three problems for the Rails community to solve. His idea was that these would help Rails become more popular in organizations. I would like to add two more: a SOAP library and an improved MSSQL-server driver. Judging from the amount of Microsoft-bashing going on here I would venture to guess that these aren’t on the top of the list for most Rails developers....

Ruby on Rails includes some options for handling sessions (see overview by Stefan Kaes (PDF)). Unfortunately the default ActiveRecord session handler is relatively slow which may have a big impact on your application (sessions tend to accumulate quickly). Fortunately for all of us, Stefan has created an alternative MySQL session handler whith hard coded SQL statements. His version is much quicker. If your application uses the standard session handler there is really no reason not to implement Stefan’s solution....