centre{source}
INTERACTIVE AGENCY
New Features in Rails 3
Here at centresource, we’re all about following the newest technology in web development. Rails 3 is coming soon, and it promises to be a significant upgrade. With the 4th beta version pushed recently, and a release candidate right around the corner, I thought now would be a good time to go over my two favorite new features.
All New Router
The router has been completely re-written and borrows heavily from the Merb router, but has a more developed DSL.
Regular Routes
Regular routes are more concise, but I’m not sure how I feel about the “controller#action” syntax yet…
Progressive Enhancements with CSS3
CSS3 is great! The themers and designers here at centresource all love the improvements that are now available to (most) modern browsers. The best part of CSS3 is that the changes are subtle, and a site can still look fantastic without using any of the new styles.
The idea of “progressive enhancement” is to get a site looking the way to want in all of the current browsers, then add some enhancements that most of those browsers can understand. It’s kind of like a bonus for the users of the more progressive browsers. Since they are savvy enough to know what browsers are on top, they can reap the rewards of the polish that CSS3 allows for a website.
Deploying symfony Applications with Capistrano
Capistrano is an open source tool for running scripts on multiple servers. It’s primary use is for easily deploying applications. While it was built specifically for deploying Rails apps, it’s pretty simple to customize it to deploy other types of applications. We’ve been working on creating a deployment “recipe” to work with symfony applications to make our job a lot easier.
Prerequisites
- Must have SSH access to the server you are deploying to.
- Must have Ruby and RubyGems installed on your machine (not required for deployment server)’
Installing Capistrano
sudo gem install capistrano
Setup your project to use Capistrano
cd path/to/your/app
capify .
Tools That Make My Job Easier
Bash Aliases
Working on a Mac, I spend a lot of my time in Terminal (the command-line utility). This is where I do all of my interaction with my local databases, the central Subversion repository, and issue various system commands. Some of these commands can get quite long and are time consuming to type out. That’s where aliases come to the rescue!