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How To REST With Rails and ActiveResource: Part Three

It’s easy to use OpenURI and Net::HTTP. Well, "easy" is a relative term. Building a client library to access our task manager service still requires a fair amount of boilerplate code — more than we care to write, test, and maintain. We have shown you some principles and conventions for designing RESTful web services, and in this final part of our three-part series, we'll take it a step further and show you how we can use them to develop a client library for the task manager using ActiveResource.

If you missed parts one and two of the series you can find them here:

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Sending Emails with Ruby

Let’s say you have a working Ruby app and need to add an email delivery functionality to it. This could be related to user authentication, or any other kind of transactional email, it makes no difference. This tutorial is tailored is aimed at helping you implement sending emails with Ruby.

Options For Sending an Email in Ruby

Mostly, you can pick one of the three options. 

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Know Your Gems

In a Rails "shop" software company, it is most likely that developers and their leads do not know all the libraries (called gems in the Ruby world) their applications use. You should not be surprised when you pick a random gem from their Gemfile, ask a software engineer who has worked for 3 years in that company what that gem is used for, and you get the answer, "I don't know."

I thought, I myself should not be in that precarious situation. I should know all the gems that my projects used.

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Fantastic Symbols and Where to Find Them (Part 2)

In the first blog post, we learned about the fantastic symbols (debug symbols), how the symbolization process works, and lastly, how to find the symbolic names of addresses in a compiled binary.

The actual location of the symbolic information depends on the programming language implementation the program is written in. We can categorize the programming language implementations into three groups: compiled languages (with or without a runtime), interpreted languages, and JIT-compiled languages.

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Ruby: Map With Index

Just like many other programming languages, the Map Method is also in Ruby. You use a Ruby Map or Map, in general, to transform the data and perform functions on each element of the object. You can use it with the hashes, ranges, and arrays. All these work as an enumerable object with a map. Let's dive into this guide and learn more about the Ruby Map Method.

Map With Index

There is no direct "map_with_index" method in Ruby. Instead, you could do one of these :

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Top 6 Web Development Languages To Use

Today, web development is seemingly a promising job. If you are a newcomer in this field, the nuisance here is where to start or which web development languages you should learn.

Inevitably, this depends much on what type of project you get involved in, whether you feel more pleasant to work with back-end or front-end technologies and whether you are good enough at mathematics and logic to learn programming skills.

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Building a Vagrant Box: Setting Up Your Environment

If setting up a virtual development environment is your goal, here is a guide on how to utilize the Vagrant box and virtual machine for this purpose. Let’s discuss the process in detail with this blog.

Here, we will build a Vagrant on top of a virtualization engine as VirtualBox. 

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Most Common Types of Technical Debt in Rails

Introduction

The majority of the Rails custom software development work we do here at NextLink Labs deals with rehabilitating older projects that are overwhelmed with technical debt from years of development without refactoring.

The software problems in these websites are never introduced maliciously. Instead, these problems tend to build up gradually over months and years after many rushed deadlines, strict client demands that don't allow for refactoring, and inexperienced Rails developers trying their best but getting overwhelmed by "Rails magic."

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Pushing Rails Validations Down to The Database?

Ever open up a Rails console to debug a problem and come away wondering how the data got so funky? Despite our best efforts, the database will accept plenty of garbage data if you let it. There are tons of methods to bypass the Rails callbacks and validations while still updating your database. If you are like me you have probably used these methods in the Rails console to fix some of that funky data you found after some other code created it in the first place.

Active Record Validations are a good place to start to prevent the funk. They will check the attributes for presence, absence, numericality, length, inclusion, format, exclusion, acceptance, and more. You can validate your model’s data easily and prevent any number of common errors this way. They aren’t the end of the problem but for most funky data you see your mind should go to checking the validations and probably writing another one. 

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Caching Ruby Gems on Github Actions Using ruby/setup-ruby or actions/cache

How to start CI build faster by loading Ruby gems from cache on Github Actions? You can start running your tests for a Ruby on Rails project quicker if you manage to set up all dependencies in a short amount of time. Caching can be helpful with that. Ruby gems needed for your project can be cached by Github Actions and thanks to that they can be loaded much faster when you run a new CI build.

You will learn how to configure Github Actions using:

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Interview With Jeremy Evans, Lead Developer of Sequel and Roda

Introduction

Jeremy Evans is the lead developer of the Sequel database library, the Roda web toolkit, the Rodauth authentication framework, and many other Ruby libraries. He is the maintainer of Ruby ports for the OpenBSD operating system, and has contributed to CRuby and JRuby, as well as many popular Ruby libraries. We are happy to present a brand-new interview with Jeremy to our readers. Hope you enjoy it!

The Interview

Evrone: You became a Ruby committer and received the Ruby prize 2020 with your work on keyword arguments separation. Could you tell us how did it happen, how did you feel about that?

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A Comprehensive Guide To Deploy Ruby Bot Live On Heroku

Software deployment is an important part of implementing your software application after its initial phase of development. On the other hand, a bot is a continuous running script that performs a given task or responds to any triggered action on the occurrence of a specified event. Developers use them to carry out redundant activities. Let us find out more about these computing aspects.

What Exactly is Software Deployment?

Software Deployment encompasses all the processes, steps, and activities that make software ready to deliver from developers to users. It is the process of rolling out customized software that conforms to its client's demands in an interconnected world. Software deployment enables updates, applications, modules, and patches that optimizes the performance of the software. One of the key advantages of deployment is that testing ensures a bug-free, error-free process, and after the maintenance, the software is produced with additional updates and functions. 

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Ruby Creator Yukihiro Matsumoto: ‘Do Not Fight Developer Instincts’

Introduction

Our friend Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the Ruby programming language, joined us for an interview right after the release of Ruby 3.0! Grigory Petrov, Developer Relations at Evrone, spoke with Mr. Matsumoto about the new features in the latest major Ruby release. Mr. Matsumoto also shared details about his approach to improving Ruby and gave us insight into the future of the language.

The Interview

Grigory: My name is Grigory Petrov, and I am here to interview Yukihiro Matsumoto, author of the Ruby programming language, just a few months after the major Ruby 3.0 release with all of its new shiny features.

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Parallel RSpec Tests on CircleCI With JUnit XML Reports

You will learn how to run RSpec tests for your Ruby on Rails project on CircleCI with parallel jobs to shorten the running time of your CI build. Moreover, you will learn how to configure JUnit formatter to generate an XML report for your tests to show failing RSpec test examples nicely in CircleCI web UI. Finally, you will see how to automatically detect slow spec files and divide their test examples between parallel jobs to eliminate the bottleneck job that’s taking too much time to run tests.

Ruby Gems to Configure Your RoR Project

Here are the key elements you need:

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Best Ruby Practices Beginners Should Know

Python’s dominance is never really questioned when it comes to the best for programming novices because it checks almost every box that defines a simple language. It’s remarkably easy to pick up and can rise to any challenge. But what about Ruby?

Although it does not get enough credit for being one, Ruby is an awesome language for beginners. It provides powerful constructs (like blocks) and versatile concepts (like message passing à la Smalltalk) but retains Python’s fluid and elegant English-like syntax. In fact, in many cases, one might argue that the unique design choices that went into the Ruby syntax beat even Python in terms of readability and expressiveness. If you’re getting into programming, it’s very easy to recommend that you start with Ruby.

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How to Run GitLab CI Pipeline With Parallel RSpec Tests in Ruby

GitLab CI allows you to run tests much faster thanks to its CI parallelization feature. You can run parallel jobs across multiple GitLab Runners. In order to do it, you will learn how to split tests in a dynamic way across parallel tasks to ensure there is no bottleneck in GitLab Pipeline. Thanks to that CI build can be run as fast as possible so your Ruby and JS tests can be finely fast.

GitLab CI Parallelization

The common problem when you want to run tests in parallel to complete your one-hour test suite in a few minutes instead of waiting hours is to find a way to split tests on parallel jobs. Some of your Ruby or JavaScript tests can take milliseconds and some even a few minutes per test file (for instance, when using Capybara in RSpec features testing). The problem with slow tests also occurs in E2E (end to end testing) when using Cypress test runner as browser testing can take quite a long time to execute.

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Fast CI Build Time With Parallel Jobs on Semaphore CI for RSpec, Cypress, and Jest Tests

Semaphore CI 2.0 allows for configuring your CI build task with parallel jobs. This way, you can run simultaneously a few different commands that do not depend on each other. But we could also use parallel jobs to split your test suite across a few jobs and save time this way. I will show you how to speed up your CI build for your Ruby or JavaScript project (Rails/Node project).

With Semaphore CI 2.0, you don’t pay for a reserved amount of containers that can be run in parallel as in some other CI providers. Instead, they count the amount of work time spent on running containers. This creates an incentive to run more parallel jobs to execute our tests fast and still keep bill at a similar level as if we would just run all tests in single container waisting our own time.