http://www.railsrocket.com/articles A Ruby on Rails community website with tutorials Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:29:45 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've been working quietly for the last eight months on PlainRL, a Ruby roguelike. It's a full, working roguelike; it has the following features: Fully Random: Almost everything in the game is entirely randomly-generated from a few lines of plain-text (seed data). 30 Floors: Thirty floors of monster-slaying mayhem, complete with several ... http://www.railsrocket.com/articles/plainrl-10-released We're very pleased to announce our very on Ruby on Rails eBook: Internationalizing Your Rails Application in 34 Languages! The goal of this eBook is to help you get your Ruby on Rails application internationalized--and to kick it off with not one or two, but 34 different languages--all without the ... http://www.railsrocket.com/articles/internationalizing-your-rails-application-in-34-languages If you've tried using Bort, the bootstrapped Rails skeleton application on steroids, you may have noticed one instruction in the readme file that says "Edit the REST_AUTH_SITE_KEY in each of the environment files." Huh? REST_AUTH_SITE_KEY? Some googling revealed fairly little information. After some digging, though, the pieces fell into place; so ... http://www.railsrocket.com/articles/rake-secret If you're not that familiar with Rails, you might be creating your application domain entities (models, controllers, business objects, whatever you want to call them) like this: ruby script/generate model Post ruby script/generate controller Post After which, you go in and edit the views for post to create the form with the title, ... http://www.railsrocket.com/articles/one-shot-scaffolding-creation If you're new to Ruby, especially if you're coming from a Rails background, you probably use attr_accessor (if not outright adding columns to the table in Rails) to add member variables to a class. Like so: class Player attr_accessor :x, :y end What does this mean? It means you can do things like: p = ... http://www.railsrocket.com/articles/private-member-variables-in-ruby Rails 2.2 was released late November, about two weeks ago. Of all the new features, one of the most prominent is the out-of-the-box implementation of internationalization (i18n, because it has 18 letters between I and N) in the new Rails 2.2 generated application (using the rails command). Before we dive ... http://www.railsrocket.com/articles/internationalization-i18n-in-rails-22 Rails 2.1 introduced UTC-timestamped migrations. What does this mean? Prior to Rails 2.1, when you added a migration, the number would be a simple three-digit number, like so. ruby script/generate migration create_some_table => create db/migrate/008_create_some_table Imagine, now, you have a multi-developer environment. Jack's next task is to create a migration that populates some hello-world data; ... http://www.railsrocket.com/articles/rails-21-utc-timestamped-migrations It so happens in Ruby that looping forwards is trivial; if you want to print out numbers from one to five, you can do so like this: (1..5).each do |i| puts i end This will print: 1 2 3 4 5 But how about going backwards? Can you do this? (5..1).each do |i| puts i end No! This won't print anything out! Boo! Edit: The ... http://www.railsrocket.com/articles/looping-backwards-in-ruby Today we're going to discuss one of those highly-controversial hot topics in Ruby (if there can be such a thing as a "hot topic" in programming languages)--the eval function. What does eval do? Quite simply, you pass in some Ruby code in a string, and it'll evaluate it. Observe: eval "puts 2+2" ... http://www.railsrocket.com/articles/the-controversial-eval-function This is an easy one. How do you comment out a chunk of code? Other programming languages (C++, Java, etc.) have a slash-star style of block comments, like so: /* This is a block comment. You can put whatever you want here. Even ASCII art! For REAL! o[+++]XXXXXXXXXXXX> */ // ... But what about Ruby? Ruby ... http://www.railsrocket.com/articles/block-comments-in-ruby