In this article, we’ll look at using Pry, an IRB alternative, in a Rails application. In the LISP world, it’s common to develop the entire program interactively from the REPL (language shell) —writing functions, testing and modifying them as you go and saving them to files as needed. Because Ruby is dynamic and allows you to easily modify code at…
*This is an updated version of our previous tutorial on adding Facebook comments to your website.* Facebook’s social plugin, Comments, allows you to quickly add comments to your website. Users not only have access to basic commenting abilities, they also have the option to cross-post their comments directly into their Facebook Timeline. Comment Administrators also gain access to a deeper…
For developers that deploy Rails with Capistrano, here are a few tasks to quickly open an interactive rails console or rails dbconsole on a remote server. If you’re like me, you’ll occasionally want to open a console to run a quick query, set an admin flag on a user or just verify that a migration worked correctly. This usually means…
In this two-part series, I’ll cover testing a Rails application—from how to get set up with the latest toolchain to writing those first tests. While it can be tricky to get everything playing nicely together, a solid test suite can be lifesaver down the road. In Part 1, I’ll look at how to set up and configure RSpec 3 (with…
Web Ascender is approached by local and international businesses to help them improve business processes and implement solutions to generate revenue. Our team has created a lot of mobile friendly web applications and actual native mobile applications over the years. When businesses approach us with a need, they don’t necessarily know how to approach or solve their problem. They sometimes…
Lately I’ve been writing a lot of code that deals with time—from time zones and scheduling tasks to scheduling tasks from different time zones. Time can be really tricky. It’s notoriously hard to debug and its gotchas are easy to overlook. Here are a few tips for writing and testing time-dependent code that I wish I could send back in…
HTML5 is quickly becoming the go-to markup language for the web. One of the biggest improvements over it’s predecessor is in the way it manages media, specifically video. This <video> tag provides a simple way to quickly embed video on your site. <video width=”320″ height=”240″ controls> <source src=”movie.mp4″ type=”video/mp4″> <source src=”movie.ogg” type=”video/ogg”> Your browser does not support the video tag….
At Web Ascender we strive to build websites that everyone can enjoy. I have outlined some of the key components to building a highly accessible website. By following these guidelines even website visitors with disabilities will be able to enjoy your content, products and services. When I talk about accessibility, I am talking about creating a website or application that…
Accepting payments online through your website or mobile app is becoming more and more common. In fact, customers expect your business to provide an online payment option to purchase your products or services. Additionally, after submitting an online payment they expect immediate confirmation that it was successful, along with some indication their product is on its way or their service…
For one of our projects at Web Ascender we’ve had the interesting challenge of communicating with low-level hardware from our high-level Ruby on Rails application. The application needed to read binary data from UDP packets, convert the data to Ruby numbers, dates and strings, and then send a response. While one might normally reach for a more low-level language like…