Ruby & Rails

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I have been using Ruby for about 6 years and I think it's a fantastic programming language not only for daily scripting work but also as a glue language for systems integration and for Web applications. It's a full featured object oriented programming language that blends the best of Smalltalk and C-type languages like Java. It's a fully dynamic language that allows you to manipulate code like no other language can. Then there is Rails. A great Web application framework though there are also a few other new Ruby based Web frameworks that have come out in recent times.

Ruby Resources

Rails Resources & Blogs

Rails Plugins

This is our small but growing collection of Rails plugins. They have been useful for us and we think that they could be useful to you in your projects. In case you are wondering these plugins have had their home moved from my previous blog at ericmethot.com.
Modal Overlay Rails Plugin

Modal Overlay

If you ever wanted to have an arbitrary window ala lightbox with perhaps a little form on it or anything you actually want then modal overlay could be the plugin you where looking for. It adds a nice little dimming effect to the main page while fading in your modal overlay window.
Datebalks Rails Plugin

Datebalks

If you need to get date inputs from a Rails app then I think that datebalks can be of help. This neat little helper adds a calendar icon to your text field for normal mouse input. But datebalks shines when you want to input dates using the keyboard only. It will recognize strings like tod for "today" or "fri" for "next friday" and tons of other combinations.
Yacaph Rails Plugin

Yacaph

This is a little plugin and helper that allows you to insert simple Captcha dialogues in your Rails app. The cost of doing so is really low as all the images are generated offline and the "answer" is encoded in the filename itself so that the server doesn't need to keep any state information. You do need RMagick to gerenate the images in the first place though.