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Doejo Dev Sessions: Ruby on Rails

As a copywriter at a web agency, and I can speak for many designers here as well, it’s not always easy to understand the methodology behind the development side.

Simply saying, “It’s Greek to me,” and leaving it up to someone else to deal with helps nobody. A team works better when they all understand each other’s role. So, I had to do a little research.

On our first blog post diving into the minds of Doejo developers, we look into Ruby on Rails. Its relevance, its popularity, what projects it’s ideal for, and what the benefits are.

So, this is what I found as simplified as possible.

Ruby on Rails is a framework for developing applications popular with developers for its easy-to-maintain code—cutting time and improving efficiency. (Essentially, “Rails” is a six-year-old web development framework built on top of “Ruby,” a programing language developed in the early 90s’). 

Ruby on Rails, or “Rails” for short, was instrumental in creating Groupon, Twitter, Hulu, Shopify, and countless other e-commerce sites, business collaboration tools and high-traffic media platforms, for example. Another benefit is the active Rails community: there are more than 2,000 contributors updating the libraries and templates—developers love that.

Dev’s also love its flexibility and adaptability, so if there are changes that need to made in code at any point, they can respond quickly. What this means for client work is that Ruby on Rails is both robust and dynamic (read: featureful) but also less complex and time-consuming than other dev languages like PHP for example (read: less costly).

 At Doejo, we recently utilized Ruby on Rails on a big project: BarsProducts.com, an international automotive chemical producer and distributor under the Bar’s Leaks and Rislone brands.

This site is jam-packed with useful features and resources: a full listing of their product line by category (complete with descriptions, testimonials, comments, related products, etc.), where to find them, a platform for support specialists, a comprehensive look at the company history, and a multi-media blog on BarsProducts in the motorsport scene. Most interestingly, as an international site serving various countries, each page comes in about 10 different languages built off the same platform.

Doejo developer Roman says he couldn’t have done this project on just any developer framework. He needed the robust resources, reusable code and reliable libraries of Ruby on Rails.

And then there’s Workify, a platform connecting odd-job contractors with users seeking help with work. This site offered contractors a place to create customizable profiles detailing their talents, to upload photos, and specify their price, etc. Users can then track down location-based help for chores with ease. 

In an effort to get this site up and running quickly, our developers worked on Workify at the same time designers were producing the site’s brand identity/ visual elements.

Doejo developer Nysa was able to use Ruby on Rails to build the back-end skeletal framework before the colorful logos and icons were even fashioned. Another benefit from Ruby on Rails is that it allows developers to change the functionality of the site in the future, easier, since the code and templates are so decoupled and don’t rely on one-another. In other words, code is easy to replace without disrupting everything else. 

Some other projects we’ve developed using the Ruby on Rails framework: 

Bike and Park: a biking community resource with updated events, blog posts, newsletters, bike shop locators, info on bike and segway rentals and tours, etc. in three different cities but built on the same platform for brand continuity.

Beyond Credentials: A personalized resume network where users can create customized resumes/profiles in a creative platform like uploading personal Q&A’s, photos, writing samples, videos, etc.

Deals Go Round: A platform where users can resell/buy unused/ past Groupons, Living Social deals, and other collective bargaining deals in about 128 cities nationwide. We built the iOS and Android app components with multi-category searches.

Vista College Search: A map-based platform thought up by a college education consultant to help make finding an appropriate college easier and more efficient. And with about 1,570 four-year colleges to search from—geographic location, size of student population, city size and academic programs, etc.—it can be a convoluted process.

John Scribe

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Andrew Warner of Mixergy talks with Philip Tadros of Doejo (That's me!)

I really love and respect what Andrew Warner of Mixergy is doing and how he's pulling it off.. I want to interview him. He does such a great job of letting you in on how he has built such a great show and following with THIS AWESOME PAGE  

Only a small handful of people know that my secret fantasy is to have a talk show.. like mixergy.. but with a house band.. obviously. 

***Please click on the image above to watch the doejo interview :) thanks guys! 

Philip Founder & CEO

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jQuery Lifestream - A simple way to track your online activity in one spot

With the addition of Google +, we are connected again to another social network. With more people becoming members of multiple networks, blogs, twitters, or what-have-you it is getting increasingly difficult to keep track of your online activity. Lifestream offers a simple jQuery plugin to be able to pull from almost any network feed into one spot. Pull your tweets, likes, check-ins, and even your Github all into one simplified feed. Check out jQuery lifestream from Christian Vuerings.

Installation and Useage:
A really simple to use plugin. You just have to add a couple scripts to your jQuery dependancy and some account information for each network you want to stream.

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://raw.github.com/christianv/jquery-lifestream/master/jquery.lifestream-compiled.js"></script>
<script>
  $("#lifestream").lifestream({
    list:[
      {
        service: "github",
        user: "doejo"
      },
      {
        service: "twitter",
        user: "doejo"
      }
    ]
  });
</script>

Lifestream even supports templates to easily customize each network stream.

{  service: 'github',
  user: 'doejo',
  template: {
    githubpost: 'Posted: <a href="${url}">${title}</a>'
  }}

Christian has created a nice demo page to test your social networks usernames.
Source on github

Adam Designer

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OpenSource Fridays

Our company is all about cool practices of how to make our workflow better and our products stunning. We have a lot of different and complicated projects and many of them involve open-source solutions. Open Source makes every developer's life easier and helps improve communication and development skills. Thats why everybody should at least try to get involved in an awesome Open Source project.

"OpenSource Fridays" is a new category in our blog and also a new practice at Doejo. You can take a few hours or a full day and dedicate it to some small project or idea you had in mind for a long time. Or, just cover up an awesome and powerful library you've been using and contributing to. Sharing is a power.

Here is a few projects and libraries I wanted to share, some of them are being used and some of them are just interesting technology innovations.

cdnjs - Javascript CDN with public contributions

Everyone loves the Google CDN right? Even Microsoft runs their own CDN. The problem is, they only host the most popular libraries. CDNJS hosts the other stuff. Their goal is to operate this CDN in a peer reviewed fashion. This means only the highest quality libraries vetted by the community get added to cdnjs.com. All CDNJS code is open source and users are welcome to fork request to help maintain an up-to-date collection of Javascript libraries.

website — source

TwUI - A framework for developing interfaces on the Mac.

TwUI is a hardware accelerated UI framework for Mac, inspired by UIKit.

It enables:

• GPU accelerated rendering backed by CoreAnimation
• Simple model/view/controller development familiar to iOS developers

It differs from UIKit in a few ways:

• Simplified table view cells
• Block-based layout and drawRect
• A consistent coordinate system (bottom left origin)
• Sub-pixel text rendering

source

pdf.js - PDF Reader in JavaScript

pdf.js is a technology demonstrator prototype to explore whether the HTML5 platform is complete enough to faithfully and efficiently render the ISO 32000-1:2008 Portable Document Format (PDF) without native code assistance.

source — overview

plax - JQuery powered parallaxing

Plax is a jQuery / Ender plugin that makes it suuuuuper easy to parallax elements in your site based on mouse position. You can see it implemented in many places throughout GitHub, including the 404 page, the 500 page, and the about page.

source — demo

girl_friday - Asynchronous tasks with Ruby

girl_friday is a Ruby library for performing asynchronous tasks. Often times you don't want to block a web response by performing some task, like sending an email, so you can just use this gem to perform it in the background. It works with any Ruby application, including Rails 3 applications.

source

linguist - Language detection library

Github uses this library to detect blob languages, highlight code, ignore binary files, suppress generated files in diffs and generate language breakdown graphs. Also was originally developed by Github.

source

split - Rack Based AB testing framework

Split is a rack based ab testing framework designed to work with Rails, Sinatra or any other rack based app, and is heavily inspired by the Abingo and Vanity rails ab testing plugins and Resque in its use of Redis. Split is designed to be hacker friendly, allowing for maximum customisation and extensibility.

source

active_admin - The administration framework for Ruby on Rails applications.

Active Admin is a framework for creating administration style interfaces. It abstracts common business application patterns to make it simple for developers to implement beautiful and elegant interfaces with very little effort. Goals are:

• Allow developers to quickly create gorgeous administration interfaces (Not Just CRUD)
• Build a DSL for developers and an interface for businesses.
• Ensure that developers can easily customize every nook and cranny of the interface.
• Build common interfaces as shareable gems so that the entire community benefits.

website — demo — source

chronic - Ruby natural language date parser.

Chronic is a natural language date/time parser written in pure Ruby. Chronic can parse a huge variety of date and time formats. Following is a small sample of strings that will be properly parsed. Parsing is case insensitive and will handle common abbreviations and misspellings.

Examples:

• Simple: thursday, november, summer, friday 13:00, mon 2:35, 4pm, 6 in the morning
• Complex: 3 years ago, 5 months before now, 7 hours ago, 7 days from now

source

markup-editor - Web-based markup editor with live preview

MarkupEditor is a simple Sinatra-based web application to render html for markups. It supports Markdown, Textile and RDoc. Main feature of this app is a split-screen where you can see how the result will look like. Also the produced output has the same styles as Github's README pages which is useful to write documentation.

source — demo

Dan Sr. Software Engineer

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HTML-, CSS- time-savers

Silence is golden, time is money..

An average human brain weighs about 3 lb, has a volume of around 1130 cubic centimeters. At the age of 20, a typical human has around 176,000 km (149,000 km for females) of myelinated axons*. All this amazingness of our brain doesn't mean that we have to know all useful information by heart (even if we use it almost every day).

Here are some sweet html/css tools, which will help you to save your time and will decrease your brain power consumption (so you will have enough energy for some more important things such as PS3, Xbox, Starcraft, Portal 2 and so on)...

CSS Box shadows:

Tables:

CSS Gradient Generator:

CSS3 Generator:

Also, be sure to check out this nice article by smashingmagazine on Useful HTML-, CSS- and JavaScript Tools and Libraries.

Masha Front-End Developer & Email Marketing

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