Simon Willison’s Weblog

Rails and Scaling with Multiple Databases. Ryan Tomayko explains how his team spreads a high traffic Rails application across five separate PostgreSQL databases by giving each client their own schema—similar to how WordPress MU scales.

# 14th April 2007, 2:32 am / postgresql, rails, ryan-tomayko, scaling, wordpress

XSS. Sanitising HTML is an extremely hard problem. The sanitize helper that ships with Rails is completely broken; Jacques Distler provides a better alternative.

# 12th March 2007, 12:34 am / jacques-distler, rails, security, xss

Ficlets (via) AOL’s first application to launch on Rails, and their first application to accept OpenIDs as well as AOL screen names.

# 10th March 2007, 5:41 pm / aol, ficlets, openid, openidconsumer, rails

The No-Shit Guide To Supporting OpenID In Your Applications. Fantastically useful: Dan Webb digs through the API documentation so you don’t have to. The example code is for Rails but the PHP and Python libraries work in much the same way.

# 27th February 2007, 1:56 am / dan-webb, openid, rails

OpenID makes web identities real and appealing. DHH has caught the OpenID bug. Expect to see a flurry of activity around OpenID in the Rails community over the next few weeks.

# 26th February 2007, 10:31 am / dhh, openid, rails

Rails 1.2.1 Impression. I hadn’t seen assert_select before, which lets you unit test generated HTML using CSS selectors; a really neat idea.

# 15th February 2007, 9:14 am / assertselect, css, rails, testing

A brief update with some numbers for hardware load-balanced mongrels. 4000 requests/second on 48 mongrels behind a hardware load balancer.

# 5th February 2007, 12:38 am / mongrel, rails, scaling

Rails vs Django Paper and Slides. Even if you’ve already read the paper you should check out the slides. Really good flow, clear and clever use of diagrams.

# 24th December 2006, 12:43 pm / django, presenting, rails, slides

Django on Dreamhost: incomplete headers. Fix this problem on Dreamhost by renaming django.fcgi to dispatch.fcgi (they special-case for Rails users; Django users can tag along).

# 17th December 2006, 9:36 am / django, dreamhost, fastcgi, rails

Riding Rails: Rails 1.2: Release Candidate 1. Highlights include REST, resources and unicode support.

# 23rd November 2006, 8:21 am / rails

err.the_blog: My Rails Toolbox. Good overview of what’s hot in Rails land this season.

# 17th October 2006, 2:22 pm / rails

DateBocks—Intuitive Date Input Selection. A better version of my better date input script, packaged as a Rails Engine.

# 18th August 2006, 10:03 am / rails

Rails 1.1.6, backports, and full disclosure. Fixes a left over problem from 1.1.5.

# 10th August 2006, 7:20 pm / rails

Release: Unobtrusive Javascript For Rails 0.2. RJS kind of sucks. This looks like it doesn’t.

# 10th August 2006, 4:30 pm / rails

On the total nondisclosure of the 8/9/06 [Rails] security vulnerability. The best argument I’ve seen in favour of full disclosure.

# 10th August 2006, 2:53 pm / rails, security

Rails 1.1.5: Mandatory security patch. Upgrade now, and spread the word.

# 9th August 2006, 8:55 pm / rails, security

Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Impressive!

# 7th August 2006, 10:52 pm / rails

Infovore: ChinaDialogue.net. An entirely bilingual site, powered by Ruby on Rails.

# 1st August 2006, 9:22 pm / rails

BackgrounDRb (via) Easy back-end daemons for your Rails apps. Django needs this.

# 10th July 2006, 4:46 pm / rails

A Week in Chicago with Rails, Perl, and Django. I love Nat’s observations about Java programmers who discover dynamic languages.

# 29th June 2006, 6:21 pm / rails

Reuse-in-the-large is an unsolved problem: Why I left OpenACS for Rails. Fascinating insight in to the reason frameworks that do less do more.

# 26th June 2006, 2:55 pm / rails

punupgeek.com on Active Resource. Looks like 37 signals might be looking in to scaling across multiple servers using web services.

# 26th June 2006, 11:12 am / 37signals, activeresource, rails, scaling

Rails is the devil on your (client-side) shoulder. This is exactly why I’m not a fan of RJS.

# 6th April 2006, 8:41 pm / rails

Running Your Rails App Headless. Pretty sweet new feature of Rails 1.1.

# 6th April 2006, 8:40 pm / rails

Productivity Arbitrage. Rails goes enterprise. Django gets a mention as well.

# 21st December 2005, 7:22 pm / productivity, rails

Rails Weenie—find answers to your Ruby on Rails questions. Kind of like a specialized Yahoo! Answers for Ruby on Rails.

# 20th December 2005, 3:33 pm / rails

Rails 1.0. Congrats to David and the Rails community as a whole.

# 14th December 2005, 2:32 am / rails

Snakes and Rubies event. Rails and Django event in Chicago on December 3rd.

# 18th November 2005, 7:36 am / rails