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Just finished off Ruby Koans. A great way to brush up on your ruby basics and uncover some things you might not have ever known.

One of the odder things for people coming to ruby might be the concept of blocks. I know I struggled with them when I first started ruby and the ruby koans probably has the clearest examples I’ve ever seen.

sigh, remember that if you use action caching to move any after_filters to a before_filter since action caching uses a special around filter and will kill you!

If you’re still using ruby 1.8.7 for some apps built in older versions of Rails, but you want to start playing with Rails 3.0 and Ruby 1.9.1 you can easily sandbox directories on your dev machine with different version of Ruby using RVM.

RVM is the Ruby Version Manager. You can find it here.

Once installed, you can simply use it to install the ruby version you want to use and even set up a specific gemset:

rvm install 1.9.1
rvm gemset create new_proj

If you want to automatically use the rvm when you cd into your new_proj directory, simply add a .rvmrc file with the following

rvm ruby-1.9.1@new_proj

So when you cd into new_proj and check the ruby version, you’ll see 1.9.1

Of course, there’s much more you can do with the rvmrc file, check it out here

RVM gives you a very nice way to create multiple sandboxes for Ruby development on the same machine without any headaches.

According the the Riding Rails Blog the final release for Rails 3.0 should be this week. Lots of tweaks and bug fixes, but the things most people (including me!) are excited about are the new methods for handling gems (Bundler) and ARel. Accessing models using relational algebra. Should be much more efficient!

So as happy as I am with my action caching over on Alternity, there is one problem that’s bugging me.

I’d like each world and category to have a title that reflects the content. I put the content_for :title in my views, threw a yield :title in my layout and as expected, each of my pages had an appropriate title. Committed the change and didn’t think about it too much afterward until I noticed that there was no custom title on my live site. Duh, the content_for method is called when the view is rendered and since my action caching was fetching the pre-rendered *.cache files from my cache, naturally there was no :title for the layout to render. One solution would be to simply include the layout in the action cache, but I have reasons for not wanting to do that. It makes cache invalidation a bear.

I looked up how content_for worked and found that it simply saved the text into an instance variable:
@content_for_{name_of_the_content_block}
@content_for_title in my case.

It seems like the way to fix this would be to have the action cacher check for those instance variables and append them to the bottom of the *.cache files, then check for them when rendering and put them back into an instance variable.

Say, a chunk of text at the bottom of the file:

content_for_title blah blah blah
content_for_nav blah blah blah

Anybody done anything similar? I’m planning it out, but I want to wait until Rails 3 drops to see if there’s changes to the caching.