SSL checklist for Ruby on Rails Applications
Cross posted from darthsid
The purpose of SSL is to provide a reasonable level of protection against eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks. Although SSL provides a greater level of security, it introduces a lot of overheads and hence should be used sparingly. Two of the most common places to use SSL is for payment transactions and user registration/login.
This post intentionally focuses only on the Rails application as there are numerous post on the net for SSL setup on the server. Enabling SSL in a Rails application is really trivial and there are just a few points that need your attention..
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Jquery Full Calendar with Ruby on Rails
Contrary to popular belief, working on a client project gives us a generous margin of creativity and explore innovative solutions. Take the example of a recent project I was working on. The client required a collaboration-based calendar module for their application similar to Google Calendar. Initially we started developing it from scratch , but then, we found an awesome Jquery plugin.
“FullCalendar” provides a full-sized, drag & drop calendar. It uses AJAX to fetch events on-the-fly for each month. It also supports an intuitive interface to manage events that spans over multiple days or weeks. It is visually customizable and exposes hooks for user-triggered events (like clicking or dragging an event).
I decided to give it a try and utilize its hooks for user triggered events within our Rails application. This small effort resulted in a barebone Rails app that might provide a good base for your project which require calendar, scheduling or appointment features. I called it fullcalendar_rails and it is now available on github with a working demo at http://fullcalendar.vinsol.com.
Feel free to give your valuable feedback. I hope you will find this useful.
Update: On popular demand, I have added recurring events functionality with daily, weekly and monthly frequencies. It also allows for exceptions to recurring events including delete and edit features.
Skiping installation of ri and RDoc documentation while installing gems
Probably most of the time you would like to skip ri and RDoc installation while installing some new gems, specially on production server.
I do like to skip ri and RDoc documentation while installing gems on my development machine, because it takes more time to generate ri and RDoc then actual installation of gem.
We can skip rdoc and ri documentation while installing a gem by:
I am sure that you would not like to give –no-ri and –no-rdoc every time you install a gem. To avoid this situation, you can create/update $HOME/.gemrc file with following option:
Now every time you install a gem, it will skip installation of ri and RDoc for the gem.
My .gemrc file looks like:
Google maps like image browsing?
Does anybody over there have any idea about any library that facilitates us to implement google maps like image browsing?
Basically I want to implement something like where a user can drag drop large image to view specific portion.
Basic Introduction of Apache rewrite rules
Today, I had a basic talk about apache’s rewrite rules. Slides are below:


Working with Vinsol has been one of the most rewarding and productive collaborations I've ever had in the technology industry. Manik is an intelligent and honest engineer with a great faculty for open and clear communication, and his team include some of the swiftest and keenest developers I've ever had the pleasure to work with. They're great value for money, excellent people who are a joy to know and interact with, and above all they really know their stuff