How about a little love for the guys and girls behind the scenes, eh? After celebrating some great web design posts last month, we’re turning the focus to Web Development for this edition of the MetaSpring Blog Carnival. So let’s get right to it!
The Trouble with Soft Delete
“Soft delete is a commonly used pattern amongst data-driven business applications”, but as Richard Dingwall points out in this post, “[soft delete] usually ends up causing more harm than good.” Richard outlines the various pros and cons of soft delete and offers a few solutions for those struggling with implementations of the pattern.
Scaling Rails – On The Edge – Part 1
This is the first of three screencasts by Greg Pollack in which he explores nine new Ruby and Rails libraries which can help you to scale your rails application. This first post deals with three tools: Bullet, Rails Indexes, & Scrooge. The content covered in these posts is easy to discern for all levels of Ruby development.
behavior: a Rails gem/plugin for storing application configuration in the database
Paul Campbell from Pabcas.com put together this post highlighting the advantages of a new Rails gem/plugin that he’s pushed out called “behavior”. Paul worked on the Rails Development Directory and developed behavior as a solution to storing issues that came up. As Paul writes, “It is useful to store site title, description, email address, passwords, etc. outside the source code.” Behavior does this with a Yaml configuration file. Installation instructions can be found at the end of Paul’s post on his website.
We Can Have Hack Free CSS With the @unsupported Directive
This forward-thinking post by Chris Eppstein discusses a feature for CSS that does not yet exist. Chris makes his plea to CSS3, requesting an @unsupported directive, which would provide benefits like “Feature Queries” and legacy browser targeting.
Top 15+ Best Practices for Writing Super Readable Code
The developers here at MetaSpring take great pride in well written, succinct code. (MetaSpring programming Architect, John Ku took this concept to the extreme a few months back in a post about Ruby Quines.) Now, Burak Guzel’s post urging developers to write highly readable code will continue that theme, because as Burak says, “readable and maintainable code is something to be proud of in a finished product.”
Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices
Burak Guzel is so good that we had to feature another of his posts! This time Burak covers a few MySQL optimization techniques. Burak walks through a step-by-step process for structuring tables properly, writing optimized queries and assembling better code. This 21 point plan for making optimized web applications is a great read for any programmer.
Next Month’s Issue: Usability
Thanks to all those that submitted blog posts this month. Hopefully you learned as much as we did. Next month’s theme is one that gets discussed a lot in both the world of development and design: Usability. Usability issues are at the forefront of many projects these days, so we’re sure to have a great batch of links. The deadline for submissions on BlogCarnival.com or through our email is January 17th. If you have a usability-related post or a suggestion for a topic that you’d like to see discussed, make sure to let us know at media@metaspring.com.
Happy Holidays!
