I recently found myself searching Stackoverflow and Google for various techniques for automatically testing Rails migrations. I was surprised not to have found too much information though. While testing a migration is fairly straightforward (migrations are classes and you can easily invoke corresponding methods); the challenge can be setting models up properly.

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Recently, a buddy of mine pointed me to an interesting tweet:

New tool converts your Apple #iOS apps to #HTML5 http://dld.bz/cejxz #appdev

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MongoDB supports a rich query language; in fact, its support of dynamic queries is one of its more distinguishing features compared to other datastores in the NoSQL world.

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Search is no longer an optional feature: it’s expected of most any application that consumes, produces, or stores data. And not everyone wants to be a search technology specialist, especially given the range of sophisticated algorithms underlying today’s complex searches (i.e. SQL queries are no longer sufficient!). Knowing about existing, open source search platforms could save you a lot of time and money and allow you to spend your time fine-tuning your software’s main functionality.

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We recently implemented a new feature that required two interesting aspects: storing a file in MongoDB using GridFS (think traditional Blob) and then pushing that file down to a browser.

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Every now and again, I find myself struggling to remember how to execute a single test in Rails. While I have Guard running the entire test suite anytime a change is detected, there are times when I want to focus solely on one test. Accordingly, Flavio Castelli has a great blog entry detailing the manifold ways one can execute a single test using Rake and/or Ruby.

The good folks over at IBM developerWorks have recently published season 5 of the Java technical podcast series. This season
focuses on the technologies, companies, and people influencing cloud computing.

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I recently decided to ditch plain old JavaScript in a Sinatra based application in favor of CoffeeScript. The existing JavaScript wasn’t terribly complex; however, I was looking at having to add some AJAX based long polling and I couldn’t bring myself to do it in JavaScript.

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There’s no shortage of mobile growth statistics, but here’s a few specific ones paint an overall picture of mobility:

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Are you pumped that you just published an app? Yep, me too. But guess what? Once you’ve built, tested, and deployed a mobile app, you’ll find yourself concerned with two factors:

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