DRY your Rails CRUD with Simple Form and Inherited Resources

22 September 2013

When you're writing a Rails application you usually end up with a lot of CRUD-only controllers and views just for managing models as an admin. Your user-facing views and controllers should of course have a lot of thought and care put into their design, but for admin stuff you just want to put data in the database as simply as possible. Rails of course gives you scaffolds, but that's quite a bit of duplicated code. Instead, you could use the one-two-three combination of Simple Form, Inherited Resources, and Rails' built-in template inheritance to DRY up most of the scaffolding while still preserving your ability to customize where appropriate. This lets you build your admin interface without having to resort to something heavy like Rails Admin or ActiveAdmin while also not having to build from scratch every time.

Tagged: Programming  Rails 

Essential Tools for Starting a Rails App in 2013

15 September 2013

Over the past few years I've written a number of Rails applications. It's become my default "scratch an itch" tool for when I need to build an app quickly to do a task. Even though Rails is mostly batteries-included, there are a few tools that make writing new applications so much easier. This is my list of tools that I use for pretty much every new Rails project.

Edit: The discussion on Hacker News has some great gems that you should consider using as well.

Tagged: Programming  Rails