Shane Sherman

I've been doing web development since 1994 and Ruby on Rails is a breath of fresh air. In the past I have developed sites in Perl, Php, Asp.net, and Java. Ruby on Rails blows them all away in terms of ease of use and development time. I thought I would go through the specifics of [...]

I'm a huge Ruby on Rails fanboy, and I've been using it to write web applications for a year and a half now. I think it's superior to everything else I've used in the past 12 years. It does have problems though.
Migrations are not executed within a transaction
This one has bitten me on a number [...]

In my Keeping track of user-made changes post I descriped the various options for implementing change-tracking in my application. I ended up doing something completely different. Ruby on Rails has a cool feature called Observers which basically act like database triggers. After certain events(save, update, create, etc) happen your observer code will automatically get executed.
I [...]

In my web application I have been building for over a year, registered users can edit content. This is structured content that is stored in different fields and database tables. Every change that a user makes needs to be approved by a moderator/admin user. There are a couple of ways you can do this, and [...]

I absolutely can't stand having to log in to web applications on every visit. If I manage to remember what login I used, I'm not going to remember the password. It's just one more unnecessary step that I don't want to take.
If you're building a Ruby on Rails application that requires authentication, you're probably [...]