Front End Rails Issue 28

Introduction Have you ever thought about using R (the programming language) to run some analyses using data from a Ruby on Rails application? This tutorial will provide step-by-step walkthrough on how to connect a simple Rails app to R. I recently needed to run some complicated statistical analyses on data generated by a Rails application. […]

Research can sometimes feel like a luxury when you work at an agency. With budget constraints, we have to conduct research much more leanly than we might, say, at a product company that has more flexibility when it comes to timelines and hours. This can be frustrating, but some research is always better than no research, and it’s often just a matter of getting creative or simply knowing what tools are out there to help you get things done quickly. Here are five tips that have saved us time while conducting research and allowed us to fit it into various projects:

In our day-to-day activities we are often interacting with archives. When you want to send your friend a bunch of documents, you’d probably archive them first. When you download a book from the web, it will probably be archived alongside with accompanying materials. So, how can we interact with archives in Ruby? Today we will […]

User Interface (UI) Testing. The idea is simple — automate some UI tests to ensure your application is still behaving as expected. Usually your first set of tests — running green, no doubt — make you all cheer and pat yourselves on the back. Then you open up the framework to more people. Despite the […]

As older versions of browsers die out, it's more and more common that we don't have a need for jQuery on certain Rails projects. So why can't we just remove these lines from application.js?

Testing your software is important. Automating your testing and having continuous integration for your project in place is a matter of best practice nowadays. Often it’s one of the first things a software team works on when starting a new project. A good test suite allows you to push changes to your product in a […]

Looking back on the history of fonts and their relationship with the web, web designers have long been handicapped in comparison to print designers. The surge in font choice due to @font-face and web font services has certainly helped lessen the disparity between typography for print and web, but we’re still missing some key features. Luckily, OpenType fonts and some quick CSS tricks can enable some old print stand-bys: kerning, ligatures, swashes, and small-caps (among others).

We released Paperclip v5.0.0.beta1.