One of our first clients for Bootspring is NorthScale, a company specializing in memcached-based infrastructure for scaling large websites. Since I maintain memcache-client, the most popular Ruby client for memcached, they contacted me about building a next generation client. This … Continue reading →

HTML forms are bread and butter to developers like us at Bootspring. In the early days, Rails provided a number of simple view helper methods to construct form tags. Later, the form_for helper was introduced which made form building a … Continue reading →

CSS has a serious maintainability problem: stylesheets usually contain a lot of duplicate code because CSS rules are not declared in a modular way. Traditional object-oriented programming allows inheritance or composition to keep code as DRY as possible but neither … Continue reading →

Arguably the most useful innovation introduced with Ruby on Rails was first class support for testing application code. Rails supports three levels of testing: unit, functional and integration. Over the last 5 years, tools and best practices have come and … Continue reading →

Social networking is and has been hot for the last few years; Facebook and Twitter have made friending and following common Internet verbs. So it’s not surprising that many web sites these days need social networking functionality. One thing we’ve … Continue reading →