In earlier installments of this series, Alex Stoll guided us through creating a lexer and a parser. These translated the human-readable source code into data structures. In this article, he begins work on the interpreter - the bit that actually runs our code!
Ruby's flexibility has always been both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. You can write amazingly expressive programs. You can also slip and break them in amazingly expressive ways. RBS is a new type annotation system in Ruby 3 that seeks to keep ruby's flexibility while protecting us from some of its dangers. In this article, Julio Sampaio walks us through RBS. He explains the impact it has on metaprogramming, and he shows us how we can use it to make our own apps more robust.
Ruby lets you express yourself like few other languages, with a minimum of boilerplate. It's fantastic until it isn't. Until one day when you think you're calling the foo method you wrote last week, but instead, you end up calling a foo method that came with some gem from 2008. In these situations, knowing about Ruby's method lookup rules will save your bacon.
As developers, our world is made of text, but computers only understand numbers. What gives? A process called character encoding maps numbers to letters. Easy enough, until you realize that we need to encode every character from every language while keeping file sizes small and staying compatible with legacy systems. In this article, José shows us everything we need to know about character encoding for PHP developers - including what to do when it breaks!
One of the best things about Rails is that it protects your app from a wide variety of injection attacks with minimal development effort. But we're never 100% safe. After all, Rails can't protect us from our own bad decisions. We need to understand the threats so we know when we can lean on Rails and when we can't. In this article, Diogo Souza introduces us to the OWASP Top 10 list of vulnerabilities and dives into injection vulnerabilities to show us how rails protects us against them and how we can protect ourselves.
To decide on a front-end for your Rails app, you need a feel for the options. Does a certain JS framework speak to you or does it make you feel dirty inside? There's only one way to find out! In this article, Julio Sampaio walks us through creating a React app from scratch and integrating it with a Rails back-end via webpacker.
If you've ever checked the environment in your Rails app with Rails.env.production? you've used a fascinating little utility class called StringInquirer. In this post, Jonathan Miles dives into the rails codebase to show us exactly how StringInquirer works and how we can bring a little of its magic to our own apps.
Before you can decide on a front-end for your Rails app, you need a feel for the options. Does a particular JS framework speak to you or does it make you feel dirty inside? There's only one way to find out! In this article, Julio Sampaio walks us through creating an Angular app from scratch and integrating it with a Rails back-end via webpacker.
The fastest web page is one you've already loaded. Browsers love to avoid round-trips by caching assets. And HTTP provides ways for us to tell browsers what's changed and what hasn't - so they make the right decisions. In this article, Jonathan Miles introduces us to HTTP caching and shows us how to implement it in Rails.
A fast app means happy users. The speed that your pages render depends on which templating system you use. In this article, Diogo Souza puts the three most popular Ruby templating engines to the test to see which is fastest. In the process, he shows us how to construct benchmarks and do our own investigations into performance.