http://railsforphp.com Fri, 09 May 2008 21:45:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In chapter 5 of the book, we discuss the importance of separating public files in your web applications. Rails applications have a separate public/ directory where all public assets such as CSS, Javascript, and images are stored. No configuration files or Ruby code is stored in this directory, and we ... http://railsforphp.com/2008/05/09/separating-public-files/ If you look up at the navigation bar, you'll see we've added a new Reference section. When you're starting out with Ruby and Rails, often times you'll know how to do something in PHP and need a way to map that knowledge into the Ruby world. For example, you might ... http://railsforphp.com/2008/03/20/new-php-to-ruby-reference/ The MD5 and SHA1 cryptographic hashes are commonly used to verify the integrity of files or create a fixed length digital representation of a string or file. PHP has some very easy functions to create hashes of both strings and files. Like most utility functions, generating these hashes is not ... http://railsforphp.com/2008/02/26/calculating-string-and-file-hashes/ Ruby's blocks, or closures, are a feature that does not have a direct equivalent in PHP. We devote a fair number of pages to this topic in the book. Even so, it will take a bit of time and practice before you feel completely comfortable with them. ... http://railsforphp.com/2008/02/18/ruby-block-scope/ Rails uses quite a few techniques to make the end-user API a little nicer when you're creating your applications. One of these techniques is having a method accept variable arguments with a hash of options. We see this pattern appear in quite a few different areas of the Rails API, ... http://railsforphp.com/2008/02/13/variable-arguments/ PHP implements both POSIX and Perl-compatible regular expressions. The Perl-compatible regexp functions (which includes all the preg_* functions) is the preferred library for most developers since it has many features not available in POSIX, and is binary safe. Ruby uses Perl-compatible regular expressions, so if you're familiar with the preg_* ... http://railsforphp.com/2008/01/17/regular-expressions-in-ruby/ Just about every PHP application needs some kind of configuration, if only to define the connection to a database. One popular way to store configuration is to use a PHP file itself because it's convenient and fast for PHP to read. This approach is taken by the Solar ... http://railsforphp.com/2008/01/08/php-meet-yaml/ PHP syntax shows obvious similarities to Perl. For example, we have the prefixing of variables ($), the arrow for object access (->), and semicolons terminating our statements. While it's perhaps less obvious to PHP developers at first, Ruby's syntax has also been influenced by Perl in various ways. ... http://railsforphp.com/2008/01/03/useful-perlisms-in-ruby/ In this article we're going to draw inspiration from Ruby's attr_accessor method in an attempt to create dynamic getter and setter methods for PHP classes. Let's start by taking a look at a similar way in which we can use the two languages to create a simple Book class. Accessing ... http://railsforphp.com/2007/12/21/accessing-attributes-in-php-objects/ The second beta of Rails for PHP Developers has been released! If you've already purchased the book, you can visit the "Your Account" page on the Pragmatic Bookshelf website to generate the new PDF at any time. The biggest change is that the beta now includes the rest ... http://railsforphp.com/2007/12/11/beta-2-released/