CommunityEngine is a free, open-source social network plugin for Ruby on Rails applications. Drop it into your new or existing application, and you’ll instantly have all the features of a basic community site.

Jeff from Softies on Rails wants to know what you think about foreign keys, and whether they're needed in Rails. Sound off!

Rails is notorious for being "opinionated software", and this is one of those opinions that a lot of people happen to disagree with, and is one of very few (the only?) cases where the majority of Rails users overwhelmingly, strongly disagree with the Rails philosophy.

You submit your code, people refactor it!

Combining the Builder pattern and fluent interfaces is pretty sexy, especially in a relatively noisy language like Java -- I like to call the combination a "fluent builder". In many cases, a fluent builder provides a form of named parameters, making code that uses the API very easy to read and understand. Fluent builders are useful in constructing immutable objects (love 'em!) without requiring overloaded/telescoping constructors with lots of arguments, particularly when some or all of the arguments are of the same type (an obvious use case for named parameters).

Ask 100 enterprise developers (who are probably using Java or C#) if Rails is ready for the enterprise. My guess is that 75 will say no, 1 will say yes, 9 will say "I don't know", and the other 15 will ask "What's Rails?" Why aren't more enterprise projects using Rails?

I wouldn't want a database that doesn't use surrogate keys.

There's a benefit that's frequently forgotten when people discuss unit testing -- encapsulation.

Ideally a build would occur automatically whenever someone checks in code. If that's not feasible (because the build takes too long), there are some options...

Unlike the fashion world, we Rails geeks prefer fat models. When we see Kirstie Alley we say, “That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

An article on The DailyWTF involves a few take-home coding exercises, including one in which the applicant is asked to write a Java program that determines whether an object (identified by an int and a String) is in a HashSet. I had several forehead-slapping moments as I read the comments.

This article discusses a Java veteran's early impressions of Ruby on Rails -- its strengths, weaknesses, and philosophical differences.

I'm a huge advocate of Test-Driven Development (TDD). But why don't I practice it? And what can I do to change? The real problem isn't lack of skill, it's lack of support.

This article introduces dependency injection from the perspective of how it enables you to write loosely coupled, highly testable code, without necessarily using a "lightweight" framework like Spring.

One of the most common refactorings is Extract Method. Basically, Extract Method involves moving a chunk of code from a larger method into a new method, resulting in two small methods (or at least one small method and one smaller method).