In the recent railscasts, Ryan Bates has shown us the usage of Highcharts and some other open-source client-side JavaScript libraries to generate beautiful charts with no load on the server. A beautiful alternative solution to Gruff, Flash chart and other plugins and gems that depend on Rmagick or Flash and are generated on the server. Also associating events with the charts is also easy. Some of the other features provided by Highcharts are explored here.
If you want to see the demo directly, please click http://hollow-day-51.heroku.com/ (more…)

Drag and Drop widgets are great functionality to let the user control how they wants to see the information as he can arrange various information blocks according to their preference. This type of functionality can be seen in some sites like Netvibes or iGoogle The interface provides the users to move the widgets to his choice and stored them in their database and show the order in which user stored them, I am trying to do this with the help of jQuery and Rails (v=2.3.5).
You can check out the demo http://draggable-app1.heroku.com/home.
You can download the source from http://github.com/spritle/draggable_app

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We have recently launched the pre-beta version of Dunnitt (http://www.dunnitt.com). Like how Twitter is for micro-blogging, Dunnitt is for micro-collaboration. You can check the screenshots of Dunnitt at http://www.dunnitt.com/one_minute_manual

Thought I would share here some of the simple things we do while we are working on our Sprint release.
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I faced one nice problem while using Facebox for one of our recent project http://www.dunnitt.com, thought i would take this moment to share the problem and solution I found.

Previously I used Thickbox based popup for the web applications, then I came to know about facebox and started using it in my recent projects. I am pretty pleased with its simplicity and configurations. It is also very simple to integrate with RAILS application. When i started using it in my Ajax pages, its wasn’t working the way it should.
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Its been a couple of months that I started developing commercial projects using Ruby on Rails. Here are some stuff I learned which might be a good practices for aspirant Ruby/Rails developers.
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Autocomplete is very common feature that we see in many web2.0 applications (as in google,youtube and so on), this feature is easily implemented in Rails using auto_complete plugin But, what I wanted to do one more ajax call upon selecting the item from auto complete list, Lets take a scenario I have a form where my I take user Information and his working company lets just say that company has few more details like address, state and country. If I type a character in my company name textbox I should be able to see all the companies If I select any one company name from the list based on that company it should fill it address,state and country textboxes as well ( Here I am assuming that company name is unique). Let’s see how to do that using auto_complete plugin.
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I stumbled upon two cool online presentation maker sites and started using it for most of my presentations.
They are Prezi.com(the zooming online presentation) and Animoto.com (lets you create exciting videos from images).
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Here is a quick listing on some of the useful Rails gems and plugin that I use in our projects everyday.
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I was using will_paginate and periodically_call_remote to update a table in a webpage periodically but it gave me a lot of trouble than I thought, when I used this I was about to leave office and bang a problem came. The problem will raise if you are using will_paginate for your pagination and updating the table or div ( or what ever you are using) periodically with periodically_call_remote. It was already 6pm so I didn’t payed that much attention to it at that time. I came up with two solutions later and thought I would blog here the simple solution first.
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RJS templates for Rails by OReilly is a cool book , If you want to learn how to give Ajax functionality to your website (using Rails) this is the best book to start with.

I searched for the source code of the examples given in this book but couldn’t find one, So I quickly prepared one and kept in google code as ProjectExpenseTracker. I also added few other features like Ajax based update and delete, index page and so on.
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