What are the advantages of immutable data structures outside functional programming? We explore the benefits of immutability when designing a search query API in Ruby. Continue reading...

Unsatisfied with the existing libraries that allow you to build HTML with Ruby, I just launched Crafty. Crafty is different, because it gives you a set of helper modules that you can use to build HTML in any Ruby class. Consider Crafty a friendly, framework-agnostic alternative to clunky Rails helpers such as content_tag. It is also faster than most alternatives. Crafty is not a templating language, but it helps to create builder classes, similar in nature to Rails FormBuilder. Learn more.

Being unsatisfied with the existing solutions, I recently wrote a brand new Rails gem/plugin to create Entity-Relationship Diagrams based on your Active Record models.

Rails ERD was designed to be flexible. Apart from output based on Graphviz, you can also create your own diagrams. It offers an internal API to inspect your domain model, and an abstract class to easily generate custom output. Learn more.

Remarks, comments and contributions are all very welcome.