If the question is how to support good performance for high volume requests without bogging down your database, the answer is caching. Caching data is a powerful tool in any programmer’s arsenal when it comes to speeding up websites and making information easier and faster to access. However, it can be tricky to pull off […]
Separating Logic and Data into Separate Applications with Rails and ActiveResource

Most Rails apps, and indeed, most web apps, combine data access and business logic into one single codebase. However, there are times when it make sense to separate business logic and data access into two separate standalone apps. Two use cases come to mind, but there are certainly others. The first is the ability to […]
Gem of the Week #5: will_paginate

Breaking out long lists into multiple pages that a user can click through is something that nearly every application can benefit from and it’s something that every programmer will have to implement dozens of times in their life. Whenever I think about implementing pagination, it’s second nature for me to add will_paginate into my gemfile […]
Partial Updates in Elasticsearch
Gain Huge Performance Increases in Elasticsearch When Updating Documents

Elasticsearch is a great tool for implementing high performance, scalable search in web and mobile applications. It is often used to index large documents, in addition to database-based text. For example, a law firm might want to index Microsoft Word documents so that they're searchable in a web interface as part of a case management […]