If you need to calculate an average user's rating or sum up a number of votes, consider using the activerecord-reputation-system gem. Here I will cover the basics and also briefly present a from-scratch solution.

As you will see it is easy to add a CSV export option to Rails. Here I also show how to export for Excel in a variety of formats.

This will show how to create a new facebook application and configure it. Then add some authentication with the omniauth-facebook gem and top it off with a client-side authentication using the JavaScript SDK.

The Brakeman gem will scan the Ruby code of a Rails application and alert you to common security vulnerabilities.

If a user's authentication cookie is sent over an insecure connection it is vulnerable to session hijacking, or more specifically, sidejacking. Learn how this is done, and how you can prevent it.

Squeel provides a comprehensive DSL for writing SQL queries in Ruby. It is built upon Arel giving you access to many of its powerful features.

There are many approaches to locking down an API. Here I start off with HTTP Basic authentication then move on to generating a unique token which can be passed through a URL parameter or HTTP header.

APIs should be consistent, but it is difficult to do this when returning a JSON response along side the HTML interface. Here I show how to add a versioned, RESTful API. The version can be determined from either the URL or HTTP headers.

It is often asked: Is Rails a good fit if I only need to serve an API? In this episode I show how to use the Rails API gem to create a slimmer Rails application designed to respond with JSON.

Deploying to Amazon EC2 allows you to scale an application quickly. Learn how to use Rubber to deploy to the cloud with just a few commands and monitor the cluster with various web tools.