update – this needs to have a recent version of RVM – it works with rvm 1.10 but not with 1.6 – do an rvm update first.

When using the mighty cobweb web crawler on my OSX 10.7 with Ruby 1.9.3 I was getting a seg fault in net http:

net/http.rb:799: [BUG] Segmentation fault

A bit of googling and isolation in IRB showed that this can be caused when hitting HTTPS urls using net http.

I saw a few different solutions to the problem, primarily talking about Ruby 1.9.2.Surprisingly it took me a while to end up at the RVM documentation about the problem: https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/packages/openssl/. This didn’t quite work out of the box for me, so I used the solution in the following gist.

rvm pkg install openssl
rvm remove 1.9.3
rvm install 1.9.3 --with-openssl-dir=$rvm_path/usr --with-gcc=clang

and now I can happily crawl https urls.

Backbone.js is a great library for creating single page applications that consume RESTful JSON services. Ruby on Rails does well at generating RESTful APIs and speaking JSON. In order to get the Rails working really well with Backbone, there are two tricks to do.

First, add the following line to the application controller to make the output look like what backbone expects.

...
ActiveRecord::Base.include_root_in_json = false
...

Second take advantage of the : only option in to_json to limit the attributes included in the serialised json object. The documentation for this isn’t quite there in the latest rails, but the 2.3 to_json method describes it. http://apidock.com/rails/ActiveRecord/Serialization/to_json.

# code to retrieve the collection - the to_json filtering works on a collection, or a single model record
render :json => collection.to_json(:only => [ :id, :name, :another_attribute])

With these two simple tricks rails will generate the json that backbone wants, and you’ll have a happy front-end developer.