Andy Stewart published Rails 2 Plugin Patterns, a book on enhancing Rails, with the highly-regarded PeepCode Press. This book tells you all you need to know to write extensions to Rails which you, and anybody else, can reuse from one project to the next.

Readers have said, “I’m loving it”, “the best I’ve seen in a while”, “outstanding work”, and “there are great insights into how Rails works.”

Elias & Grace is a smart mother and baby outfitter in London's trendy Primrose Hill. They offer “a stylish mix of high fashion, luxury accessories, lush all-natural products, organic remedies and perfect gifts” in a light, airy shop.

AirBlade worked as part of a team led by Aloof to deliver Elias & Grace’s new website, which allows customers to browse and purchase products online. AirBlade crafted all the Rails and AJAX code for Talking Pixels, our actual client on this project.

We received great feedback afterwards from Talking Pixels, and Elias & Grace received many compliments on the site from their customers.

Henrik Knudsen is an award-winning fashion photographer. He needed a professional and stylish site to display his work to maximum effect.

We delivered a fully-fledged, custom content management system to drive the public Flash front-end from Home Made Robot, together with a system for publishing photo shoots and inviting clients to view them in private client areas.

We designed and delivered a RESTful Rails app, integrated the public Flash front-end, wrote standards-based XHTML and CSS, and took care of setting up the server and deployment.

This site was a winner in the Web Sites category of the PDN Photo Annual 2008 awards for professional photographers.

An offshore yachtsman came to AirBlade with a specific problem: as a participant in ARC 2007, how could he send regular position fixes from the middle of the Atlantic that arrived at ARC HQ by email? And do so over an Iridium satellite phone in heavy seas in a sleep-deprived state?

The sat-phone's bandwidth is very low (2.4kb/s or ~300 characters per second). Despite this, the solution had to be fast — in heavy seas at night you do not want to be sitting at a computer for any longer than you absolutely have to. It had to be fool-proof to cope with tired, cold typing fingers. And it had to be reliable.

This is the sort of challenge we love. AirBlade built a stripped-down web interface with a high emphasis on usability in difficult conditions. It is lightweight, fast — even over a 2.4kb/s link — and impossible to send bad data. We believe you cannot send a position fix with fewer keystrokes than our system.

To avoid a single point of failure, we also hooked up the yachtsman's Thunderbird email client with a dial-up STMP server.

He said:

“This works great. I now have two first rate alternatives that fully meet my needs.”

Oliver J Benjamin is a London-based clothier with a rapidly expanding business. Written up in GQ magazine, Oliver wanted a complete overhaul of his online presence and business systems.

We delivered a bespoke, online customer and order management system for his staff, migrating his existing data into the new system. We extended this to be an online store where customers can place orders for off-the-peg items and, in a first for London clothiers, order made to measure suits, customising every aspect of the suit themselves. Finally we delivered a new email system, significantly reducing the level of spam received.

We were responsible for everything: from CSS and XHTML to the Rails application and database; from DNS to SMTP servers.

GSA, a Mayfair-based hedge fund, asked AirBlade to review their trade allocation algorithms and advise on their STP implementation.

We reviewed their approach, took their development team through some alternatives, and described challenges they will need to grapple with in the medium-term future.

GSA gave us glowing feedback afterwards.

HVP, energy industry investors and advisors, needed to analyse high volumes of power station data. They turned to AirBlade to source and structure the data.

Jonathan Bevan, Chief Operating Officer, said:

“In order to enhance our data analysis capabilities, we commissioned AirBlade Software to investigate ways to automate querying of a third party, online database. It was important that the software could be readily used by non-expert computer users, despite the underlying complexity of the task.”

“AirBlade's solution, using Java software, with an easy to use text based interface, was quickly adopted by all users. The data output was exported directly to Excel — making for a seamless interface of AirBlade's solution with our existing tools.”

“The delivery of the product was equally impressive. AirBlade quickly came to understand our requirements and, once the software had been delivered, remained available to answer our queries. AirBlade even included small additional features that, while not part of the originially envisaged specification, undoubtedly enhance the user's productivity and experience of the software.”

Dr Traverso is an expert in the early detection of colorectal cancer. A winner of the National Inventors Hall of Fame's Collegiate Inventors Competition and an MIT Technology Review Young Innovator, he is a past Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and current Internal Medicine Resident at Brighman and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

Dr Traverso asked AirBlade to develop custom bioinformatics software to mine and manipulate large amounts of genetic sequencing data from publicly available sources. He said:

“The project is about the mechanism of mutation acquisition in cancer. Our aim is to analyse the intersection of different sources of data (i.e. LOH, homozygous deletions and mutations in the genome) and mathematically see whether all genes behave the same with respect to how they are inactivated. It will also compare the behaviour of cancer genes in different cancers.”

“This is a novel approach that would not be possible without the sequencing of the human genome and AirBlade's bioinformatics software. AirBlade delivered exactly what I needed and the data looks great.”

At AirBlade we are firm believers in the technical and business merits of open source software. Here are a couple of highlights from our work:

• css_dryer: a Rails plugin for DRY stylesheets. Read about it or get the code.

  “I think it's awesome! I was hoping someone would make my dreams come true.” — John Nunemaker, RailsTips.org

  “This is awesome.” — Corey Johnson, StreetEasy

  “Wow.” — William H. Harle Jr.

  “Awesome. This is the way CSS should be written!” — Olly Headey, Lylo

  “I like the nesting syntax, but I can live without it. Variables on the other hand, gotta have them.” — Josh Susser

  “It's freaking cool.” — pimpmaster

• acts_as_enterprisey: a light-hearted Rails plugin that we wrote to learn a new technique. Read about it or get the code.

  “Everything about that is awesome.” — Brian Hogan

  “You know at first I thought it was just a joke. But there is actually a fully functioning plugin there. Bravo!” — Alex Wayne

  “Good one.” — Adrian Madrid

  “Very nice, though I would have a hard time ethically using this plugin…” — Jason Roelofs

  “That's just wrong.” — Anthony Eden

  “Pretty funny. Nice work.” — John Nunemaker, RailsTips.org

  “Damn funny.” — Ara T Howard