Rails audit trail

I know I've just done another post but I wanted to also mention something to you I discovered yesterday for Ruby on Rails that is, frankly, excellent.

Many applications need to keep a history of things that have happened and those responsible for auditing purposes. In fact, this is very often a legal requirement. For anyone that's worked on an application where this is the case, you'll know all too well that every "Solution Architect" out there has their own favourite way of doing it, that it can be a headache to implement, and that it often arrives as a bit of an afterthought ("Ummm... shouldn't we be auditing this stuff?").

Server-side validation

I must admit, I had assumed that server-side validation was something everyone just did. I thought it was obvious that the server should validate whatever data it receives, rather than relying on client-side validation. It seems, however, that I was mistaken in that belief - some people remain convinced that validation of, for example, mandatory fields in a form should be done on the client... and only done on the client. What follows is a brief explanation of why all applications must do server-side validation.