GridFS with Mongoid and CarrierWave on Rails 3
Over the last week I've started a project with Rails 3 and I'm impressed. The increased configurability of the framework has not diminished its ease of use nor its core concepts in the slightest. You'll have to get used to a few new conventions, especially regarding routing, but there's lots of help out there.
Since this project is something I'm doing in my off time, I decided to experiment with MongoDB using the Mongoid framework. I had played with MongoMapper before, but always felt like I was using an ActiveRecord clone that didn't take advantage of the full capabilities of a document database and was forcing and ActiveRecord-style approach on me. With Mongoid you get has_many, has_one, and belongs_to relationships that map to MongoDB concepts like embedded documents. Mongoid is fully compatible with the ActiveModel interface for Rails3, and things like associations and nested attributes work out of the box.
I also had been hearing great things about CarrierWave from co-workers. It employs the concept of an "uploader" outside of the MVC ecosystem. The uploader handles resizing, storage, and all other details. In your model, you simply "mount" the uploader and you're golden. Of course, for this project the killer feature is the GridFS storage option, which is something I wanted to play with.
