Ruby Inside

JRuby Core Team Members Enebo and Nutter Moving to Red Hat

2012-05-22T18:40:47Z

Breaking news! At JRubyConf 2012 (a 3 day JRuby-focused conference in Minneapolis) it has just been announced that JRuby core team members Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter are moving from Engine Yard to open source giants Red Hat.

The news was confirmed by Nutter in a tweet:

Engine Yard shares their side of the story and says they'll continue to "work closely with Charles and Tom as well as Red Hat to continue development of JRuby and collaborate on JRuby features to support customers running on JRuby on Engine Yard Cloud."

From the Red Hat perspective comes this post by JBoss director Mark Little. He notes:

They'll [Enebo and Nutter] be working with various teams in JBoss and Red Hat, including the obvious candidates such as TorqueBox, Immutant and OpenJDK, but also helping us deliver on our polyglot visition. I can say that bringing them to Red Hat has been almost 2 years in the making, but it's time that has been well worth spent and I have great expectations for their future here.

Mark Little

JRuby has had an interesting history, starting out as purely as a Java port of MRI by Jan Arne Petersen. It has matured significantly over the years, especially after the current core team leaders took over the reins in 2004. JRuby's performance now trumps that of MRI 1.9 in many cases and JRuby is broadly considered as Ruby's second-most established Ruby implementation (although Rubinius is approaching quickly from the rear in this regard.)

Red Hat has recently begun to make moves into the dynamic app hosting world with OpenShift, a Heroku-style auto-scaling 'Platform as a Service' (PaaS) for webapps. It includes Ruby support and along with the JRuby news shows a growing interest in the language at the popular open source company.

The JRuby team also announced the release of JRuby 1.7 preview 1 this week.

The Mega April 2012 Ruby and Rails News Roundup

2012-04-27T03:38:17Z

Welcome to April 2012's bumper pick'n'mix of Ruby and Rails news and releases, fresh from the pages of Ruby Weekly.

Highlights include: Matz's new Ruby implementation, MobiRuby (Ruby for iOS), Passenger 3.0.12, Ruby 1.9.3-p194, TorqueBox 2.0, Adhearsion 2.0, and Dr Nic's App Scrolls.

Headlines

Ruby 1.9.3-p194 Released
A small version bump for Ruby 1.9.3 which includes a security fix for RubyGems (and therefore an updated version) along with oodles of minor tweaks and fixes.

MRuby: A Lightweight Ruby Implementation by Matz
It's been in the making for a while (remember RiteVM?) but this week Matz's new 'lightweight' Ruby implementation, mruby, spread around the Rubysphere like wildfire. The key goal is to produce an embeddable Ruby implementation that has a smaller footprint than MRI.

MobiRuby: A Forthcoming Ruby Toolkit for Building iOS Apps

Announcing 'MacRuby In Action'
MacRuby In Action is a new book hat teaches Ruby developers how to code OS X applications using MacRuby, an OS X-focused Ruby implementation. Jerry Cheung, a senior engineer at Intridea authored the book alongside Brendan Lim and Jeremy McAnally.

Phusion Passenger 3.0.12 Released
The popular Apache and Nginx module for deploying Rack-based Ruby webapps gets an update. It now supports Apache 2.4 and the event MPM.

GitHub Rolls Out An Easier Way to Create Repositories
It's not Ruby specific, but GitHub's prevalence in the Ruby world should make their latest tweaks to the repository creation process interesting to anyone familiar with the service.

The Future of MacRuby?
Matt Aimonetti of the MacRuby project notes that MacRuby's de-facto project leader, Laurent Sansonetti, has been M.I.A. on the project since October and no longer works at Apple. But what does that mean for MacRuby? Matt makes some suggestions.

Adhearsion 2.0 Released: Ruby Telephony Continues to Evolve
Adhearsion is an open-source telephony development framework built in Ruby. The version 2 release brings an all new Web site, updated documentation, support for multiple telephony engines, 'call controllers' and more.

Next Generation MRI Ruby Packages for Ubuntu Available
The Brightbox brainboxes have been hard at work on new MRI Ruby packages (of 1.8.7 and 1.9.3) for Ubuntu. They're ready for you to test right now - instructions inside.

TorqueBox 2.0 Released
TorqueBox is a Ruby application server built on JBoss AS7 and JRuby. In addition to being one of the fastest Ruby servers around, it supports Rack-based web frameworks, and provides simple Ruby interfaces to standard JavaEE services, including scheduled jobs, caching, messaging, and services.

Reading

Extending Ruby with Ruby
Some beautiful, code-driven slides by Michael Fairley that dig into adding new features to Ruby by using Ruby itself. To do this, he takes a feature from each of Haskell, Python, and Scala and adds it to Ruby. The slides are complete with speaker notes so it's easy to follow along.

Read Ruby 1.9: The Online Ruby Book
Not new at all but the site recently went down and I lamented the loss of one of my favorite online Ruby references. Finally it's back online, so it's time to let people who haven't seen it before enjoy its greatness :-)

On mruby and MobiRuby
Matt Aimonetti, a key contributor to MacRuby, riffs on the possibilities opened up by mruby and MobiRuby (both above) while suggesting that it'll take a lot for Ruby to be considered a logical choice for iOS development, even by existing Rubyists.

10 Things You Didn't Know Rails Could Do
The slide deck from a RailsConf presentation given by Ruby demigod James Edward Gray II. In a mere 234 (!) slides, he digs into a lot of interesting Rails crevices. Lots of short examples to enjoy.

The Asset Pipeline for Dummies
Eric Berry explains the Rails asset pipeline from the absolute basics up.

Getting Started With mruby
Matt Aimonetti is a real fan of mruby and shows it off by explaining its purpose, comparing it to Lua, and then by building a barebones C app that calls mruby to run a single line of Ruby code.

Make the Web Fast(er): One Rails App at a Time
A great slide deck by Ilya Grigorik about the role that page loading speed has to play in Web applications. It's not particularly Rails focused at all but it covers key things to be aware of.

MySQL Query Comments in Rails with Marginalia
Noah Lorang of 37signals talks about marginalia, a new gem that adds extra comments to Rails' logs which can help in the debugging and performance monitoring process.

Building an iOS Photo-sharing and Geolocation Mobile Client and API
A fine tutorial in the Heroku Development Center about building a photo sharing service with a native iOS client and Rails backend. All deployed on Heroku, naturally :-)

Rails Tutorial for Devise with CanCan and Twitter Bootstrap
Daniel Kehoe is known for his detailed Rails tutorials and this time he demonstrates how to create a Rails 3.2 application using Devise with CanCan and Twitter Bootstrap, from start to finish.

Introducing DCell: Actor-based Distributed Objects for Ruby
DCell by Tony Arcieri (of Celluloid fame) is an actor-based distributed object oriented programming framework for Ruby. It's hard to explain the concepts involved in a short summary but this post does a great job (think an easier, better structured DRb).

A Sneak Preview of Phusion Passenger 3.2
Phusion has been hard at work on the popular Apache and Nginx module (already mentioned above) and explains the internal overhauls that have taken place in the forthcoming Passenger 3.2.

Lessons Learned Upgrading Harvest to Ruby 1.9.3 (from REE)
Harvest is a popular time tracking webapp that uses Ruby behind the scenes. They've just done a big REE to Ruby 1.9.3 upgrade and in this post T J Schuck shares some notes about the process and the 1.8 to 1.9 issues they encountered.

Some Topics From 'The dRuby Book' Explained
A month ago, I shared the news of the Pragmatic Programmers releasing 'The dRuby Book' by Masatoshi Seki. Here, its translator Makoto Inoue goes through some of the topics covered in the book and shows off some uses of DRb.

How to Serve Your Rails Assets Over Amazon S3 with asset_sync

User Authentication with Rails and Backbone.js
Backbone.js is a handy JavaScript framework for developing webapps and Rails is similarly handy on the backend. James R Bracy of 42Floors shares how they use Rails and Backbone together and perform user authentication.

Testing Like The TSA
37signals' David Heinemeier Hansson says we need to shake any bad habits of 'over testing' our code, not aim for 100% test coverage, and avoid the 'TSA-style of testing.'

Gregory Brown Releases 15 Practicing Ruby Articles.. At Once!
Gregory Brown promised to keep releasing content from his Practicing Ruby journal and has now released 15 articles at once! Tricky to write this one up but Gregory's work is always a pleasure to read and you are bound to find some useful Ruby reading in here.

On Railcar: An Isolated Rails Environment
After seeing Yehuda Katz's Kickstarter for Rails.app (covered last week) Jeremy McAnally set to work on a similar project called Railcar. Here's the what, why, and how.

Driving Google Chrome via WebSocket API
Ilya Grigorik demonstrates how to control a Google Chrome browser from Ruby using its remote debugging API.

Rails Internals: Mass Assignment Security
A look at Rails' defences against mass assignment issues by Oscar Del Ben.

Matt Wynne On Using Cucumber
Cucumber is the popular framework for executing feature documentation written in plain text in your BDD process. Pat Shaughnessy sits down with Matt Wynne, co-author of The Cucumber Book, to talk about the ideas behind Cucumber and its design.

Super Charge your Rails App with Rack Cache and Memcache

Watching and Listening

Matz Talks About mruby and Its Possibilities
Back in November 2011, Matz gave a short (9 minutes!) but sweet talk about mruby, what it's about, and where it's headed.

The Ruby5 RailsConf 2012 Podcast
The Ruby5 podcast dedicated an entire episode to RailsConf 2012, summarizing DHH's keynote and talking about some of the other things going on, all in a mere 9 minutes.

RailsCasts on Queue Classic
The PostgreSQL database system can act as a worker queue for Rails apps replacing the need for a separate process to manage background jobs. Ryan Bates shows us how with the 'queue_classic' gem.

Rails Sustainable Productivity with Xavier Shay
At the LA Ruby Conference, Xavier Shay gave a talk about testing, data modelling, code organisation, build systems, and more, while suggesting many Rails Best Practices go against the building of solid and robust applications. 30 minutes long and well recorded/produced.

Migrating to PostgreSQL by RailsCasts
Ryan Bates continues his long line of awesome RailsCasts with a look at how to use the open source PostgreSQL database system with Rails and how to migrate an existing SQLite-backed Rails app to using it.

Designing Hypermedia APIs by Steve Klabnik
Steve Klabnik recently gave a talk on REST and Hypermedia APIs, the topic of his forthcoming book, Designing Hypermedia APIs. Audio isn't great but it's good to see Steve speak.

DSLs in Ruby
Kathy Van Stone delivers a talk about domain specific languages in Ruby, and shows a brief example. The talk is 40 minutes long and the audio quality somewhat better than Steve's talk above.

Ruby Rogues Talk to Jeff Casimir about Ruby Training
The Ruby Rogues sit down with renowned Ruby and Rails trainer Jeff Casimir to discuss his role with the Hungry Academy training program and to talk about the ideas behind training students in the art of programming generally.

Crafting Rails Applications with Jose Valim
The Ruby Rogues sit down with Jose Valim to discuss not only his popular book 'Crafting Rails Applications' but the actual art of crafting Rails apps itself. At 1h20m long, it's a deep dive, but perfect for the car!

Are Interpreters (Python/Ruby/PHP) Immoral?
A developer makes an impassioned plea for developers to learn compiled languages because 'interpreters for non trivial computation' are immoral and 'indefensible' due to their carbon footprint. Hmm.. yeah.. enjoy ;-)

Libraries and Code

rails-api: Rails for API Applications
Several popular Rubyists have built rails-api, a plugin that can trim down usually unnecessary Rails features for API-only apps. They are particularly keen for people to try it out and send in their performance results so that it might be added directly to Rails core in future.

T: A Command-Line Power Tool for Twitter (written in Ruby)

Authority: An ORM Agnostic Authorization System for Rails
Authority helps you authorize actions in your Rails app. It's ORM-neutral and has little fancy syntax. Just group your models under one or more Authorizer classes and write plain Ruby methods on them.

Pry 0.9.9 Released
Pry is a popular (and significantly more powerful) alternative to irb, the interactive Ruby console. Version 0.9.9 of Pry brings line-based code highlighting, method finding, and a torrent of general improvements.

Her: An ORM for REST APIs
Her is an ORM that map REST resources to Ruby objects. It maps HTTP responses to Ruby objects (through JSON) and adds methods to Ruby objects to trigger HTTP requests.

cache_method: An Easy Way to Cache Method Results
cache_method caches the results of calling methods given their arguments. It's like memoization, but the results are stored in Memcached, Redis, etc. so the cached results can be shared between processes and hosts.

redis_failover: A Ruby-based Solution for Redis Master/Slave Failover
Redis Failover is a ZooKeeper-based automatic master/slave failover solution for Ruby by Ryan LeCompte. (Apache ZooKeeper is a tool for centralized server configuration, coordination, and synchronization.)

Allowy: Another Simple Authorization DSL for Ruby (and Rails)

App Scrolls: Rails App Generation Magic from Dr Nic
The App Scrolls is a magical tool to generate new Rails and modify existing Rails applications (coming) to include your favourite, powerful magic. Authentication, testing, persistence, javascript, css, deployment, and templating - there's a magical scroll for you.

First NMatrix Alpha Released
Get your matrix math and linear algebra on with this prototype Ruby library.

MongoDB Ruby Driver 1.6.2 Released

rdoc-spellcheck: Check Your Documentation for Spelling Errors
A library by Eric Hodel that uses libaspell to spell check your RDoc documentation.

How DHH Has Tidied The Rails routes.rb File on BaseCamp Next

mongoid-minitest: Minitest Matchers for Mongoid

Jobs

Developer Advocate/Spokesperson/Evangelist at New Relic [San Francisco]
New Relic is the emerging standard for application performance management and wildly popular in the Ruby world. They're looking for a unique individual who can nimbly walk the line between development and marketing while wearing an Evangelist hat. Sounds fun!

Senior Web Engineer for Rapidly-Growing Education Business (Steve and Kate's Camp)
Steve and Kate's Camp is seeking a senior web software engineer ready to get their hands dirty now and interested in growing and leading a technical team down the road. Experience with TDD/BDD, Ruby, Rails, and devops all useful. Based in Sausalito, CA.

Senior Rails Engineer at Signature Labs [San Francisco]

Back-end Programmer Hedgeye Risk Management [New Haven, CT]

Senior Rails Engineer at Signature Labs [San Francisco, CA]

Last but not least..

Instant: A Live, Immediate Ruby Editing and Visualization Tool
An interesting browser based editing environment where the Ruby code you type is processed on the fly. Inspired by an awesome talk by Bret Victor who did something similar with JavaScript.

Rails One Click: Another Simple Rails Installer for OS X
I've mentioned both Rails.app and Railcar in recent issues, but Rails One Click is another entry to the 'Rails installer for OS X' melee. It's a complete installer with a nice design and well suited to beginners. It focuses on installing only the minimum required to get started building a Rails app.

JavaScript Weekly: Like Ruby Weekly But.. for JavaScript!
I've spoken to some readers recently who were surprised to learn I also run a JavaScript weekly newsletter, so I thought I'd give it another mention here. There's lots of exciting stuff happening in the JS world lately so if you want to keep up.. I've got the newsletter for you :-)

@JavaScriptDaily: A Twitter Alternative to JavaScript Weekly

The Mega March 2012 Ruby and Rails News and Release Roundup

2012-04-20T22:13:28Z

And again, a mixture of travel, illness, and exhaustion have prevented me from my weekly updates on here (although Ruby Weekly is still going out on a weekly basis!) so here's a bumper update for all of the top Ruby and Rails news from March 2012.

Highlights include: Matz wins a prize, Ruby is approved by the ISO, some awesome jobs, Bundler 1.1, Vagrant 1.0, Rails 3.2.3, Avdi Grimm's Object on Rails book, the Pragmatic Programmers release some more awesome books and, of course, a lot more.

Headlines

Matz Wins FSF's 2011 Award for the Advancement of Free Software
Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF's annual free software awards recently with Ruby's own Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto picking up the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. He joins a short list of open source heroes including Alan Cox, Larry Wall, and Guido van Rossum.

Released: 'The Rails View' by John Athayde and Bruce Williams
Working in Rails' view layer can be tricky with brittle, complex views all too easy to rustle up. This book digs into strategies and approaches for upping your Rails view game and breaking free from tangles of logic and markup in your views. Two thumbs up.

Objects on Rails: How to Apply Classic OO Ideas to Rails Apps
For a while now, Avdi Grimm has been slaving over a delicious 'developer's notebook' documenting guidelines, techniques, and ideas for applying classic object-oriented thought to Rails apps. He's now released it free to read on the Web. I recommend reading this, it's good.

Ruby Language Accepted As An International Standard by ISO
Dalla Rosa noticed a press release from Japan's IT Promotion Agency which notes that the long awaited Ruby specification (not to be confused with RubySpec) has been approved by the International Standards Organization as the ISO/IEC 30170 standard.

Rails 3.2.3 Released
The usual laundry list of minor changes but the biggest deal here is the default value of 'config.active_record.whitelist_attributes' becomes 'true', inspired by the recent GitHub mass assignment issue. Note that the change only affects newly generated apps but you can learn more in this post.

Yehuda Katz Raises $40k for 'rails.app', an OS X Rails Environment Installer
Recently Yehuda Katz (well known as the lead architect behind Rails 3) launched a campaign to raise $25k to build a Ruby and Rails environment installer for OS X. It has now gone on to raise over $40k but left some in the community wondering quite what was really needed.

Vagrant 1.0: Virtualized Development for the Masses
Vagrant is a popular VirtualBox-driven Ruby tool for quickly building and deploying virtual machines for development and testing purposes. After years of development, it has reached the all important 1.0 release. Congrats!

Bundler 1.1 is Out!
No official blog post yet, but Bundler 1.1 is out and you can grab it with a gem install bundler. The big win on this release is significantly improved performance when fetching gemsets with complex dependencies.

GitHub Public Key Security Vulnerability and Mitigation
GitHub experienced a security issue involving mass assignments in Rails. They've fixed it up now but you might want to get up to speed with what happened.

The Ruby on Rails Tutorial, Now With Twitter's Bootstrap
Michael Hartl has updated the new Rails 3.2 version of his popular 'Rails Tutorial' to use Twitter's increasingly popular Bootstrap framework.

ActiveResource Removed From Edge Rails (and Rails 4.0)
Just as it says in the title, but take care to scroll down to see the full story, since the proposal was initially deferred but has now been implemented. Active Resouce is now available as a separate project.

The Prags Release 'The dRuby Book'
Learn from legendary Japanese Ruby hacker Masatoshi Seki in this first English-language book on his own Distributed Ruby library (DRb). Pick up distributed programming ideas straight from the source here. Available in print and e-book formats.

RSpec 2.9 Released

Reading

Exploring Ruby's Regular Expression Algorithm
Pat Shaughnessy, Ruby implementation spelunker extraordinaire, digs into Oniguruma, the regular expression engine used by MRI Ruby 1.9. What does it do and how does it process your regexes?

Why You Should Be Excited About Garbage Collection in Ruby 2.0
Could it be Pat Shaughnessy again? Yes, sirree. Here he digs into the 'bitmap marking' garbage collection algorithm that promises to reduce Ruby's memory consumption in Ruby 2.0.

Using MiniTest::Spec With Rails
Ken Collins has been working on minitest-spec-rails, a gem that makes it reasonably trivial to use MiniTest::Spec (part of the Ruby 1.9 stdlib) with Rails. Learn how here. Ignore the date on this article, it was just updated!

Building Backbone.js Apps With Ruby, Sinatra, MongoDB and Haml
An extensive tutorial by Addy Osmani on building a Backbone.js at both the front and back ends. The server side part is powered by Ruby's light but powerful webapp DSL Sinatra.

Running JRuby on Heroku

Zero to Jekyll in 20 Minutes
Jonathan Jackson explains how to use the popular Jekyll blog-focused static Web site generator from scratch.

Building and Implementing a Single Sign-On Solution

What Would Happen If You Ran 'bundle update' Right Now?
Is there a bundle command to tell you what would be updated with bundle update, without actually making those updates? With Bundler 1.1.. yes there is!

GitHub's Ruby Style Guide
The folks at GitHub have put together a document outlining the Ruby styles and conventions they use for their internal apps. Plenty of good practice in here, along with a little opinion.

Learning More About JRuby from Charles Nutter
Pat Shaughnessy has interviewed Charles Nutter of the JRuby core team and digs into the meaning behind JRuby, what JRuby is well suited for, how its internals work, and where JRuby is headed in the future.

A Use of Enumerable#chunk
Enumerable#chunk is a not particularly well known method in the Enumerable module (and therefore available to your arrays and hashes by default) and in this post, Eric Hodel shows off a use for it.

How to Use Bundler Instead of RVM Gemsets
Stephen Ball recently heard Bundler maintainer Andre Arko say that Bundler can obviate the need to use RVM gemsets. In this post, he investigates the idea.

Rails Is Just An API
Alex MacCaw says there's nothing wrong with relegating Rails to the API layer.

Tailin' Ruby: 'Faking' Tail Call Optimization
By default, Ruby doesn't implement tail call optimization (although it can be enabled in various ways in 1.9) so Magnus Holm set out to try and 'fake' it. An interesting experiment.

How to Test External APIs
It's common to integrate with an external API and in order to effectively test the integration, you might want to stub it out. Jared Carroll of Carbon Five shares a testing strategy using stubs for an external API.

How to Write (and Test) a Gem to Serve Static Files on the Rails Asset Pipeline

Ruby 2.0's Enumerable::Lazy
Innokenty Mihailov's Enumerable::Lazy patch was accepted into Ruby trunk this week which gives us some ActiveRecord 3-style 'lazy evaluation' features on enumerations in Ruby. Worth checking out as a key new feature to come along in Ruby 2.0.

API Versions in Rails Routes: A Mind Blowing Answer?
Ryan Bigg promises to 'blow your mind' in his answer on Stack Overflow that shows some Rails 3 routing magic (in the context of versioning an API through the URL).

Sinatra + Heroku = Super Fast Deployment
Darren Jones demonstrates creating a very simple Sinatra app and deploying it on Heroku.

How to Write MiniTest::Spec Expectations

Getting the Most out of Bundler Groups
Bundler lets you create different 'groups' in your Gemfile so different environments can have different dependencies. Iain Hecker shows off some uses for this feature.

Use Different User Agents Per Cucumber Scenario

Gracefully Exiting from Console Programs in Ruby

Why doesn't Nokogiri have a .gemspec file in its repository?

Yehuda Katz's Proposal for Improving Mass Assignment (in Rails)
After the GitHub issue (above), Rails 3 guru Yehuda Katz came up with a proposal for improving how mass assignment works in Rails. I don't agree with the approach but it sparked an interesting discussion.

The NOR Machine: Building a CPU With Only One Instruction
Have you ever developed in an assembly language? Have you developed an assembly language? Ever developed a CPU running your own assembly language? Alexander Demin shows you how in this fun Ruby-oriented walkthrough.

Flexible Searching with Solr and Sunspot
Mike Pack outlines how the Solr full text search server can benefit your project's indexing capabilities and shows how Solr can be used within a Rails app using Sunspot.

A Common .ruby-version File For Ruby Projects
Got .rvmrc and .rbenv-version (and possibly more) floating around your projects? What if we had an ecosystem of fabulous Ruby managers that all understood the semantics of a generic dotfile like '.ruby-version'? Here's a proposal to weigh in on.

Wizard-ify Your Rails Controllers with Wicked
Multi-page 'wizards' are popular in both desktop software and webapps and Wicked by Richard Schneeman brings a way to make them easier to produce in a Rails app.

Load Balancing and Reverse Proxying with Nginx (for Rails Apps)
Nginx is a modern, open-source, high-performance web server that's well known in the Rails hosting world. In this post, Justin Kulesza demonstrates how to do a load balanced, reverse proxying setup with Nginx for a Rails app.

Why Critics of Rails Have It All Wrong (and Ruby's Bright Multicore Future)

What is docrails?
docrails is a branch of Ruby on Rails with public write access where anyone can push documentation fixes. Xavier Noria explains how it works.

The Hardest, Most Rewarding Job I've Ever Had
Mitchell Hashimoto of the Vagrant project (which recently hit 1.0 - above) shares his take on the history of Vagrant and the experiences it brought him. Always nice to see a post like this.

Watching and Listening

RailsCasts on Copycopter
Copycopter provides an interface that clients can use to edit the text in a Rails application. Learn how to deploy a Copycopter server using Heroku and integrate it in a Rails application through I18n.

PeepCode Play by Play: Jim Weirich
PeepCode continues its Play by Play screencast series with Jim Weirich, the author of the ubiquitous Rake build tool for Ruby and chief scientist at EdgeCase. Want a view over an experienced Rubyist's shoulder? This is a good place to go.

Don't Fear The Threads: Simplify Your Life with JRuby
An epic 161 slide slide-deck by David Copeland, focused on threading and JRuby.

Inside Ruby: Concurrency and Garbage Collection Explained
Matt Aimonetti's presentation from Ruby Argentina has finally been released. Skip a few minutes in unless you want to enjoy Matt's Spanish skills.

14 Presentation Videos from ArrrrCamp 2011
Videos from last year's ArrrrCamp have been released, including presentations by Corey Haines, Elise Huard, Jim Gay, Anthony Eden and John Long.

RubyConf Argentina 2011 - Day 1
It must be the week for releasing conference videos. RubyConf Argentina (back in November 2011) has released theirs too.

Refinery CMS Basics with RailsCasts
Ryan Bates shows off how to quickly build a Rails app with out of the box content management using the Rails-based CMS, Refinery CMS.

Love Your Lib Directory
Brian Cardarella shares some conventions over the use of the 'lib' directory within Ruby projects and libraries. A 20 minute talk given at Boston.rb.

Ruby Rogues on Bundler with Andre Arko
The lovable rogues are back for another hour long podcast, this time discussing the Bundler project with its maintainer Andre Arko.

Libraries and Code

Rubydeps: Create Dependency Graphs from Test Suites
Rubydeps is a tool to create class dependency graphs from test suites. It runs your suite, records the call graph between the classes, and uses this info to create a Graphviz dot graph.

Weary: Framework and DSL for Building RESTful Web Service Clients
Mark Wunsch's Weary is a suite of tools built around the Rack ecosystem that makes it both easy to build elegant clients for (ideally RESTful) Web services.

debugger: Port of ruby-debug That Works on 1.9.2 and 1.9.3

store_configurable: A Hash for Config Options on ActiveRecord Objects
A zero-configuration recursive hash for storing a tree of options in a serialized ActiveRecord column.

Proffer: Hide Instance Variables from Rails Views by Default

S3itch: Amazon S3 WebDAV Proxy for Skitch
Popular OS X screenshot tool Skitch is dropping its native file sharing component so Mathias Meyer has built a Sinatra-based proxy that can accept files over WebDAV and then upload them to S3.

rankable_graph: A Ruby PageRank-Like Implementation

minitest-metadata: Metadata for your MiniTest Test Cases
minitest-metadata allows you to set metadata (key-value) for your test cases so that before and after hooks can use them.

Non-Rails Rackup with Sprockets, Compass, and Twitter Bootstrap

RSpec is Not The Reason Your Rails Test Suite is Slow
In a simple gist, RSpec maintainer David Chelimsky dispels the myth that RSpec drags slowness around with it, wherever it goes.

Oj: Optimized JSON Parser and Marshaller

Ry: The Simplest Ruby Version Manager
We have RVM, we have rbenv.. we now have 'ry' too! It bills itself as the 'simplest Ruby virtual environment' and its major design goal is to explicit, unobtrusive, and easy to query. It can also lean on ruby-build to install new versions.

Rake-Pipeline: Rake-Powered Asset Packaging
A system for packaging assets for deployment to the web built as an extension to Rake. Developed by the masterminds over at Living Social.

Capital: 'Top Off' Your ActiveRecord Columns
Capital extends what's returned via your model's columns, converting values to and from 'rich objects.' It's inspired by MongoMapper's serialization.

Ruby-Doc.com: Ruby and Rails API Docs Hosted on S3
Rob Cameron was getting tired of slow or inaccessible Ruby and Rails docs so has rendered and put up an entire set of Ruby and Rails API docs (various versions) on Amazon S3.

VCR 2.0.0 Released: Recording Your Tests' HTTP Interactions
VCR is a library for recording a test suite's HTTP interactions to replay during future runs. Version 2 is now out and brings a lot more flexibility, custom request matchers and serializers, request hooks, and more.

'wow how come I commit in master? O_o'
The Rails commit that started the drama around the GitHub / Rails mass assignment issue. Linked for posterity but also because the comments turned into the typical meme-fest.

Zonebie: Timezone Randomization for Robust Time Tests
Zonebie helps you hunt down bugs in code that deals with timezones by randomly assigning a different timezone on each run.

Metriks: A Simple, Lightweight Ruby Metrics Experiment
An experiment in making a thread-safe, low impact library to measure performance metrics in your Ruby apps. One of the most interesting uses is to have it update your process's title so the metrics info appears live in ps or top!

md2man: Markdown to Man Page
A Ruby library and command-line program that converts Markdown documents into UNIX manual pages.

Rails Best Practices: Code Metric Tool to Check Rails Code Quality

Rocket Pants: Tools for Building Well Designed Web APIs
A humorously named and highly opinionated toolkit for building well-designed Web APIs, with a focus on Rails.

MethodProfiler: Get Performance Info about Methods on Your Objects
MethodProfiler collects performance information about the methods in your objects and creates reports to help you identify slow methods. The collected data can be sorted in various ways, converted into an array, or pretty printed as a table.

Jobs

Rails Developer at On The Beach [Manchester, UK]
One of the better designed and more creative job ad pages I've seen!

Ruby and Web Developer at Hubbub [Highbury, London, UK]
Pass a simple API challenge to apply..

Ruby Developers for an Awesome Social Media Co. (Wildfire Interactive) [Bay Area, California]

Web Engineer at Sports Technologies, LLC [Canton, Connecticut]

There's more to life than CRUD: Solve hard problems with Ruby at MegaPhone Labs [New York City]

Rails Developer at Infusionsoft [Phoenix, Arizona]

Ruby Agent Engineer at New Relic [Portland, Oregon]

Ruby on Rails Developer at ManageIQ [Mahwah, New Jersey]

Ruby Developer at Decisiv, Inc. [Remote working OK]

Mid-Senior Ruby Software Engineers at FreeAgent [Edinburgh, United Kingdom (Remote poss)]

Last but not least..

'Working With Unix Processes' by Jesse Storimer
Jesse Storimer doesn't think you should need to learn C to pick up some intricacies of Unix and Unix-style systems. In this (pay for) e-book he takes a Ruby based approach at explaining file descriptors, processes and forking, signals, and more.

Cloudinary: Image Manipulation in the Cloud
A lot of webapp developers seem sick of installing things like ImageMagic to do image cropping and scaling. Cloudinary adds another solution. It's a commercial service but makes it easy to do image manipulations via URLs.

Heroku Add-ons Catalog
There are lots of add-ons for the Heroku cloud hosting service nowadays but Ivan Schneider thought they were hard to scan through, merely being in an alphabetical list, so he built a different way to browse them.

The Mega Ruby News and Release Roundup for February 2012

2012-03-02T15:35:56Z

Oops! I forgot to post the weekly Ruby news updates from Ruby Weekly to Ruby Inside in February so.. here's a mega roundup of all that was new in the Ruby and Rails worlds in February 2012. I'll try to keep posting every week from here on - sorry.

Highlights include: a new Ruby 1.9.3 release, REE's end of life, Spree 1.0, some Rails 4 news, Devise 2.0, a new private gem hosting service.. and that's just scratching the surface :-) Enjoy! (And don't forget to subscribe to Ruby Weekly if you want to receive something like this every week via e-mail or The Ruby Show if you want it in podcast/audio form.)

Headlines

Ruby 1.9.3-p125 Released
Patchlevel 125 of Ruby 1.9.3 is the latest production release of MRI. It adds LLVM/clang support (ideal for OS X Lion users), GCC 4.7 support, and includes security fixes in the OpenSSL extension.

Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2012.02 released; End of Life Imminent
Phusion has unveiled the latest release of REE which is based on Ruby 1.8.7-p358 and RubyGems 1.8.15 and is compatible with XCode 4 and OS X Lion. However, REE is being slowly retired and no Ruby 1.9 version is forthcoming for several reasons.

JRuby 1.6.7 Released: More 1.9 Fixes

Full Draft of 'Rails Tutorial' 2nd Edition is Now Available
Michael Hartl, author of 'Rails Tutorial', has finished a draft of a new Rails 3.2-focused edition of the popular book and Web site. This is a popular way to learn Rails and it's only getting better!

Spree 1.0 Released (Rails-based E-commerce System)
Spree is almost certainly the most popular, fully featured Rails-based e-commerce system and its creators are proud to announce the release of version 1.0.0. This follows the $1.5M seed funding of Spree's parent company in October 2011.

RubyMine 4.0 (Ruby IDE) Released
RubyMine is a popular Ruby and Rails IDE by JetBrains (the folks behind IntelliJ IDEA). A focus has been put on improving its performance and UI, but it now also supports all of Rails 3.2 features, including CoffeeScript compilation right from the IDE.

Refinery CMS 2.0.0 Released
Refinery CMS is a Rails based CMS which in its new 2.0.0 incarnation is now fully Rails 3.2 and asset pipeline compliant. This post sums up some of the changes. Congrats to them.

For Rails 4, PATCH Is The New Primary HTTP Method for Updates
Xavier Noria of the Rails core team shares a new development that's in edge Rails (and due to be released in Rails 4): switching to using HTTP's 'PATCH' verb for making partial updates to resources.

Code School Unleashes 'Rails Testing for Zombies'

British Government's New Portal Built on Ruby, Rails and Sinatra
The British Government has launched the beta of 'gov.uk', a new attempt to centralize government Web sites. Ruby is not a focus of this article but it's revealed that Ruby makes up 'most of the application code' with a mixture of Rails and Sinatra.

Reading

The History of Rubinius
A beautifully presented magazine article by Evan Phoenix about the background to Rubinius' creation and its development all the way up to 1.0. Not much tech stuff in here but a truly heartwarming story about the little Ruby implementation that could.

The Joke Is On Us: How Ruby 1.9 Supports the Goto Statement
Pat Shaughnessy is back with a dive into Ruby's support for the concept of "goto" (a la your favorite pre 1990s programming languages). Did you realize Ruby has a hidden feature to support GOTOs and labels? Neither did I. Wow!

The Pry Ecosystem (the awesome alternative to IRB)
Pry is a popular alternative to IRB and in this post, its creator John Mair looks at several of the additional plugins people have developed for it.

Five Favorite 'Hidden' Features in Rails 3.2
Jose Valim shows off five features of Rails 3.2 that he particularly digs. An enjoyable list; I didn't know of any of these.

How To Build a Naive Bayes Classifier
Want to do spam detection, classification, language detection or similar? Bayes classification may be for you. This post walks through how it works before producing a Ruby implementation.

Dave Thomas on 'Smart Constants' in Ruby

An Introduction to Ruboto: Ruby + Android
Marc Berszick presents a practical introduction to Ruboto, technology that allows you to run Ruby scripts on Android devices.

A Chat with Nick Quaranto About RubyGems.org Internals
An interesting and extremely visual interview with Nick Quaranto of RubyGems.org about how the site works and how gems are stored and distributed. Lots of interesting stuff in here.

Using Rails 3.2 With Ruby 1.9.3 on Heroku
Daniel Kehoe has updated his Rails on Heroku tutorial to support Rails 3.2 and Ruby 1.9.3. Want to get a new Rails app up and running on Heroku? This is a fine place to start.

37signals: Code Statistics for Basecamp Next
37signals' Basecamp was the app from which Rails was initially extracted, so it's interesting to see how 37signals are using Rails to build the next, fully rewritten version. The real value here is in the comments where DHH answers many questions about their stack.

Building A Unix Shell in Ruby
The first article in a series where 'Working with Unix Processes' author Jesse Storimer implements a Unix shell in pure Ruby code.

Is Ruby Interpreted or Compiled?
Pat Shaughnessy returns with yet another great article diving into the world of Ruby intepreters and execution. This time he looks at the compilers in Rubinius and JRuby and what they're producing.

Rails Went Off The Rails: Why I'm Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript
The never-dull Giles Bowkett explains why he thinks Rails is old and busted and picks quite a few Ruby related scabs along the way. Sure, it's dramatic, but you might enjoy it.

Ruby Patterns from GitHub's Codebase
Zach Holman of GitHub presents some things that the developers at GitHub have done to help with the maintainability and reliability of their Ruby apps. Key takeaways are their 'bootstrap' script and using TomDoc for documentation.

Let's Write a Gem
Stephen Ball presents a two part series on building a Ruby library and gem from scratch including best practices like BDD.

Work-Stealing and Recursive Partitioning with Fork/Join in JRuby
The Fork/Join framework in JDK7 implements a clever work-stealing technique for parallel execution. Ilya Grigorik explains what it does and shows off some JRuby-based examples.

Watching & Listening

Ruby Trick Shots: 24 Ruby Tips and Tricks in a Screencast
Over the years I've collected 100+ bite-sized Ruby tips and tricks that I've seen surprise other Rubyists. I have bigger plans for them but decided to record a video showing off 24 of them. Enjoy these.. Ruby trick shots!

Watch Steve Klabnik Hacking on RubyGems
Steve Klabnik has shared a 50 minute video of him working on a pull request for the RubyGems project. It's not a focused or narrated video but if watching a master at work sounds interesting to you, check it out.

Ruby Freelancers — A New Podcast on the Business of Ruby Dev
Ruby Freelancers is a new podcast focusing on the art of being a freelance Ruby or Rails developer. Things kick off with Charles Max Wood, Eric Davis, Evan Light, and Jeff Schoolcraft at the helm.

Play by Play with Aaron 'Tenderlove' Patterson
PeepCode has released the latest in its 'play by play' series with a two hour peep over the shoulder of popular Rubyist Aaron Patterson's shoulder. It costs a little money but it has gotten an excellent reaction so far.

Twitter Bootstrap Basics by RailsCasts
If you're not yet sick of hearing about Twitter Bootstrap or want to learn how to work with it using Rails, Ryan Bates' latest screencast is a great place to start.

Code

Devise 2.0 Released: The Flexible Auth System Grows Up
Devise 2.0 is here but it's aimed at deprecations rather than new features. Nonetheless, it adds Rails 3.2 support and supports e-mail reconfirmation. Beware though, it now only supports Rails 3.1 and above.

Sidekiq: Efficient Resque-compatible Message Processing for Rails 3
Got lots of Resque processes running at once? Sidekiq offers 'simple, efficient message processing' for Rails 3 applications and due to its actor-based concurrency, a single Sidekiq process could do the work of many Resque ones.

Virtus 0.2.0: Attributes on Steroids for Plain Old Ruby Objects
Virtus is a partial extraction of the DataMapper Property API with which you can extend your Ruby objects with attributes that require data type coercions. Handier than it sounds; see the README examples.

AlterEgo: Hosted Two Factor Authentication for your Web App
A gem to access AlterEgo, a two factor authentication service built by MailChimp, the folks I use to send Ruby Weekly each week :-)

Prickle: A Simple DSL Extending Capybara
Capybara has become the de facto Ruby acceptance test framework for web apps and Prickle takes things a step further with extra methods for finding elements, performing actions, and more.

Newman: A Microframework for Email-based Apps
Still in a highly experimental state, Newman is a micro-framework aiming to do for email-based applications what Rack and Sinatra have done for web apps. Gregory Brown leads the project.

Heads Up: A Rails and JS Powered Desktop Heads Up Display
Heads Up is a simple HUD showing your calendar items for today, your unread emails and custom notes. The interesting part is it's an OS X app, yet it's built on Rails, JavaScript (using Spine), Rack::Offline and MacGap.

A Patched Ruby 1.9.3-p0 for A 30% Faster Rails Boot
A somewhat adhoc set of patches to boost the performance of Ruby 1.9.3-p0 have been floating around on GitHub this week. Tread with caution but it may appeal to you. Hopefully the ideas will make their way into MRI proper.

Plymouth: Start Pry in the Context of a Failed Test
Pry is an awesome alternative to the IRB Ruby console and Plymouth will automatically bring up a Pry session when a test fails in your suite, putting you right into the context of the failure. Supports Bacon, Minitest and RSpec.

SimpleForm 2.0: Rails Form Creator, Now With Twitter Bootstrap Support
SimpleForm is a popular DSL for creating forms in Rails apps and version 2 is now out. It includes a new wrapper API to create custom input stacks and also includes some integration features for Twitter Bootstrap.

A Rails 3 App in a Single File

UnixUtils: Like FileUtils But For Using Unix Tools
Like FileUtils, but provides access to zip, unzip, bzip2, bunzip2, tar, untar, sed, du, md5sum, shasum, cut, head, tail, wc, curl, etc. The README explains why you wouldn't want to just spawn these yourself.

Ruby Jobs of the Month

Ruby on Rails Developer at WegoWise, Inc. [Boston, Massachusetts]

Junior Rails Developer at Harvest [New York, New York]

Rails Software Engineer at ZestCash [Los Angeles, California]

Senior Rails Engineer at G5 Search Marketing [Bend, Oregon]

Rails Developer at New Relic [San Francisco, California]

Web Development Engineer at G5 Search Marketing [Bend, Oregon]

Senior Ruby Engineer at Spinnakr [District of Columbia]

Veteran Rubyist to Join Team of Financial Software Engineers at Fynanz, Inc. [New York City]

Miscellaneous

Ruby Reloaded #5 Coming in March, Sign Up to be Notified
No big announcement yet but you can now sign up to be notified when Ruby Reloaded 5 is taking place (sometime in March) as well as get a discount. If you don't know what Ruby Reloaded even is (it's an online course I run), you can read about that too! :-)

Flowstone 2: A Ruby-based Graphical Programming Environment
Flowstone is a commercial Ruby-based graphical development environment aimed at the robotics and device control field. Certainly looks interesting from the screenshots and a restricted free version is available to download (Windows only).

Ruby and Rails Documentation Apps for the iPhone and iPad
Pandalab has put together two free, reasonable looking iPad and iPhone apps for looking up Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3 documentation (note: they offer an in app purchase to remove their ad). If only I'd bought my iPad into the office today to try them out..

Gemfury: A Private Gem Hosting Service in the Cloud
Gemfury is a hosted service for private and custom gems. Upload your gems, enable Gemfury as a source, and you can securely deploy any gem to any host.

Events

Steel City Ruby Conf - Pittsburgh, PA - August 3-4, 2012

Registration Open for Madison Ruby Conference (August 2012)

Aloha Ruby Conference - Oct 8-9, 2012 - Honolulu, Hawaii

This Week in Ruby: Rails 3.2, Rails Tutorial, and Why You Should Learn Smalltalk

2012-01-28T01:35:19Z

It's the latest Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the weekly Ruby and Rails e-mail newsletter (which just tipped 11K subscribers). Ruby Weekly now has a 'tips' page where you can submit links for potential inclusion so if you're releasing something or have written a cool post, fill out the form and you may be in Ruby Weekly next week :-)

Headlines

Rails 3.2 Released
DHH has unveiled Rails 3.2! Not quite as big a deal as 3.1 but has a faster development mode, faster route recognition, a tagged logger, and more. With Rails master now aiming at 4.0.0, it seems 3.2 may be the last version of Rails to support Ruby 1.8.

Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 2nd Edition (Updated for Rails 3.2)
Michael Hartl's "Rails Tutorial" site has been incredibly popular over the last year and he's now finishing up a 2nd edition that's fully updated to Rails 3.2 standards. The first 5 chapters are already good to go and can be read no-cost, as always, at railstutorial.org.

Articles and Tutorials

Backing Up with Backup: A Neat DSL for Backup Operations
Pat Allan loves Michael van Rooijen's 'backup' gem so much that he wants to to convince you to use it, by showing you two examples of why he finds it so useful. It does seem pretty handy..

Why Every Ruby Developer Should Learn Smalltalk
Smalltalk was the first purely object oriented language (though Simula included objects before it) and it heavily inspired Ruby's initial development. Victor Savkin thinks that Rubyists could learn a lot from playing with Smalltalk.

The Right Way to Code DCI in Ruby
DCI (Data, Context and Interaction) is an interesting object oriented pattern that's been discussed in the Ruby community lately, but Mike Pack thinks most articles oversimplify its use. In this post, he digs into the idea.

The 'Rails and Spine.JS' Series
Ken Collins is working on a series of posts about using the Spine.js JavaScript MVC framework alongside a Rails app. This is the first of three posts so far.

systemd Socket Activation and Ruby
systemd is a system and service manager for Linux (and replacement for the System V init daemon). Here, Marcin Kulik looks at how a socket-based Ruby server can take advantage of systemd's socket activation feature.

RVM Stable (and More)
Michal Papis of Engine Yard looks at the 'stable' release of RVM (Ruby Version Manager) and how to install and use it. Some handy RVM tips here.

Modularized Association Methods in Rails 3.2

Testing Rails Engines With RSpec

Factory Girl 2.5 Gets Custom Constructors

Media

RailsCasts: Upgrading to Rails 3.2
In the latest RailsCasts episode, Ryan Bates looks at the newly released Rails 3.2 and shows off some of its new features. Short and sweet in just 9 minutes.

Web Programming and Updating Frameworks with Yehuda Katz
The Ruby Rogues sit down with Yehuda Katz to discuss Web frameworks, JavaScript, Rails, Merb, Sinatra, Rack, and more. And just why is to_json a problem? If you have a spare hour, find out :-)

Libraries and code

SitemapGenerator: Generate XML Sitemaps from Ruby
Originally a Google idea, XML sitemaps are now used by several search engines and SitemapGenerator will generate Sitemap 0.9 compliant sitemaps for you from Ruby. Includes Rails integration too but is otherwise framework agnostic.

tconsole: A MiniTest Testing Console for Rails
tconsole is a testing console for Rails based around MiniTest (also supporting Test::Unit). It allows you to issue commands concerning what tests to run, and see their test output.

Lisp in 32 Lines of Ruby
Implementing a small Lisp interpreter is the super geeky equivalent of 'hello world' and Michael Fogus (author of The Joy of Clojure) deftly pulls it off in 32 lines of Ruby here.

Tork: Continuous Testing using Forked Processes

Ruby Jobs of the Week

Rubyist (or Pythonista) Required at RackSpace [San Antonio, Texas]
Hosting company Rackspace is looking for a developer with Ruby or Python experience (and maybe even Erlang!) to work in its foundation software development team. If Git, Capistrano, MongoDB, and Rails are all interesting to you, check it out.

Ruby Framework Engineer Job at Zendesk [San Francisco]

Want your job featured in Ruby Weekly? Learn more here.

This Week in Ruby: Nominate Your Ruby Heroes, Include/Extend, Ruby on Netbeans, Jekyll-Bootstrap, and more

2012-03-23T01:25:52Z

Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, my Ruby e-mail newsletter.

Headlines

Vote for your 'Ruby Hero' in the Ruby Hero Awards
The Ruby Heroes awards run each year and present 6 community nominated 'heroes' with an award at RailsConf. Nominations are now open so go and drop your nomination for the Rubyist whose code has brightened up your life the most in the past year.

Heroku Receives InfoWorld's Technology of the Year Award
Sorry it's just a press release but it's great to see a company that came up from the Ruby world continue to do well. Congrats to the Heroku team.

Articles and Tutorials

Hashes and Encapsulation
Jon Leighton demonstrates why accessing hash elements in a "obj.hashthings['foo']" style isn't the way to go and how to act in a way that respects encapsulation, a tenet of object orientation.

Explaining Ruby's Include and Extend
Aaron Lasseigne gives a simple introduction to the ideas behind the 'include' and 'extend' methods.

Why Sinatra's Halt is Awesome
Myron Marston draws attention to Sinatra's 'halt' method which you can use to immediate stop a request within a filter or route, and explains why he likes it for handling exceptions in Sinatra apps.

Replace Your Test Helpers with a Reusable API
Eric Hodel makes an interesting argument that instead of leaning on test helper files all of the time, perhaps there are common bits of functionality you can bake into your library or app's own APIs.

assert_nothing_tested..
Ryan Davis demonstrates why his popular minitest testing library doesn't have an assert_nothing_raised assertion by picking on a relatively useless test in Rails.

A Workaround for Ruby Support on Netbeans 7.1
Back in February 2011, Netbeans (a popular IDE) dropped its official support for Ruby but the JRuby team offered to pick up the slack. Thomas Enebo has been working on it and has some code to make Ruby support work on Netbeans 7.1 here.

Faster TDD Feedback With tmux, tslime.vim, and turbux.vim

Rails or Sinatra: The Best of Both Worlds?
Over at RubySource, Darren Jones rounds up the opinions and assessments of several well known Rubyists when it comes to choosing Sinatra or Rails for a project. An interesting high level collection of ideas.

How to do Fuzzy Matching in Ruby with fuzzy_match

Media

The Ruby Rogues on Versioning and Releases
The world's favorite Ruby podcast, Ruby Rogues, is back with an episode all about the versioning of code, Ruby libraries, gems, and more. This time out, James Edward Gray II takes the helm.

Private Pub (RailsCasts)
Private Pub is a gem for use with Rails to publish and subscribe to real-time messages through Faye. You get real-time updates through an open socket without tying up a Rails process. Ryan Bates shows you how to use it in a mere 7 minutes.

Libraries and code

ROFLBALT: A Terminal-based ASCII Side Scroller Game
At RailsCamp X, Paul Annesley and Dennis Hotson built this nifty little side scrolling game which works straight from your terminal (256 color support needed though). Surprisingly good for a quick effort.

TwoStroke: A JavaScript Implementation Written in Ruby
Charlie Somerville presents an interesting working (but incomplete) JavaScript implementation, written entirely in Ruby. One of those projects that may seem useful somewhere down the line but for now is just a neat idea.

Guard::RSpectacle: An RSpec Plugin for Guard
Guard::RSpectacle automatically tests your application with RSpec when files are modified. This sounds like guard-rspec on the surface, but RSpectacle acts as an 'embedded' runner within a running Rails app and reloads changed files on the fly.

Juvia: An Open Source Commenting System from Phusion
For a while now, Hongli Lai of Phusion (the geniuses behind Passenger and REE) has been working on a Rails-based open source commenting system that you can include into your site using JavaScript.

Jekyll-Bootstrap: A Quick Way to Start Off Your Own Jekyll-Powered Site
Jekyll is a blog-focused static site generator, and Jekyll users often recommend cloning an existing Jekyll blog to use as a starting point. Jekyll-Bootstrap takes this idea to the next level by attempting to be the definitive Jekyll framework to clone.

Socialization: Liking and Following for your Rails 3 Apps

OEmbedr: Lightweight, Flexible OEmbed Consumer Library
oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites OEmbedr makes consuming oEmbed from any source simple.

Hobson: A Resque-based Distributed Test Runner
Hobson distributes your test suite across N machines and aggregates the results live on a locally run webapp. I haven't tried it yet but on a trawl through the source code it seems to be for Cucumber and RSpec only.

Cracking WPA networks with MacRuby

Vesper: A New Sinatra-based Webapp Framework
Yes, it's 'yet another' webapp framework but Vesper is based on top of Sinatra, already has several plugins, and features a handy 6 minute screencast on its homepage.

Ruby Jobs of the Week

Ruby Framework Engineer Job at Zendesk [San Francisco]
The fantastic folks over at Zendesk, the help desk and support ticket app, are looking for a creative and seasoned Ruby engineer to focus on improving their code base. They want full stack engineers who can improve and refactor their frameworks and lead an open source effort by publishing some of the resulting gems.

Ruby on Rails Developer at Unpakt [New York City]

Want your job featured in Ruby Weekly? Learn more here.

Last but not least..

Owning Rails: Marc Andre Cournoyer's Online Rails Masterclass
Marc Andre Cournoyer (of Create Your Own Programming Language fame) is running another of his highly praised 2 day, online Rails masterclasses. Marc's given me a discount code you can use to get 80 dollars off - it's 'rubyweekly'. I disclose that I make a commission on this but I won't promote trash and the testimonials speak for themselves :-)

The Programming Language Masterclass: Another Marc-Andre Class
Along similar lines, Marc Andre Cournoyer also runs a more general class aimed at giving you an understanding of the inner workings of programming languages and programming language implementation. 'SAVEME50' gets you a discount and it's in mid February.

The Last Week in Ruby: RSpec 2.8, Redcar 0.12, Torquebox 2.0 beta, articles and more

2012-01-16T02:47:08Z

Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the Ruby e-mail newsletter. While I have you, be sure to follow @RubyInside on Twitter as I'm going to be posting news more frequently there than on the Web site in future.

Follow @RubyInside

Also, if you're interested in getting one interesting programming related quote or link each day on Twitter, check out @codewisdom.

Follow @CodeWisdom

Headlines

RSpec 2.8: The Popular Ruby BDD Tool Goes Supersonic
RSpec 2.8 and rspec-rails 2.8.1 have been released and some users have been reporting significant performance improvements. Other tweaks include improved documentation, better tag and filtering options, random example execution, and 'rspec --init' for adding RSpec to an empty Ruby project.

TorqueBox 2.0 Beta 2 Released
Torquebox is a popular JBoss-powered application server for Ruby webapps that provides a smorgasbord of useful backend features. This beta of the 2.0 release boasts the latest versions of JRuby and JBoss and new support for WebSockets/STOMP.

Redcar 0.12 Released: An Editor Built in Ruby
Redcar is a programmers' text editor written in Ruby and this latest release has streamlined its installation and added Mac OS X Lion support.

Articles and Tutorials

The Status of DataMapper
DataMapper is a popular Ruby ORM and an interesting alternative to ActiveRecord. In this post, Piotr Solnica explains what's happening with DataMapper 2.0 and how it aims to implement the Data Mapper pattern in full. The systems outlined in this post could resolve a lot of issues people have been having with ActiveRecord, it seems.

Does My Rails App Need A Service Layer?
Jared Carroll picks up on a common thread being discussed in the Rails world lately: service layers. He explains what 'services' are, what types of service can exist, and tries to briefly explain his opinion on their usage within the context of Rails. I'm not entirely comfortable with his conclusion but it's a good introduction nonetheless.

An Exhaustive Explanation of Minimax: A Staple AI Algorithm
An appealing explanation of an algorithm that can be used to 'intelligently' play Tic Tac Toe, complete with a simple Ruby implementation.

How Airbnb Upgraded from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.0

Rails Development on Ubuntu 11.10: Setting Up a Dev Environment
Eric Proctor wanted to refresh his setup for 2012 so sat down to install a Rails development stack from scratch on Ubuntu 11.10. He shares the process here in case you want to repeat it for yourself.

How to Create A Local Copy of the Rails API Docs and Guides
If you're like many Rails developers, you might frequently hit the Rails docs and guides via Google searches, but if you want access to these useful resources when offline, Aslam Najeebdeen has the answer.

Hosting Your Own Local RubyGems Server
Want to have your own in-house RubyGems server? It's easy and Michael Erasmus shows you how in this post.

Ruby Float Quirks
Clemens Helm stumbles across a rudimentary floating point representation issue, but one that can trip you up nonetheless if you're not aware of it.

Installing RefineryCMS with Rails 3.1.3

Capybara, Cucumber and How the Cookie Crumbles
Steve Richert of Collective Idea wanted to punch through Capybara and be able to set cookies that would "Just Work" from anywhere in his Cucumber suite. Here, he shows you how he did it.

DDD Aggregates in Rails with ActiveRecord

Screencasts

Pretty URLs with FriendlyId (RailsCasts)
If you are tired of model ids in the URL, overriding to_param can only get you so far. The friendly_id plugin can help by making it easy to generate a URL slug and maintain a history. Ryan Bates shows us how in a mere 7 minutes.

Libraries and code

Puma: A Ruby Web Server Built For Concurrency
Puma is a simple, fast, and highly concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby webapps. It can be used with any application that supports Rack and makes the audacious claim that it 'is considered the replacement for WEBrick and Mongrel.'

confstruct: Yet Another Configuration Object for Ruby
Confstruct optimistically bills itself as 'yet another configuration gem.' It's definable and configurable by hash, struct, or block and aims to provide the flexibility to do things your way, while keeping things simple and intuitive.

coffee-script-pure: A Pure Ruby CoffeeScript Compiler
CoffeeScript was originally implemented in Ruby so it's interesting to see Charlie Somerville bring it full circle by reimplementing the current CoffeeScript compiler in pure Ruby.

gon-sinatra: Get Your Sinatra Variables in your JavaScript

rack_session_access: Rack Middleware for 'rack.session' Environment Management
rack_session_access makes it possible to change values within the application session of your Rack-backed app.

Rglpk: Ruby Wrapper for the GNU Linear Programming Kit

liquid.js: A JS, In-Browser Implementation of the Liquid Templating Language

Ruby Jobs of the Week

Ruby and Rails Entwickler bei blau Mobilfunk GmbH [Hamburg, Deutschland]
Unfortunately I don't speak German but it's great to see a wider variety of locations in the jobs. So if you're looking for a Rails job in Germany or know someome who is, check this out.

Lead Rails Developer at Unpakt [New York, New York]

Last but not least..

Exceptional Ruby: Master The Art of Handling Failure in Ruby
I can't help but continue to recommend Avdi Grimm's awesome 'Exceptional Ruby' e-book if you want to dig deep into the world of exceptions and error handling in Ruby. I enjoyed it a lot (and I'm not even making a bean on this recommendation :-))

RSpec 2.8: The Popular Ruby BDD Tool Goes Supersonic

2012-01-07T13:55:11Z

RSpec 2.8 has been released, along with rspec-rails 2.8.1 for the full Rails 3.x integration experience.

RSpec is a BDD-focused testing tool that's particularly popular in the Rails world where everyone except DHH is using it (if you believe the hoopla). RSpec has faced accusations of being less than speedy in the past, but it seems 2.8 has had a performance firework shoved up its tailpipe:

David Chelimsky, the creator of RSpec, also notes that in RSpec 2.8:

the documentation has been significantly improved
there's improved support for tags and filtering
random example running order support (with user definable seed)
rspec --init will create a spec directory and some starter code on a blank project - ideal for Ruby library development!

Overall, 2.8 seems like a good step forward, and if you've been feeling a little constipated in the spec running department lately, RSpec 2.8 might help you get things flowing again (though as with Ruby 1.9 vs 1.8, your mileage may vary depending on your usage.)

The Past 2 Weeks in the World of Ruby: 40 Links to Bring You Up to Speed (January 2012)

2012-01-06T15:03:41Z

Ruby Weekly has just tipped over 10,000 subscribers but I know not everyone is into getting their news via e-mail, so here's the latest frequent roundup of the latest Ruby and Rails news for you, all on the Web :-)

Key News, Releases, and Headlines

Hungry Academy Application Process Closes This Weekend
LivingSocial's 'Hungry Academy' will provide a paid, on-site 5 month Ruby and Rails learning experience and mentorship program to a small group of lucky applicants. Interested? You've only got a few days left to apply.

DOS Attack Vulnerability Found in Ruby 1.8's Hash Algorithm
Ruby 1.8.7-p352 and earlier are affected by a wide reaching (as in Python and Java are also affected!) hash related vulnerability. Ruby 1.9 is entirely unaffected.

JRuby 1.6.5.1 Released: Fixes the Hashing Vulnerability
JRuby 1.6.5.1 is a minor patchlevel release of JRuby that's mostly interesting because of the potential hash-based DOS vulnerability it papers over. Plenty of info in this post.

KidsRuby 1.0 Released
KidsRuby is a kid-focused (but just as useful for adults!) Ruby editor aimed at being an environment for teaching the Ruby language. It includes tutorials and a Logo-esque turtle graphics system for more visual types of learning.

Rack 1.4.0 Released
Rack is the modular Ruby Web server interface that sits between servers like Apache and nginx and systems like Rails or Sinatra. Rack 1.4 drops support for Ruby 1.8.6 and includes a bevy of tweaks, bug fixes and minor new features (including support for the 'teapot' HTTP status code ;-)).

Rails 3.2.0 RC2 Released: Rails 3.2 Gets A Step Closer

rbenv 0.3.0 Released: Minor Updates and Fixes

Articles and Tutorials

Never Create Ruby Strings Longer Than 23 Characters
A linkbaity title but an interesting article nonetheless by Pat Shaughnessy about a curiosity of how MRI Ruby 1.9 handles strings. Why are 24 byte strings far slower to process than 23 byte ones? Find out here.

Giving Rails 2 the Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline
Not quite ready for Rails 3.1 yet but still want an asset pipeline on your Rails 2 app? Davis W Frank was in that situation and in this post explains how he sorted it out.

The & Operator in Ruby
Pan Thomakos looks at the uses for the & operator and its associated methods in Ruby, including bitwise ANDing, set intersection, and the unary &.

DelayedJob 3.0 Release Rundown

How Collections Work in the AWS SDK for Ruby

Ruby Gems API Console: Play with RubyGems.org's API on the Web
An interesting API console that's set up to play with the RubyGems.org JSON API. Click the drop down to the left to see all of the prebuilt requests.

MiniTest Quick Reference
MiniTest is the unit testing library that comes in the Ruby 1.9 standard library and which also acts as a compatibility layer for test/unit on 1.9. Matt Sears has put together a handy round up of the assertions and matchers offered by MiniTest::Unit and MiniTest::Spec.

Structural Design Patterns in Ruby
Gregory Brown looks at seven structural design patterns laid out by the Gang of Four, the Adapter, Bridge, Composite, Proxy, Decorator, Facade and Flyweight.

'bundle exec rails' Executes Bundler.setup 3 Times
Rails core team member Santiago Pastorino notes that running 'bundle exec rails' is an inefficient mistake and explains why. (TLDR: Just use 'rails', it'll work out the particulars.)

1 and 2 Letter Ruby Gems
Mike Gunderloy looks at Ruby gems that only have a single letter as their name. It's a mixture of junk and curiosities.

'Kestrels, Quirky Birds, and Hopeless Egocentricity' by Reg Braithwaite
Ruby's own 'Raganwald' has compiled his essays about combinatory logic, method combinators and Ruby meta-programming into a handy and inexpensive e-book. Cerebral stuff.

Evaluating Alternative Decorator Implementations in Ruby

Deprecating a Legacy Subsystem in Rails

Libraries and code

Momentum: A Rack Handler for SPDY Clients
SPDY is a experimental networking protocol developed by Google (and already used in Chrome) for delivering Web content more quickly. Momentum is a Rack handler that can receive connections from SPDY clients and run Rack apps. Lots of info in the README.

Webmachine: Expose Your App's Resources Via HTTP Declaratively
webmachine-ruby is a port of Erlang's Webmachine. Both projects aim to expose parts of the HTTP protocol to your application in a declarative way, so you're less concerned with handling requests directly and more with describing the behavior of the resources in your app.

EmberJS-Rails: Ember.js for Rails 3.1 Developers
Ember.js is the new name for the Sproutcore 2.0 framework, a powerful system for building rich JavaScript-driven Web applications.

Celluloid 0.7: Actors for Concurrent Programming in Ruby
Celluloid provides a simple and natural way to build fault-tolerant concurrent programs in Ruby. With Celluloid, you can build systems out of concurrent objects just as easily as you build sequential programs out of regular objects. 0.7 has just been released.

hogan_assets: Compiles Mustache Templates with Hogan.js on Sprockets

Gitview: A JS Widget to List GitHub Repositories
Gitview is a JavaScript widget you can include on any page to show off your GitHub repositories. Github-badge has done this for years, but Gitview has an interesting GitHub style presentation format including the weekly commit bars.

Screencasts, Presentations, and Podcasts

Some Thoughts on Ruby Classes After 18 Months of Clojure
An enjoyable 25 minute romp through Brian Marick's thoughts on structuring objects in Ruby based on his experiences with the Clojure Lisp dialect.

Sending HTML Email (RailsCasts)
Ryan Bates is back for his weekly RailsCasts episode, this time looking at how to not only send HTML e-mail, but how to put it together (along with the obligatory inline CSS) too.

Debugging Scary Crashes of Rubinius
Dirkjan Bussink has been debugging memory corruption in Rubinius and has put together a 55 minute video explaining how he debugged it. Surely a must watch for any wannabe Rubinius hackers. A 453MB download though..

'Architecture the Lost Years' by Robert Martin at Ruby Midwest 2011
I really enjoyed this keynote by 'Uncle Bob' at the recent Ruby Midwest 2011 conference. He talks about application architecture and how the typical 'Rails way' of approaching it has key disadvantages compared to a decoupled approach.

ActiveRecord Anti-Patterns for Fun and Profit
At November's Ruby Midwest 2011, Ethan Gunderson gave a talk on common mistakes made when working with ActiveRecord and how to make everything all better.

Smalltalk On Rubinius (or How to Implement Your Own Programming Language)
At September's Golden Gate Ruby Conference, Konstantin Haase gave a talk about implementing a programming language using Ruby and the Rubinius compiler tool chain.

Getting Started with Rails: RailsCasts
Ryan Bates takes it back to basics this week with a quick 7 minute sweep through some of the sites, tools, and books you'll find useful when starting out with Rails as of late 2011.

Vim for Rails Developers Screencast
An inexpensive 34 minute screencast by Ben Orenstein that teaches you how to use the popular Vim text editor when working with Rails projects. Ben has a lot of experience in this area.

The Ruby Rogues on Benchmarking and Profiling
Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson rejoins the Rogues for an hour long chat about benchmarking and profiling Ruby code. There's a lot of depth here and it makes for a typically good and roguish listen.

MacRuby for Fun and Profit by Joshua Ballanco (55 minutes)

Ruby Jobs

C/Unix Agent Engineer [Portland, Oregon]
New Relic, the Web app performance monitoring and management folks, are looking for someone who loves Ruby but is an experienced C or C++ developer who understands multithreading, database contention, and object-oriented design.

Senior Java/Ruby Software Engineer at Outbid.com [Oakland, California]

Software Developer at Geoforce, Inc. [Lewisville, Texas]

Network Software Engineer at Carnegie Mellon University [Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania]

9 Ruby and Rails Jobs for January 2012

2012-01-02T22:06:14Z

Recently Forbes wrote about the rise of 'developernomics', noting that companies are seeing programmers as a 'safe haven' investment in otherwise troubled times. Maybe.. maybe not.. but the Ruby and Rails job market is as hot as ever, so if you're looking for a new position, be sure to negotiate well! ;-)

To promote a job, see our Post A Job page. Your listing not only ends up on the Ruby Inside and RubyFlow sidebars but also in the 10114 subscriber Ruby Weekly for free (as a bonus) and on our 7305 follower @rubyinside Twitter account.

Senior Engineer - Edinburgh, United Kingdom

FreeAgent, the pioneers in web-based accounting, is looking for a senior engineer to join their engineering team in a brand new office in beautiful Edinburgh. It's a fantastic opportunity to join a young, exciting and fast-growing company, and help develop a much-loved and high-traffic customer-facing web app — click here to learn more.

Ruby Developers (Jr and Sr) for Awesome Social Media Tech Co. - Redwood City, California

Wildfire Interactive is looking for a Ruby Developers (both junior and senior) to work on social media technology (lots of working with the Twitter API, for example). They want truly talented Ruby developers with a passion for clean code and great products. Their current technology stack includes Ruby on Rails & Sinatra, and they're in the process of building a number of pure Ruby components so it's not just a Rails job — click here to learn more.

Ruby on Rails Developer - Austin, Texas

Facilities Technology Group is a small company with a software product used by thousands of hospitals around the country to manage and maintain the maintenance of equipment. They're busy migrating an old ASP classic based version of their product to Rails and are looking for a Ruby on Rails Developer to help join the team to make it happen — click here to learn more.

Back and Front End Developers at New Relic - Portland, Oregon

If you've been reading Ruby Inside for a while, you'll already know New Relic, the leaders in webapp performance management and monitoring. They've got a couple of different positions open, first they're looking for a back end Rails developer and.. a front-end Rails developer too!

Software Engineer and Generalist - San Francisco, California

Samasource is an award-winning technology social enterprise that provides dignified, internet-based work to people living in poverty. They're looking for a Software Engineer / generalist to join their team and write code that meaningfully impacts the human condition — click here to learn more.

Software Developer - Lewisville, Texas

Geoforce, Inc. is looking for a Ruby and JavaScript Developer to work in a team environment to write and maintain Ruby and Javascript code. Experience with geospatial tools is a big plus — click here to learn more.

Senior Java/Ruby Software Engineer - Oakland, California

Outbid.com is a unique peer-to-peer auctioning platform designed to allow users to host their very own live online auctions. They're looking for a senior Java/Ruby Software Engineer to join their growing product development team — click here to learn more.

Network Software Engineer - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Carnegie Mellon University is looking for a Network Software Engineer to be responsible for the design and development of network-related systems and services that operate, automate, and protect Carnegie Mellon's campus and global data networks — click here to learn more.