Ruby Inside

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

2012-01-20T16:32:12Z

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.

Let’s Build a Simple Video Game with JRuby: A Tutorial

2011-12-15T01:51:30Z

Ruby isn't known for its game development chops despite having a handful of interesting libraries suited to it. Java, on the other hand, has a thriving and popular game development scene flooded with powerful libraries, tutorials and forums. Can we drag some of Java's thunder kicking and screaming over to the world of Ruby? Yep! - thanks to JRuby. Let's run through the steps to build a simple 'bat and ball' game now.

The Technologies We'll Be Using

JRuby

If you're part of the "meh, JRuby" brigade, suspend your disbelief for a minute. JRuby is easy to install, easy to use, and isn't going to trample all over your system or suck up all your memory. It will be OK!

One of JRuby's killer features is its ability to use Java libraries and generally dwell as a first class citizen on the JVM. JRuby lets us use performant Java powered game development libraries in a Rubyesque way, lean on Java-based tutorials, and basically have our cake and eat it too.

To install JRuby, I recommend RVM (Ruby Version Manager). I think the JRuby core team prefer you to use their own installer but rvm install jruby has always proven quick and effective for me. Once you get it installed, rvm use jruby and you're done.

Slick and LWJGL

The Slick library is a thin layer of structural classes over the top of LWJGL (Lightweight Java Game Library), a mature and popular library that abstracts away most of the boring system level work.

Out of the box LWJGL gives us OpenGL for graphics, OpenAL for audio, controller inputs, and even OpenCL if we wanted to do heavy parallelism or throw work out to the GPU. Slick gives us constructs like game states, geometry, particle effects, and SVG integration, while allowing us to drop down to using LWJGL for anything we like.

Getting Started: Installing Slick and LWJGL

Rather than waste precious time on theory, let's get down to the nitty gritty of getting a basic window and some graphics on screen:

First, create a folder in which to store your game and its associated files. From here I'll assume it's /mygame
Go to the Slick homepage and choose "Download Full Distribution" (direct link to .zip here).
Unzip the download and copy the lib folder into your /mygame as /mygame/lib - this folder includes both LWGWL and Slick.
In /mygame/lib, we need to unpack the natives-[your os].jar file and move its contents directly into /mygame.
Mac OS X: Right click on the natives-mac.jar file and select to unarchive it (if you have a problem, grab the awesome free The Unarchiver from the App Store) then drag the files in /mygame/lib/native-mac/* directly into /mygame.

Linux and Windows: Running jar -xf natives-linux.jar or jar -xf natives-win32.jar and copying the extracted files back to /mygame should do the trick.
Now your project folder should look a little like this:

If so, we're ready to code.

A Bare Bones Example

Leaping in with a bare bones example, create /mygame/verybasic.rb and include this code:

$:.push File.expand_path('../lib', __FILE__)

require 'java'
require 'lwjgl.jar'
require 'slick.jar'

java_import org.newdawn.slick.BasicGame
java_import org.newdawn.slick.GameContainer
java_import org.newdawn.slick.Graphics
java_import org.newdawn.slick.Input
java_import org.newdawn.slick.SlickException
java_import org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer

class Demo < BasicGame
  def render(container, graphics)
    graphics.draw_string('JRuby Demo (ESC to exit)', 8, container.height - 30)
  end

  # Due to how Java decides which method to call based on its
  # method prototype, it's good practice to fill out all necessary
  # methods even with empty definitions.
  def init(container)
  end

  def update(container, delta)
    # Grab input and exit if escape is pressed
    input = container.get_input
    container.exit if input.is_key_down(Input::KEY_ESCAPE)
  end
end

app = AppGameContainer.new(Demo.new('SlickDemo'))
app.set_display_mode(640, 480, false)
app.start

Ensure that ruby actually runs JRuby (using ruby -v) and then run it from the command line with ruby verybasic.rb. Assuming all goes well, you'll see this:

If you don't see something like the above, feel free to comment here, but your problems most likely orient around not having the right 'native' libraries in the current directory or from not running the game in its own directory in the first place (if you get probable missing dependency: no lwjgl in java.library.path - bingo).

Explanation of the demo code

$:.push File.expand_path('../lib', __FILE__) pushes the 'lib' folder onto the load path. (I've used push because my preferred << approach breaks WordPress ;-))
require 'java' enables a lot of JRuby's Java integration functionality.
Note that we can use require to load the .jar files from the lib directory.
The java_import lines bring the named classes into play. It's a little like include, but not quite.
We lean on Slick's BasicGame class by subclassing it and adding our own functionality.
render is called frequently by the underlying game engine. All activities relevant to rendering the game window go here.
init is called when a game is started.
update is called frequently by the underlying game engine. Activities related to updating game data or processing input can go here.
The code at the end of the file creates a new AppGameContainer which in turn is given an instance of our game. We set the resolution to 640x480, ensure it's not in full screen mode, and start the game.

Fleshing Out a Bat and Ball Game

The demo above is something but there are no graphics or a game mechanic, so it's far from being a 'video game.' Let's flesh it out to include some images and a simple pong-style bat and ball mechanic.

Note: I'm going to ignore most structural and object oriented concerns to flesh out this basic prototype. The aim is to get a game running and to understand how to use some of Slick and LWJGL's features. We can do it again properly later :-)

All of the assets and code files demonstrated here are also available in an archive if you get stuck. Doing it all by hand to start with will definitely help though.

A New Code File

Start a new game file called pong.rb and start off with this new bootstrap code (very much like the demo above but with some key tweaks):

$:.push File.expand_path('../lib', __FILE__)

require 'java'
require 'lwjgl.jar'
require 'slick.jar'

java_import org.newdawn.slick.BasicGame
java_import org.newdawn.slick.GameContainer
java_import org.newdawn.slick.Graphics
java_import org.newdawn.slick.Image
java_import org.newdawn.slick.Input
java_import org.newdawn.slick.SlickException
java_import org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer

class PongGame < BasicGame
  def render(container, graphics)
    graphics.draw_string('RubyPong (ESC to exit)', 8, container.height - 30)
  end

  def init(container)
  end

  def update(container, delta)
    input = container.get_input
    container.exit if input.is_key_down(Input::KEY_ESCAPE)
  end
end

app = AppGameContainer.new(PongGame.new('RubyPong'))
app.set_display_mode(640, 480, false)
app.start

Make sure it runs, then move on to fleshing it out.

A Background Image

It'd be nice for our game to have an elegant background. I've created one called bg.png which you can drag or copy and paste from here (so it becomes /mygame/bg.png):

Now we want to load the background image when the game starts and render it constantly.

To load the game at game start, update the init and render methods like so:

def render(container, graphics)
  @bg.draw(0, 0)
  graphics.draw_string('RubyPong (ESC to exit)', 8, container.height - 30)
end

def init(container)
  @bg = Image.new('bg.png')
end

The @bg instance variable picks up an image and then we issue its draw method to draw it on to the window every time the game engine demands that the game render itself. Run pong.rb and check it out.

Adding A Ball and Paddle

Adding a ball and paddle is similar to doing the background. So let's give it a go:

def render(container, graphics)
  @bg.draw(0, 0)
  @ball.draw(@ball_x, @ball_y)
  @paddle.draw(@paddle_x, 400)
  graphics.draw_string('RubyPong (ESC to exit)', 8, container.height - 30)
end

def init(container)
  @bg = Image.new('bg.png')
  @ball = Image.new('ball.png')
  @paddle = Image.new('paddle.png')
  @paddle_x = 200
  @ball_x = 200
  @ball_y = 200
  @ball_angle = 45
end

The graphics for ball.png and paddle.png are here. Place them directly in /mygame.

We now have this:

Note: As I said previously, we're ignoring good OO practices and structural concerns here but in the long run having separate classes for paddles and balls would be useful since we could encapsulate the position information and sprites all together. For now, we'll 'rough it' for speed.

Making the Paddle Move

Making the paddle move is pretty easy. We already have an input handler in update dealing with the Escape key. Let's extend it to allowing use of the arrow keys to update @paddle_x too:

def update(container, delta)
  input = container.get_input
  container.exit if input.is_key_down(Input::KEY_ESCAPE)

  if input.is_key_down(Input::KEY_LEFT) and @paddle_x > 0
    @paddle_x -= 0.3 * delta
  end

  if input.is_key_down(Input::KEY_RIGHT) and @paddle_x < container.width - @paddle.width
    @paddle_x += 0.3 * delta
  end
end

It's crude but it works! (P.S. I'd normally use && instead of and but WordPress is being a bastard - I swear I'm switching one day.)

If the left arrow key is detected and the paddle isn't off the left hand side of the screen, @paddle_x is reduced by 0.3 * delta and vice versa for the right arrow.

The reason for using delta is because we don't know how often update is being called. delta contains the number of milliseconds since update was last called so we can use it to 'weight' the changes we make. In this case I want to limit the paddle to moving at 300 pixels per second and 0.3 * 1000 (1000ms = 1s) == 300.

Making the Ball Move

Making the ball move is similar to the paddle but we'll be basing the @ball_x and @ball_y changes on @ball_angle using a little basic trigonometry.

If you stretch your mind back to high school, you might recall that we can use sines and cosines to work out the offset of a point at a certain angle within a unit circle. For example, our ball is currently moving at an angle of 45, so:

Math.sin(45 * Math::PI / 180)   # => 0.707106781186547
Math.cos(45 * Math::PI / 180)   # => 0.707106781186548

Note: The * Math::PI / 180 is to convert degrees into radians.

We can use these figures as deltas by which to move our ball based upon a chosen ball speed and the delta time variable that Slick gives us.

Add this code to the end of update:

@ball_x += 0.3 * delta * Math.cos(@ball_angle * Math::PI / 180)
@ball_y -= 0.3 * delta * Math.sin(@ball_angle * Math::PI / 180)

If you run the game now, the ball will move up and right at an angle of 45 degrees, though it will continue past the game edge and never return. We have more logic to do!

Note: We use -= with @ball_y because sines and cosines use regular cartesian coordinates where the y axis goes from bottom to top, not top to bottom as screen coordinates do.

Add some more code to update to deal with ball reflections:

if (@ball_x > container.width - @ball.width) || (@ball_y < 0) || (@ball_x < 0)
  @ball_angle = (@ball_angle + 90) % 360
end

This code is butt ugly and pretty naive (get ready for a nice OO design assignment later) but it'll do the trick for now. Run the game again and you'll notice the ball hop through a couple of bounces off of the walls and then off of the bottom of the screen.

Resetting the Game on Failure

When the ball flies off of the bottom of the screen, we want the game to restart. Let's add this to update:

if @ball_y > container.height
  @paddle_x = 200
  @ball_x = 200
  @ball_y = 200
  @ball_angle = 45
end

It's pretty naive again, but does the trick. Ideally, we would have a method specifically designed to reset the game environment, but our game is so simple that we'll stick to the basics.

Paddle and Ball Action

We want our paddle to hit the ball! All we need to do is cram another check into update (poor method - promise to refactor it later!) to get things going:

if @ball_x >= @paddle_x and @ball_x < = (@paddle_x + @paddle.width) and @ball_y.round >= (400 - @ball.height)
  @ball_angle = (@ball_angle + 90) % 360
end

Note: WordPress has borked the less than operator in the code above. Eugh. Fix that by hand ;-)

And bingo, we have it. Run the game and give it a go. We have a simple, but performant, video game running on JRuby.

If you'd prefer everything packaged up and ready to go, grab this archive file of my /mygame directory.

What Next?

Object orientation

As I've taken pains to note throughout this article, the techniques outlined above for maintaining the ball and paddle are naive - an almost C-esque approach.

Building separate classes to maintain the sprite, position, and the logic associated with them (such as bouncing) will clean up the update method significantly. I leave this as a task for you, dear reader!

Stateful Games

Games typically have multiple states, including menus, game play, levels, high score screens, and so forth. Slick includes a StateBasedGame class to help with this, although you could rig up your own on top of BasicGame if you really wanted to.

The Slick wiki has some great tutorials that go through various elements of the library, including a Tetris clone that uses game states. The tutorials are written in Java, naturally, but the API calls and method names are all directly transferrable (I'll be writing an article about 'reading' Java code for porting to Ruby soon).

Packaging for Distribtion

One of the main reasons I chose JRuby over the Ruby alternatives was the ability to package up games easily in a .jar file for distribution. The Ludum Dare contest involves having other participants judge your game and since most participants are probably not running Ruby, I wanted it to be relatively easy for them to run my game.

Warbler is a handy tool that can produce .jar files from a Ruby app. I've only done basic experiments so far but will be writing up an article once I have it all nailed.

Ludum Dare

I was inspired to start looking into JRuby and Java game libraries by the Ludum Dare game development contest. They take place every few months and you get 48 hours to build your own game from scratch. I'm hoping to enter for the first time in just a couple of days and would love to see more Rubyists taking part.

A Lagom Review of O’Reilly’s ‘Sinatra Up and Running’

2011-12-14T15:19:03Z

Sinatra Up and Running is a new book published by O'Reilly and written by Alan Harris and Konstantin Hasse that covers the popular Sinatra web application DSL in a brisk 103 pages, acting as a tutorial to newcomers and a handy reference for old hands.

TLDR: It's a short, sweet, relatively cheap and very well written book about Sinatra. Recommended. Buy here.

An interesting quirk of Scandinavian society is the concept of Jante Law. It knocks down standing out and being individual, in favor of communal harmony. It's typically used in a negative context to lament restrictions and lack of risk taking within Nordic society (DHH touched on this briefly in a recent Mixergy interview) but the flip side of the Jante coin is lagom: the idea and ideal of having just the right amount of something.

Sinatra Up and Running is, second to K&R, the most lagom technical book I've read. At a mere 102 pages you may wonder whether it's worth buying - it is. Unlike most technical books - yes, including mine - it skips the waffle and provides a perfect level of detail going through from what Sinatra is, to how it works, and on to an example project that covers just 13 pages. Don't be fooled, though, this isn't one of those tiny format O'Reilly handbooks; it's a regular, full size book - just a thin one!

Structure

The book is split into three key sections:

Sinatra's "fundamentals." We cover similar ground to the Sinatra README but I prefer the less generic examples in the book. How to build routes, use views, use sessions, caching, HTTP headers, and even Sinatra 1.3's new streaming functionality.
Behind the curtain. The bulk of the book takes a peak under the kimono into areas where online documentation occasionally trips over or fails to mention. How is Sinatra implemented and what is its basic execution model? How do you create extensions for it? How does it integrate with Rack middleware? And how can you use Sinatra in a modular style?
Blog engine project. A snappy run through a simple Git and Sinatra powered 'blogging' system.

As a core piece of printed documentation for a project, the book does a great job at sharing the basics, inspiring you to dig further and, of course, its short length puts Sinatra into context with the gargantuan Rails framework, where even a 400 page book would struggle to cover the essentials.

So, should you buy it?

Sinatra Up and Running is a good book and well written. I enjoyed it and picked up or was reminded of quite a few interesting bits and pieces. I'll probably refer to it from time to time. If your Sinatra experiences are rather on and off or you've not played with it for a while, it's a great, well-paced introduction.

If, however, you're already a Sinatra guru and/or working with Sinatra on a day by day basis and have all of the main patterns memorized, there's not a great deal you're going to get out of it. Buy it to be a completionist or to support the authors, but if you want a book demonstrating in depth how to integrate Sinatra with everything or how to big giant Web applications, this isn't for you.

Inexperienced Rubyists may also find the book's direct no-nonsense style intimidating. If you know what a code block is, you're good to go. This may seem like a bizarre observation to most Rubyists, but I've encountered many beginners who've wanted to "build a Web site" and immediately leapt into an advanced Rails book, only to be confused. If you're still new to Ruby, read The Well Grounded Rubyist or Beginning Ruby first.

And I'm going to stop here, because that would be lagom :-)

Where to buy

There are several options for buying the book. Check out O'Reilly (print, PDF, Mobi, and ePub), Amazon.com (print and Kindle), and Amazon.co.uk (print and Kindle) or your own favorite local bookstore.

Ludum Dare for Rubyists: An Online 48 Hour Game Coding Competition

2011-12-14T02:45:12Z

Ludum Dare is an online accelerated game development event that focuses on regular 48 hour competitions. Think Rails Rumble but for games! It's been around since 2002 but has had a big publicity boost recently due to the participation of Notch, the creator of the mind-bogglingly popular indie game Minecraft.

The next Ludum Dare contest is taking place this coming weekend between December 16-19, 2011 and I want to encourage Rubyists to take part. The competition tends to be dominated by Java, Flash, Microsoft XNA developers, and HTML5 developers, so it'd be great to see more Ruby entries (of which there have only been a couple so far).

During August's event, I, along with hundreds of others, was glued to Notch's livestream watching him code his game, Prelude of the Chambered (a 6 minute version is on YouTube). I was inspired enough to port his Java code into Ruby using JRuby, producing
potc-jruby (sadly far slower than the original Java version). This time, I plan to enter for real and build my own original game.

How to Take Part in Ludum Dare

Go to the Ludum Dare homepage, read the rules and guide, register on their WordPress blog, wait until the 'theme' has been decided, and start coding once the countdown is finished.

During the 48 hours (or 72 if you do the 'jam' version), you can post blog entries directly to the main Ludum Dare site (if you want) and submit your entry via a special link at the end. Entrants play and judge each other's entries for a period of three weeks before the winners are announced. Having more Rubyists involved would be useful since our games may be less likely to work cross platform or without Ruby installed.. (more on this shortly)

A quick summary of the rules:

You have to work alone. (If you want to do a team effort, you need to enter the less restrictive 'jam' contest.)
All content and code must be created within the 48 hours (except for libraries, legally licensed fonts and drum/instrument samples).
Your game has to be based on the theme given out before the contest.
You must share the source code with the other participants at the end of the contest though you do not have to give it an open source license.

The contest has a popular IRC channel (which is already quite active) at #ludumdare on irc.afternet.org. I'm petercooper on there - say hi! I'll be lurking in there a lot over the next week. Also, follow @ludumdare on IRC for more updates and info.

To get a feel for the contest, check out this "keynote" from the last Ludum Dare. There'll be a new one for this year soon:

Building a Game in Ruby?

Building games in Ruby isn't popular but it's not frontier country either. Rubystein, a Wolfenstein 3D pastiche by the Phusion guys, remains a favorite of mine and it even runs on 1.9 with only a few tweaks.

There's a great series by Andrea Wright that dates from 2007 but still has some handy pointers. We also have Ray, RubyGame, and Gosu which all have their fans (Ray is the most recent Ruby game library I'm aware of).

Or.. JRuby!

My choice for the contest is none of the above. Instead, it's JRuby. As part of the 'warmup process' for the contest, I've been playing with JRuby and the popular Slick2D Java library. The performance is amazing and the development process pretty straightforward.

Being a popular library in the Java world, I can use a lot of the Java-based tutorials and code samples for Slick2D to get a feel for how it all works. And.. I'll be writing an article for Ruby Inside in the next day or two showing you how to get started with it for yourself :-)

Ruby News and Releases in 2011: A Retrospective

2011-12-08T23:14:45Z

2011 is drawing to a close and I have been reminded of a post I made about a year ago: Ruby in 2010: A Retrospective of a Great Year for Ruby. 2010 was a stunning year with the release of Ruby 1.9.2, MacRuby 0.5, Sinatra 1.0, Rubinius 1.0, and DataMapper 1.0!

This year, MagLev, Capybara, Cucumber, RefineryCMS, OmniAuth and TorqueBox all hit their 1.0 milestones, but I've dug through the archives to see what else 2011 brought for the Ruby scene.

January

Rails Installer: Ruby and Rails on Windows in a Single, Easy Install - Wayne E Seguin, of RVM, released a super simple Rails, Git, SQLite, and Ruby installer for Windows. It's now an Engine Yard project and going strong.

Clever Algorithms: Free E-book of Nature-Inspired AI Recipes for Ruby

February

Ruby Turns 18 - Matz had previously said Ruby was "born" on February 24, 1993, so "she" turned 18 years old in February. Yes, I'm sad enough to have had that in my calendar ever since I read about it ;-)

Netbeans Drops Ruby Support (And JRuby Picks It Up) - The Netbeans IDE team announced they were dropping support for the Ruby and Rails specific features in their popular IDE. Separately, though, Thomas Enebo of the JRuby core team said that they had spoken to the Netbeans team and they would be adopting the project.

March

JRuby 1.6 Released - JRuby 1.6 was released with, significantly, Ruby 1.9.2 support. JRuby has continued its role as a formidable and leading Ruby implementation throughout 2011.

MacRuby 0.10 Released - Apple's MacRuby got XCode 4 support (although some have complained it's been a bit shaky since) and the ability to put together apps suitable for Mac App Store submission. There are now at least several MacRuby powered apps on the store.

DHH Offended by RSpec, Says Test::Unit is Just Great - Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson inadvertently kicked off a relatively interesting discussion about testing tools.

DataMapper 1.1 Released

LivingSocial Acquires Ruby/Rails Consultancy InfoEther - This wasn't your typical boring acquisition. LivingSocial, a daily deals site, purchased InfoEther, the US's first significant Ruby consultancy and home to Chad Fowler, Rich Kilmer, Tom Copeland, and others. Ruby recruitment in overdrive!

April

The Rails Hotline launched - The Rails Hotline is a free helpline run by volunteer Ruby and Rails developers. It was very popular early on and while I haven't heard much about it lately, there still seem to be people staffing it.

Haml and Sass 3.1 Released (Separately)

May

TorqueBox 1.0.0 Released: A Java Platform for Rack Apps - Almost three years in the making, Torquebox 1.0 arrived. It's a popular JBoss-powered application server for Rack apps (including Rails apps) that provides a smorgasbord of useful backend features.

RubyGems 1.8.0 Released - Significant because 1.8 is still the version that comes with Ruby 1.9.3 in late 2011. After a raft of slightly temperamental releases, 1.8 has been a champ.

The Ruby Rogues Podcast Launches - A new discussion based podcast made it into the Ruby world in May. It's still going and has frequent episodes with great discussions on all sorts of Ruby related topics. Much recommended.

Avdi Grimm's "Exceptional Ruby" Book Released - Avdi Grimm released a PDF e-book about error and exception handling in Ruby, based on his 'Exceptional Ruby' talk at Magic Ruby 2011. It has proven to be quite a talking point since.

June

The Story Behind Ruby 1.9.3 Getting 36% Faster Loading Times - Perhaps the story I spent the most time on in 2011. Two different solutions to speeding up Ruby 1.9.2's notoriously slow requires were tabled, only one made the cut. Ruby 1.9.3 has since proven to be somewhat swifter.

Refinery CMS 1.0 Released - Version 1.0 of Refinery CMS arrived 2 years after it first became an open source project. Refinery is one of the most popular Rails-based content management systems and the 1.0 release boasts full Rails 3 support and a solid stable base built up by over 100 contributors.

Capybara 1.0 Released - It was certainly the year for Capybara. The acceptance test framework for webapps is now perhaps the most popular tool in its field.

Cucumber 1.0.0 Released - Continuing with the testing theme, Cucumber also hit a significant milestone in 2011.

July

Ruby's Creator, Matz, Joins Heroku - Surprise in the Ruby community as Yukihiro 'matz' Matsumoto took up a Chief Architect position with Heroku, the Salesforce-owned Ruby application hosting company.

August

Rails 3.1.0 Released - A full year after Rails 3.0, Rails 3.1 was released to much fanfare, adding key features like the asset pipeline, roles, reversible migrations, jQuery as the new default JavaScript library, and a new focus on CoffeeScript. I explained the controversy behind some of the changes when they were announced back in April.

rbenv: A Simple, New Ruby Version Management Tool - Sam Stephenson of 37signals unveiled his new lightweight Ruby version management tool and.. well, there was quite a bit of drama around it. Now, though, it seems people have fallen into sticking with the tool they like best and both RVM and rbenv seem to be going from strength to strength.

September

RailsInstaller 2.0 Shipped - The Windows-based RailsInstaller hit its 2.0 milestone and became a great way to get Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3.1 on Windows in a single install.

The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough Released - I released my epic 3 hour Ruby 1.9 screencast guide in September. It's been a fun ride!

TrollScript Released - A significant new entrant to the world of programming languages arrived in the shape of a Ruby-based interpreter for a new Brainf**k dialect by Tom Bell.

October

Ruby 1.9.3p0 Released - The official production release of Ruby 1.9.3 finally hit in October and brought faster Rails app loading times to millions. Hurrah! I made a more detailed roundup of the changes.

Ruby 2.0 Release Schedule Announced - It was announced that Ruby 2.0 would be coming along in 2013, but I also put together some info about what Ruby 2.0 is and what it might contain.

Ruby-doc.org Got A Facelift - James Britt gave Ruby-doc.org a significant facelift this year and unveiled his work in October. It's certainly been a major improvement so far.

Ryan Bates Unveils RailsCasts Pro - Ruby's most popular screencasting legend (other than Geoffrey Grosenbach, of course!) 'went pro' and started to charge for extra episodes of his popular weekly screencast series.

Sinatra 1.3 Released - Sinatra, the popular webapp DSL / microframework, reached version 1.3.0. The significant addition this time around was a 'streaming API' for streaming data to clients instead of delivering it all in one big package.

Spree (Open Source Rails E-commerce System) Raises $1.5 Million - Spree is a popular open source Rails e-commerce system and its creator raised $1.5m in venture capital to take it even further (as well as offer Spree-based consulting). Tom Preston Werner (GitHub) and James Lindenbaum (Heroku) also joined as advisors.

DataMapper 1.2.0 Released - DataMapper is a popular ORM (Object Relational Mapper) and a powerful alternative to ActiveRecord for many developers. Version 1.2 brought all-important support for Rails 3.1 amongst other things.

November

MagLev 1.0 Released - Two years after its alpha released, one of the most intriguing alternative Ruby implementations made to its big 1.0.

OmniAuth 1.0: Authentication APIs Reach A New Level - OmniAuth is a popular library for performing authentication against numerous external authentication systems (like OAuth, OpenID, Facebook, and Twitter). Version 1.0 brought massive structural changes (for the better) and introduced capabilities to do local/internal authentication too.

DHH Got Married - Dashing the dreams of women everywhere.