The talk focused on how the guys (with some help from other sources, including Joe Damato and Aman Gupta) have dug into MRI Ruby 1.8's internals to get some significant memory usage and thread performance improvements for their Ruby Enterprise Edition branch (they're not calling it a fork) of Ruby 1.8.

The video is presented in HD so the slides are easy to see and the audio is solid. If taking a small trip through Ruby's garbage collection, memory allocation, and threading system sounds good to you (or you just want to know what Ruby Enterprise Edition is all about), it's a must watch. If you want some practical Ruby stuff and don't care about what the interpreter's doing, give it a miss.

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RConfig - Powerful Ruby configuration management

RConfig, by Rahmal Conda, bills itself as a "complete solution for Ruby configuration management" and it certainly has a compelling feature-set. It supports YAML, XML, and properties files (a bit like INI files) and provides a short hand global access to application configurations in both enumeration-based and dot-notation/method forms. It also supports what it calls "overlays" where different configurations can be used within a single app (for different "environments", say). RConfig can be installed as a gem as it's hosted on Gemcutter.

Ruby-GMail - A Rubyesque interface to GMail

Ruby-GMail is an awesome new library by Daniel Parker that provides significant GMail-specific (Google Mail) functionality within your apps. You can read/retrieve e-mails via IMAP, fully handle attachments, deal with labels, mark items as spam/unread/read, and send e-mails (including MIME messages with images and attachments).

Excelsior - Super fast CSV parsing

Excelsior (GitHub) is a Ruby gem by Matthew Mongeau that binds to some C code that parses CSV (comma delimited) data very quickly. Matthew benchmarked Excelsior against the built in Ruby 1.9 'csv' parser (based on 1.8's FasterCSV) and a 1 million row CSV file was parsed in 4.44 seconds with Excelsior versus 54 seconds for the built-in library. As well as being a useful library, the source is useful to check out if writing a native extension of your own is of interest.

Linkedin - Ruby Bindings for the LinkedIn API

If you don't know about it, LinkedIn is basically a Facebook for business contacts and relationships. You get profiles, can message other people, and build up "connections" with other people (as an aside, if you want to add me - Peter Cooper - on your LinkedIn, my profile is here). Wynn Netherland has put together a tidy Ruby library to use LinkedIn's new API features. His blog post highlights some uses for it.

Ohm - Object-hash mapping library for Redis

Redis is one of a growing number of persistent key-value database systems, and Ohm is a library for storing objects in a Redis database. It was built by Citrusbyte - the team behind the Monk Ruby Web development framework. As an aside, Citrusbyte are looking for a software engineer to work with them in Los Angeles.

Alchemist - Conversion between units

Alchemist is another library by Matthew Mongeau. It makes it easy to convert between different units - such as from miles to meters or celsius to kelvin with code like 8.meters.to.miles or in operations like 10.kilometers + 1.mile. It was mentioned in an earlier Ruby Inside post but fits in well here too.

Nanotest - Super lightweight testing

Nanotest is, perhaps, the most lightweight testing library available for Rubyists today. Billing itself as "extremely minimal," it provides the bare minimum needed to test code in a constructive manner. When it was mentioned on RubyFlow recently, Nanotest got quite a bit of flack..

Savon - "Heavy metal" SOAP client library

Unlucky enough to need to use SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)? Savon presents a new, intriguing alternative to Soap4R (which few people seem to be particularly complimentary about). If your SOAP service is SOAP 1.1 compliant, has a WSDL file, and doesn't need WSSE authentication, you can be calling methods in just two lines of Ruby. You can do a lot more with further tweaks, however (including SOAP 1.2 and WSSE authentication).

Versionomy - A "version number" library

Versionomy by Daniel Azuma is a library that provides tools to represent, manipulate, parse, and compare version numbers in the wide variety of versioning schemes in use. In this sense, think of it as a Chronic for version numbers.

From the announcement:

For wider and more application of Ruby language, "Ruby Standardization Working Group" has been established under Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA) to define the specification of Ruby language on Oct. 2008. Since then the WG has been drafting the specification of Ruby language.

As the first draft of Ruby language specification has just recently completed, we'd like to request users and developers of Ruby communities to review it.

By gathering review comments widely from you, we are going to improve the draft of Ruby language specification further. Then we will propose the improved draft to Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JISC) to be JIS. After JIS for Ruby has been published, we will propose it to International Standardization Organization (ISO/IEC JTC1) to be International Standard.

Why now? In a ruby-core thread about the forthcoming standard, Shugo Maeda spills the beans:

In addition, one of reasons why we need open standard for Ruby is that the basic guideline for the government procurement in Japan require it. In that policy, we should refer to open standards instead of specific products for fair competition.

While the prospect of getting cushy government contracts is appealing to Japanese Rubyists, it could also start to play a role elsewhere as governments start to ride their own open standards/open source bandwagons.

Ultimately, this news isn't going to matter to the majority of Rubyists yet, but becoming an international standard will ultimately lend more legitimacy to a language that has been flagging in popularity lately. If you want to jump right to checking out the standard (available only as a PDF at the moment), click here.

As well as fixing the vulnerability, Ruby 1.9.1-p376 also includes over 100 bug fixes on the previous release, none of which are particularly interesting. You can check this release's change log to see if anything affects you.

If you want to download Ruby 1.9.1-p376 now, the following URLs will work direct:

• http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.bz2
• http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.1-p376.tar.gz
• http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.1-p376.zip

Further, Danny Tatom has put together a PKGBUILD file for Ruby 1.9.1-p376 for Arch Linux users. As an aside, Arch Linux is worth a look if you haven't heard of it yet. It's basically a lightweight, heavily customizable, developer focused Linux distribution that's less annoying than Gentoo, and a little more BSD-like than the average Linux distro.

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Daniel states that web "applications should be self contained rack applications, able to function as gems, able to pick up an entire application and mount it inside another, able to inherit the whole application and take care of the low level plumbing," and also "let you create your own type of application when required." Pancake achieves this by building upon some excellent existing projects, including Tilt for templating, Usher for routing, and Hashie to extend the features of Ruby's hashes and give them additional object-like functionality.

Joining Apps With Rails (And Each Other..)

Yehuda Katz was first seen using Usher in his blog entry How to Build Sinatra in Rails 3 and it is being used for developing Pancake guaranteeing that anything you build with it is going to be mountable in Rails 3. Pancake stacks can be used with the current versions of Rails via Metal, and examples are given on Pancake's blog for doing so.

Sinatra apps are mountable through Pancake, as are any other fully Rack-compliant parts, and Rack middleware can be applied to either the entire Pancake stack, or to individual stacks within the container app. One can first make gems of stacks, which can then be inherited by their containing app or stack. While this sounds like it could become messy quickly, Pancake employs namespacing to keep everything distinct.

Installation and Usage

To get started with Pancake, I ended up installing via:

sudo gem install usher rake pancake haml rcov rack-test rspec racksh

I then created a stack by issuing:

sudo pancake-gen short ri_example    ## pancake-gen {short || micro} 

To move further, check out two projects: Pancake Blog (mountable basic blogging) and CouchDB Proxy (mountable couchdb proxy)

Philosophically, "Rango is attempting to be as agnostic as possible, valuing simple, readable code.  It intends to encourage explicit code rather than implicit magic."  Modularity is a top priority. In many ways it feels like Ramaze, but with a newer "era of Rack" foundation. There's a good "Why Use Rango" article available if you want to get a feel for the project and why you might consider using it. There's also a PDF presentation that acts as an introduction to the project.

Serving, Routing and Templates

Rango is Passenger friendly, and because Rango is designed for Ruby 1.9, using Mongrel is discouraged (although possible).  The router is pluggable and Usher is the default, but you can elect rack-router or rack-mount via the generator.  At present, Rango plays nicely with Haml, but with the upcoming 0.2 version it will adopt Tilt, which adds a number of formats, including Mustache, ERB, Erubis, and Liquid.

Rango has generators, but beyond that it employs a sub-project named "Simple-Templater" to assist developers in customizing project-specific code generation. Rango draws additional strength from "Pupu," a framework agnostic CLI (command-line interface) system which aids in managing /public directory content and functionality into modules - modules which can even include packaged javascript functionality.

Code reloading during development is made available by Shotgun, or if you are using Phusion Passenger, you can of course use tmp/always_restart.txt to restart the app at every request. If Racksh is installed, running ./init.rb -i will start it, and it falls back to Irb otherwise.

The Future

Rango has a very aggressive roadmap for December 2009, and also boasts an impressive feature timeline within the wiki.  Rango offers a number of innovative departures which seem noteworthy at present.  To get updates on the Rango project, follow @RangoProject on Twitter.

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The creators of Amp believe that while there are lots of great repository formats out there, none of the official clients are "truly good software" and so they're aiming to build something that abstracts away all of the pain into a heavily customizable Ruby library and client. Even now you can add your own commands to Amp or adjust those that already exist, meaning you can totally customize a powerful source control tool to your own taste.

One of the points that's constantly stressed on Amp's rather well designed official site is that the project is actively looking for new contributors and help. They have a repo on GitHub if you want to fork and issue pull requests, as well as an IRC channel on Freenode, #amp.

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Racksh is a console for Rack based ruby web applications. It allows you run a console in the context of an application environment for Rails, Merb, Sinatra, Camping, Ramaze (or even your own framework) provided there is a rackup file in the root directory.

When you run the racksh command, it loads the whole application environment just like a Rack web server, but instead of running the app it starts an irb session where you can invoke commands.

$ racksh
Rack::Shell v0.9.4 started in development environment.
> Article.all
=> # returns all articles...

As of version 0.9.4 (released this week), racksh uses Bryan Helmkamp's rack-test to simulate HTTP requests to your Rack application via the $rack variable.

$ racksh
Rack::Shell v0.9.4 started in development environment.
> $rack.get "/"
=> # returns a Rack::MockResponse

Racksh also allows you to apply configuration through a .rackshrc file. This can be used to set headers which will be used for requests, or to make additional setup requests (e.g. to make sure a user is logged in).

Install as a gem from Gemcutter, or get the source from Github.

gem install racksh -s http://gemcutter.org

For more details, check out the project's README, and these recent posts on Marcin's blog.

Back in early 2008, MagLev program manager Bob Walker did an interview with InfoQ about the project where he said that 8 people were working on MagLev, so this is a pretty big deal for them. Developer Avi Bryant then did a short presentation at RailsConf 2008 where he gave a comprehensive overview of what MagLev is along with some live demonstrations.

Why Should You Care?

In short, MagLev is cool for a few reasons. Two key ones being that 1) MagLev runs on the SmallTalk virtual machine which, it is claimed, should yield significant performance increases for a language like Ruby, and 2) a MagLev environment allows multiple Ruby processes over multiple machines (if you wish) to use the same objects simultaneously for easy scalability. Avi's video is great if you want to get a grasp on it:

MagLev presentation at RailsConf 2008 from Monty Williams on Vimeo.

Developer Monty Williams is keen to stress that this is an alpha, not a beta, so you can't expect it to run Rails or any gems that require C extensions. That said, it does run Sinatra, Rack, and RubyGems, plus a significant effort has been put into passing the RubySpec, so it's not as if it's a crippled implementation as such.

If you want to learn more, consider following the MagLev team on Twitter @MagLev and checking out the official mailing list "maglev-discussion."

Installation (i.e. getting to an irb prompt that works)

Bear in mind that MagLev will only work on 64 bit versions of OS X, Linux, and Solaris, so if you're in the 32 bit club, there's no point in going any further (yet).

If you download the MagLev Installer script (small ZIP file), you can run the installMaglev.sh script and install the latest version like so:

./installMaglev.sh 22578

The announcement post doesn't make it clear you need to provide a version number of what version number to provide. 22578 was mentioned earlier in the day though, and it seems to work.

Once installed, MagLev provides some info about environment variables you need to add to your .bashrc or .bash_profile. Follow these, then open a new terminal and here's how you get to an irb session:

$ maglev start
startnetldi[Info]: Starting GemStone network server "gs64ldi".
startnetldi[Error]:  could not start server
startstone[Info]: Starting Stone repository monitor "maglev".
startstone[Info]: GemStone server 'maglev' has been started.

$ maglev-irb
irb(main):001:0> 20 + 20
=> 40
irb(main):002:0> exit
error , SystemExit Error,  nil,
          during /Users/peter/Downloads/MagLev-installer/MagLev-22578.MacOSX/bin/maglev-irb
SystemExit Error,  nil

Alternatively: GitHub installation

MagLev is also available from GitHub to clone. To install MagLev from GitHub:

git clone git://github.com/MagLev/maglev.git
cd maglev
./install.sh

.. then follow the note about adding the path to your .bashrc or .bash_profile and running Rake in a new prompt (though still under the maglev project directory).

If you get any further with doing something interesting like, say, getting an IRB prompt up successfully on this, do post a comment ;-)

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If you want to post a job to our job board check out our new Post A Job page. It explains it all. It's $249 for 60 days of exposure with a link on all Ruby Inside and Rails Inside pages, exposure through Simply Hired, and inclusion on a post like this that goes out to all 22,000 subscribers. Most ads get 1-2,000 direct views during their run (and linked from about 240,000 pageviews on our sites in all). And if you post before the end of 2009.. we have a discount code 2009deal that gives you $50 off!

On to the jobs:

P.S. Just as a test to see if anyone gets as far as down here, we have another discount code.. "greatdeal" (without the quotes) that gives 50% off when you post a job.. it also expires at the end of the year :-)