Could JavaScript Power A Significant Future Ruby Implementation or VM?

jslilimg.pngThis week you may have heard about “Chrome,” a new Web browser being developed by Google (if you haven’t, read this online comic book that demonstrates its worthiness). Associated with Chrome is V8, a new open source JavaScript engine that’s designed to execute JavaScript code at never-seen-before speeds.

All this reminded Marc-André Cournoyer (of Thin fame) of HotRuby (see previously on Ruby Inside), an experimental JavaScript-based virtual machine that can run YARV-compiled Ruby code, and he set out to test the performance of Ruby…

13 Top Ruby and Rails Jobs for September 2008

If you thought August’s job post was hectic, this month will blow you away! The focus is still heavily on Rails - and most of these jobs are in the United States (there’s one in the UK - keep an eye out for it). The Ruby Inside Job Board (costs $99 for a 60 day listing - and you get featured on Ruby Inside like this) is the source for most of the positions.

This month’s interesting opportunities:

MySQLPlus: A Non-Blocking MySQL Driver for Ruby 1.8 and 1.9

bm11.png

Recently we posted about NeverBlock, a Ruby 1.9-specific library that eases the development of apps that use non-blocking IO. eSpace, the company behind the library, have now come along with another surprise… MySQLPlus - a non-blocking MySQL driver for Ruby 1.8 and 1.9! There’s more information here in the official announcement.

MySQLPlus is billed as a new general purpose MySQL driver that supports “threaded access and async operations” and after installing it and running the basic tests that come with the library, it certainly…

Configatron: Simple, Persistent Configs for your Ruby App(s)

Configatron is a new Ruby library that makes it easy to have persistently accessible configuration data available through your Ruby application. It bears some similarities to the Rails pluginSimpleConfig, but being distributed as a gem, is suitable for non-Rails applications. To install: gem install configatron

Once configatron is installed, the following code will get things going:

configatron do |config|
  config.app_name = "My Awesomely Jazzy App"
  config.database_url = "postgres://localhost/somedb"
  # etc...
end

4 Upcoming Ruby and Rails Events (MerbCamp, Great Lakes, Rails Summit Latin America, and Voices That Matter)

It has not gone unnoticed that random announcements of individual events do not work well here on Ruby Inside. With events taking more of a local focus these days, it makes more sense to pool the announcements together. This post, therefore, is a rather uncelebrated launch of a new series of event-related compilation posts. Please make sure to post in comments if you have other events you want to mention or visit our Contact page.

merbcamp.png MerbCamp - October 11 and 12, 2008 -…

daemon_controller: Automatic Daemon Process Management

After tackling the difficult task of improving Rails deployment, Phusion - the creators of Passenger (mod_rails) recently announced the availability of daemon_controller - a library (rather than a stand-alone tool) for managing daemons. It lets you write applications that manage daemons in a robust manner (e.g. mongrel_cluster or UltraSphinx could be adapted to use this library).

The primary motivation for using daemon_controller is to make it easier to have other applications (such as Rails apps) start daemons without encountering race conditions or parallel attempts.…

Ruby Hoedown 2008 Videos Available

Videos from the recent Ruby Hoedown conference are now available at the Confreaks site.

The talks this year are split between traditional talks and “Lightning Talks” - 5 minute presentations that quickly highlight a single package or aspect of Ruby.  The talks cover a wide range of topics including Archaeopteryx - a Ruby MIDI/Music generator, easy phone calling with ruby, cloud computing, the usual excellent testing and design patterns talks, and a slew of other quirky and useful presentations.

Mack 0.7.0: A Significant Update to A Powerful Ruby Web App Framework for Distributed Apps

macklogo.png We first covered Mack in April, when I billed it as a “fast, best of the rest, Web app framework.” Mack, a Ruby-based Web application framework, developed by a team led by Mark Bates, has continued to grow over the past several months and today announced a significant release, Mack 0.7.0.

Mack is a unique Ruby Web app framework due to its heavy focus on reusability across multiple applications. Mack supports distributed objects - yes, between multiple applications, distributed views and layouts, and even distributed…

What’s Hot on GitHub - August 2008

Github is a great resource for finding new projects within the Ruby community. It has become an extremely popular place for Ruby and Rails developers to congregate lately, so I wanted to list some of the new projects, and some of the updated ones, that I have found interesting and that are too small for their own blog post. Let us know if you like this as we might turn it into a regular series on Ruby Inside!

This month’s picks:

NeverBlock: Fast, Non-Blocking IO In Ruby Without Changing Program Flow

neverblock.pngNeverBlock is a Ruby (1.9) library developed by eSpace - an Egyptian Web 2.0 development team - that could make your life a whole lot easier if you have to deal with blocking IO operations that hold up all your Ruby threads.

NeverBlock makes it easy to get the benefits of non-blocking IO (IO operations that aren’t held up by mutexes) in your Ruby apps without having to take the usual route of redesigning your app to be event-based. You get all…