Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news.

Author Archives: Peter Cooper

Raptor: A Forthcoming Ruby Web Server for Faster App Deployment

By Peter Cooper / October 21, 2014

Raptor bills itself as a new Ruby “app server” and it claims to blow everything else out of the water performance-wise (by between 2-4x!) whether that’s Unicorn, Puma, Passenger, or even TorqueBox on JRuby. The bad news for now is there’s no source or repo yet and only a handful of people (including me) have been given a sneak peek, although a public beta is promised on November 25th.

The history of Ruby webapp deployment

The deployment of Ruby (and therefore Rails) webapps was a painful mess for years, a state I lamented 7 years ago in No True ‘mod_ruby’ is Damaging Ruby’s Viability on the Web. Read More

Ruby’s Unary Operators and How to Redefine Their Functionality

1 Comment

By Peter Cooper / October 16, 2014

In math, a unary operation is an operation with a single input. In Ruby, a unary operator is an operator which only takes a single ‘argument’ in the form of a receiver. For example, the – on -5 or ! on !true.

In contrast, a binary operator, such as in 2 + 3, deals with two arguments. Here, 2 and 3 (which become one receiver and one argument in a method call to +).

Ruby only has a handful of unary operators, and while it’s common to redefine binary operators like + or [] to give your objects some added syntactic sugar, unary operators are less commonly redefined. Read More

This Month in Ruby: PeepCode Acquired, Rails 3.2.14, And More

By Peter Cooper / July 25, 2013

Welcome to a roundup of Ruby news, articles, videos, and more, for July 2013 cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly.

Highlights include: PeepCode acquired by Pluralsight, Practicing Ruby archives made public, Rails 3.2.14, and an interesting interview with Matz.

Featured

The First Four Volumes of Practicing Ruby, Now Available Online
Practicing Ruby is a high quality, paid Ruby journal run by Gregory Brown, but he’s made archives of over 60 articles available to the public. There’s a ton of stuff to enjoy here.

PeepCode Acquired by Pluralsight
Ruby and Rails screencasting pioneer Geoffrey Grosenbach has announced he has sold Peepcode to Pluralsight, a large online training provider. Read More

This Week in Ruby: Matz on Ruby 2.0, Numerous Conference CFPs, Tenderlove on define_method

1 Comment

By Peter Cooper / March 7, 2013

Welcome to this week’s roundup of Ruby news, articles, videos, and more, cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly. Sorry these roundups have been missing for a couple of months, I’ve been focusing very heavily on the e-mail newsletters which are continuing to grow like crazy! :-) I hope to get back into blogging more soon.

Matz on Ruby 2.0
Matz spoke about Ruby 2.0 (‘the happiest release ever’) for 30 minutes at the Heroku Waza event a week ago and the video is already available to watch. He stresses that “Ruby 1.8 will die soon” and encourages everyone to upgrade. Read More

A Simple Tour of the Ruby MRI Source Code with Pat Shaughnessy

5 Comments

By Peter Cooper / December 3, 2012

I’m not in Ruby core or, well, even a confident C coder anymore, but I’ve long enjoyed digging in the Ruby MRI source code to understand weird behavior and to pick up stuff for my Ruby course.

Pat Shaughnessy is also a fan of digging around in Ruby’s internals and has written some great posts like How Ruby Executes Your Code, Objects, Classes and Modules, and Exploring Ruby’s Regular Expression Algorithm.

When Pat released his Ruby Under a Microscope book, I knew it would be right up my street! He digs into how objects are represented internally, why MRI, Rubinius and JRuby act in certain ways and, of course, “lots more.”

I invited Pat to take a very high level cruise through the MRI codebase with me so we could share that knowledge with Ruby programmers who haven’t dared take a look ‘under the hood’ and to show it’s not as scary or pointless as it may seem. Read More

The Last Week in Ruby: A Great Ruby Shirt, RSpec Team Changes and a Sneaky Segfault Trick

By Peter Cooper / December 2, 2012

Welcome to this week’s roundup of Ruby news cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly.

Highlights include: A time-limited Ruby shirt you can order, a major change in the RSpec project, how to make Ruby 1.9.3 a lot faster with a patch and compiler flags, a sneaky segmentation fault trick, several videos, and a few great jobs.

Featured

The ‘Ruby Guy’ T-Shirt
Grab a t-shirt with a cute ‘Ruby Guy’ mascot on the front in time for Christmas. Comes in both male and female styles in varying sizes. Only available till Thursday December 6 though as it’s part of a temporary Teespring campaign (Note: I have no connection to this, it just looks cool.)

David Chelimsky Hands Over RSpec to New Project Leads
After several years at the helm, David Chelimsky is handing over the reins to Myron Marston and Andy Lindeman for RSpec and rspec-rails respectively. Read More

The Split is Not Enough: Unicode Whitespace Shenigans for Rubyists

8 Comments

By Peter Cooper / November 26, 2012

That code is legal Ruby! If you ran it, you’d see 8. How? There’s a tale to tell..

The String with the Golden Space

I was on IRC in #nwrug enjoying festive cheer with fellow Northern Rubyists when ysr23 presented a curious problem.

He was using a Twitter library that returned a tweet, “@twellyme film”, in a string called reply. The problem was that despite calling reply.split, the string refused to split on whitespace. Yet if he did “@twellyme film”.split in IRB, that was fine.

International man of mystery Will Jessop suggested checking $; (it’s a special global variable that defines the default separator for String#split). Read More

This Week in Ruby: Ruby 2.0 Refinements, Cost of GC::Profiler, and BritRuby Cancelled

By Peter Cooper / November 23, 2012

Welcome to this week’s roundup of Ruby news, articles, videos, and more, cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly. If you’ve been celebrating Thanksgiving this week, I hope you’re having a good break.

Highlights include: Charles Nutter on Ruby 2.0 refinements, the cancellation of the British Ruby Conference, and DHH’s latest object instantiation (thanks Doug Renn).

Featured

Refining Ruby (or The Best Study of Ruby 2.0 Refinements Yet)
I’ve editorialized the title somewhat but this article by Charles Nutter is a great look into the world of ‘refinements’ in Ruby 2.0, what they’re intended for, and all of the challenges they throw up, both for developers and language implementers. Read More

This Week in Ruby: MRI 1.9.3-p327, Rails 3.2.9, Capybara 2.0, and the Fukuoka Ruby Award

By Peter Cooper / November 15, 2012

Welcome to this week’s roundup of Ruby news, articles, videos, and more, cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly.

Highlights include: MRI 1.9.3-p327, Rails 3.2.9, Capybara 2.0, and the Fukuoka Ruby Award.

Featured

Ruby 1.9.3-p327 Released: Fixes a Hash-Flooding DoS Vulnerability
Carefully crafted strings can be used in a denial of service attack on apps that parse strings to create Hash objects by using the strings as keys. This new patch level release of 1.9.3 counters the issue.

2013 Fukuoka Ruby Award Competition
Each year Matz and the Government of Fukuoka in Japan run an award for Ruby programs. Submit by November 30th to enter – it doesn’t have to be an all new app either. Read More

This Week in Ruby: Rubinius 2.0-rc1, Rake 10, Refactoring video, Passenger 4.0 supports JRuby, and more

By Peter Cooper / November 9, 2012

Welcome to this week’s roundup of Ruby news, articles, videos, and more, cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly.

Highlights include: Passenger 4.0 gets support for JRuby and Rubinius, Ben Orenstein’s awesome refactoring video, Pat Shaughnessy’s new ‘Ruby Under a Microscope’ book, AWS adds Ruby support to Elastic Beanstalk, and more.

Featured

Rubinius 2.0.0 Release Candidate 1
Sadly the Rubinius blog seems to be on hiatus but plenty of people noticed Rubinius 2.0.0rc1 has been tagged. Rubinius is an alternative Ruby implementation largely written in a subset of Ruby itself and the 2.0 release brings 1.9 syntax to the fore. Read More

This Week in Ruby: JRuby 1.7.0, Passenger 4.0b1, Ruby 2.0 Feature Freeze

1 Comment

By Peter Cooper / October 25, 2012

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

Highlights include: a massive release for JRuby, a promising beta for Phusion Passenger 4.0, the announcement of a ‘feature freeze’ for Ruby 2.0, the Rails Rumble 2012 results, and just what did the Rails Rumble winners use to power their apps?

Featured

Ruby 2.0.0 ‘Feature Freeze’ Announced
Right on schedule, the core Ruby team have announced a ‘feature freeze’ for the forthcoming Ruby 2.0. All this means for now is that no features not already approved by matz will make it into 2.0.0.

JRuby 1.7.0 Released; Gets 1.9.3 Support as Default

Working with TCP Sockets: Jesse Storimer’s New Ruby E-Book
Jesse Storimer (‘Working with Unix Processes’) has released his latest book, Working with TCP Sockets. Read More

The Past 2 Weeks in Ruby: 1.9.3-p286, JRuby 1.7RC2, Sidekiq Pro and Much More

By Peter Cooper / October 18, 2012

Welcome to this week’s Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the Ruby e-mail newsletter (just passed 17,000 subscribers – c’mon, sign up! :-)). 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 from now on.


The latest highlights include:

Featured

Ruby 1.9.3-p286 Released
The latest, official production patch-level release of MRI 1.9 is out. The primary motivation was for fixing a couple of security vulnerabilities and a handful of bugs.

A Whirlwind Tour of Rails 4
Andy Lindeman presents a 40 minute tour of some of the forthcoming Rails 4′s new features, including strong_parameters, Russian Doll caching, PATCH verb support, removal of Rails 2 finder syntax, and more. Read More

This Week in Ruby: What to Expect in Rails 4.0 talk, EventMachine tutorial, and StrongParameters hit Edge Rails

1 Comment

By Peter Cooper / September 20, 2012

Welcome to this week’s Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly.

Featured

Yehuda Katz Needs Your Input on the Tokaido (a.k.a. rails.app) UI
5 months ago, Yehuda Katz raised $51k to work on Tokaido, an app designed to make setting up a Rails environment on OS X easy. He now has some mockups of the app’s user interface and needs your input.

RIP attr_accessible: DHH Commits StrongParameters to Rails Edge

KidsRuby Now Available in French, Japanese, and Spanish

Tddium Looking for Beta Testers of its New JRuby CI Service
Tddium is a cloud-based continuous integration service for Ruby apps and they’re expanding into CI for JRuby. Read More

This Week in Ruby: Rails Rumble Dates, Active Admin 0.5, Protected Methods in Ruby 2.0

By Peter Cooper / September 14, 2012

Welcome to this week’s Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the Ruby e-mail newsletter (Now at 16,300 subscribers! C’mon.. check it out ;-)).

Highlights include: an announcement over the dates for this year’s Rails Rumble, releases of Active Admin 0.5 and Bundler 1.2, as well as Aaron Patterson looking at a difference in Object#respond_to? in the forthcoming Ruby 2.0.

Featured

The Rails Rumble is Back! Dates and Details Announced
The popular 48 hour Ruby development contest is back and will run this October 13th and 14th. Registration opens on October 1st. Learn all about it here.

Active Admin 0.5.0 Released
Active Admin is a popular administrative interface generation system for Rails and a new version has been a long time coming. Read More

A Mega Ruby News and Release Roundup for July 2012 in 97 Links

By Peter Cooper / August 3, 2012

Welcome to the bumper pick’n'mix of Ruby and Rails news and releases for July 2012, fresh from the pages of Ruby Weekly (now at 15,400 subscribers – give it a look).

Highlights include: Rails 3.2.7, Phusion Passenger Enterprise, RubyMine 4.5, O’Reilly’s “Learning Rails 3″, GitHub’s funding, and Rails 4.0′s live streaming support.

Headlines

Phusion Passenger Enterprise Released
The chaps at Phusion have unveiled their latest release: Passenger Enterprise. Passenger is a popular Apache and Nginx module for deploying Ruby webapps and the ‘Enterprise’ variant includes rolling restarts, a live IRB console, and more.

Rails 3.2.7 Released
Contains an important security fix for apps using digest authentication from Action Pack. Read More

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. 6
  8. 7
  9. ...
  10. 80