Yesterday, Lyle Johnson of the FXRuby GUI toolkit project stood aside as the project’s maintainer, effectively retiring the project:

The undertone here is that the FOX Toolkit, upon which FXRuby operates, isn’t underseeing significant development and, perhaps, there is little more for FXRuby to be doing (at least, little in the way of exciting or interesting) and Lyle wants to shuffle the project off his plate.

Lyle cites Jamis Buck’s dropping of his Capistrano deployment system project as an inspiration, though Capistrano’s story turned out to be a happy one after being adopted, for the most part, by Lee Hambley. Read More

Avdi Grimm presents a concise guide to a matter that confuses the majority of Ruby developers from time to time. Read More

The Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example (a.k.a. railstutorial.org) by Michael Hartl has become a must read for developers learning how to build Rails apps. Michael has put together a great Rails 2.3 tutorial, releasing it all for free online chapter by chapter. Now, Michael’s going three steps further:

1 — A new, Rails 3.0 focused version. The free online book previously covered Rails 2.3 but Michael’s updated it to cover Rails 3.0 too. He’s also selling it as a DRM-free PDF for $39 (you get a PDF of the Rails 2.3 version too). As a gesture of goodwill to Ruby Inside’s readers, he’s made a coupon code that works till the end of August – it’s rubyinside01 and gets you 20% off (so a total of $31.20 in the end). Read More

This is very nice. I love these microframeworks. The Sinatra style is always good to ape. Read More

In Distributed Ruby – Exploiting Enterprise Software, Anthony riffs on using JRuby as a way for Rubyists to “exploit” robust, enterprise-grade libraries. This isn’t a new topic but his demonstration is particularly compelling (and worth scrolling down for).

Hazelcast is an “in memory data grid” that’s fail-safe (with regard to crashes) and that automatically scales across the number of nodes within the system. Anthony’s code works fine out of the box with JRuby 1.5.1 running under RVM (yep, I tested) and demonstrates what is a particularly powerful Java library I’d never heard of before. It’s excellent we have access to this from Ruby, and Anthony’s right – the JRuby team deserves credit for giving Rubyists opportunities to both “exploit” enterprise technologies and to deploy systems in enterprise environments without having to jump ship with Ruby. Read More

Over on the official Rails blog, DHH talks about today’s release of the first release candidate of the much awaited Rails 3.0.

Note: You might still find RI’s Rails 3.0 Beta: 36 Links and Resources to Get You Going useful too. Read More

It’s been a couple of months since the last job round up but the Ruby Inside job board has been hopping! There are 14 live listings to go over today and they’re not all in San Francisco. Jobs in Denver and Maryland bring in a bit of interesting variety.

A tweak to the format now that Ruby Inside has gone all “tumblelog” on you: I’ve decided not to include blurbs about every job in the listings since if you’re interested in a company or the location is suited to you, you’re going to click through and read the extended information anyway. Read More

Hot on the heels of his Windows Ruby implementation shootout comes Antonio Cangiano’s Great Ruby Shootout of July 2010 where Antonio pits 8 different Ruby implementations against each other in a performance shootout!

Antonio’s findings and observations are interesting and well worth a read (particularly the parts about memory consumption) but if you’re in a hurry, the conclusion is that Ruby 1.9.2 RC2 and JRuby 1.5.1 are almost joint first place for fastest Ruby implementation (but 1.9.2 takes it by a hair.) Ruby 1.9.1 and Maglev are then very close behind. Read More

I don’t understand the odd release candidate vs “1.0 is released” situation, but I’ve been following Eric’s progress for months and he’s put a lot of effort into making Redmine – a Ruby and Rails-based project management system used by the Ruby, RubySpec, Puppet and Typo3 projects, amongst others. Read More

Giles Bowkett (Ruby Inside’s top Ruby presenter of 2008) has released a series of free videos called “Secrets of Superstar Programming Productivity” that could interest some of you:

Flow (22 minutes)
Metrics (17 minutes)
Habit (22 minutes)

Giles’ style isn’t for everyone, but he shares some great tips in these videos and they’ve been very well received on Twitter. Enjoy! Read More

Florian Hanke got in touch to tell me that presentations and photos from the recent Euruko 2010 European Ruby conference are now online.

http://euruko2010.heroku.com/ shows off the presentations awesomely! Videos and slides are available for most of them and the video/audio is of a high quality.

Highlights include:

• Continuous Integration and Why You Need It — Nicolas (foca) Sanguinetti
• Getting and loading code: current state of packaging & best practices — Mislav Marohnić
• Building a search engine with Ruby — Florian Hanke
• Why Bundler? — Yehuda Katz
• Remodelling a Facebook game — Tim Lossen
• Putting the static back into Ruby — Tomasz Stachewicz
• Anatomy of Ruby i18n — Sven Fuchs
• Matz’s Keynote — Matz!

Read More

Rails Magazine is a well designed magazine dedicated to “fine articles on Ruby & Rails” and the recently released issue #6 is special in being nearly entirely Ruby focused. Topics covered include Haml, Sass, Capistrano, Hpricot, RubyConf India and RVM, as well as interviews with Sarah Allen and Michael Day (of PrinceXML).

The PDF version of Rails Magazine is free, but you can buy a print edition through MagCloud for less than $10. Read More

Ruby Tracker is a new webapp from EnvyLabs that tracks dependencies for your Ruby and Rails applications. It alerts you whenever libraries you depend on are updated or have new versions released. This is all in aid of keeping up to date.

Only two downsides: Ruby Tracker only works with projects that use Bundler and that are in an Internet-accessible Git repository (such as on GitHub). It can deal with private repositories, however, so your code doesn’t need to be publicly accessible.

In true Envylabs style, a screencast explains how Ruby Tracker works:

Nathaniel Bibler has written a blog post explaining what Ruby Tracker is all about in case the idea doesn’t click for you immediately. Read More