Peter Cooper Page 27 : Ruby Inside

Nokogiri: A Faster, Better HTML and XML Parser for Ruby (than Hpricot)

By Peter Cooper / October 31, 2008

Yesterday, Aaron Patterson (@tenderlove) and Mike Dalessio released Nokogiri (Github repository), a new HTML and XML parser for Ruby. It “parses and searches XML/HTML faster than Hpricot” (Hpricot being the current de facto Ruby HTML parser) and boasts XPath support, CSS3 selector support (a big deal, because CSS3 selectors are mega powerful) and the ability to be used as a “drop in” replacement for Hpricot.

On an Hpricot vs Nokogiri benchmark, Nokogiri clocked in at 7 times faster at initially loading an XML document, 5 times faster at searching for content based on an XPath, and 1.62 times faster at searching for content via a CSS-based search. Read More

Ruby 1.9.1 Preview Released: Why This Is A Big Deal

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By Peter Cooper / October 29, 2008

In an understated post on the official Ruby blog last night, Yugui (Yuki Sonoda) announced the release of Ruby 1.9.1-preview 1.

Why To Get Excited

A preview release? Why is this a big deal? A few reasons why Ruby 1.9.1 is significant, even as a preview release:

Ruby 1.9.1 will be the first stable, production-ready release of the much anticipated Ruby 1.9 series.
The Ruby 1.9 branch is the cornerstone of Ruby’s future. Much as PHP 5-style code is replacing PHP 4-style code, Ruby 1.9′s idioms and style will eventually reign (even if it takes a few years).
As of Ruby 1.9.1-preview 1, the language features and changes are effectively “frozen.” Changes to standard libraries for multilingual features are likely to continue, however.

A List of Non-English Ruby and Rails News Sites

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By Peter Cooper / October 28, 2008

When Ruby Inside started over two years ago, there were only a handful of sources for Ruby related news. The announcements on the ruby-talk mailing list (which Ruby Weekly News – now deceased – rounded up on the Web), del.icio.us, and a few popular Rubyists blogs (such as Why’s Redhanded). Now, however, there are lots of options, including Ruby Inside itself, Rails Inside, RubyFlow, Ruby Reddit, and Planet Ruby on Rails.

But what about the Ruby and Rails news for non-English speakers? I’ve been keeping my eye on a number of foreign-language Ruby and Rails news sites, and want to highlight some of the best:

Russia / Россия / русско

RubyFlow.ru is a Russian equivalent of the English language RubyFlow.com. Read More

Ruby Style Guides and Tools: How to Write Good Looking Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / October 27, 2008

Last week, Noel Rappin of Pathfinder Development wrote Elements of Ruby Style – an attempt at producing a Ruby “style guide.” After some initial feedback to this, he’s followed up with a response to some of the initial criticisms and suggestions.

Noel isn’t the first to try to develop a Ruby style guide. In an attempt to promote Ruby’s use within Google, Ian Macdonald wrote an extensive Ruby style guide back in 2006 (rather sadly, it appears his attempt did not work out).

What’s a “Style Guide” then?

For those unfamiliar with style guides, the most famous for the English language are probably Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style and The Chicago Manual of Style (my personal favorite) – both attempt to define how to write and lay out English texts properly. Read More

Mobile Orchard: Like Ruby Inside, but for iPhone Developers

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By Peter Cooper / October 22, 2008

A brief aside to mention my latest project (in collaboration with Dan Grigsby) – Mobile Orchard.

Mobile Orchard is a new iPhone developer news site, in a similar vein to Ruby Inside. We’ve already:

filmed a 5 minute walkthrough of Android for iPhone developers
shown 9 places you can go to promote your iPhone apps
launched our podcast with a 30 minute interview with Hampton Catlin, well known in the Ruby and Rails scene (he invented Haml, for example) but who’s also selling 1,000 copies a day of his iPhone application – we’ll leave you to do the math at $1 per copy!

How To Develop A Mac (Cocoa) Application With MacRuby And XCode

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By Peter Cooper / October 20, 2008

Over a year ago we had a post about how to build OS X GUI applications with Ruby and RubyCocoa. Since then, however, MacRuby has arrived on the scene. Not just the regular version of Ruby with some bindings to Cocoa, MacRuby is as native to OS X as JRuby is native to the JVM.

It’s a significant development, then, that Apple has created a very in-depth tutorial called Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby. It’s very comprehensive. The tutorial introduces you to MacRuby, walks you through installation, demonstrates Objective-C bindings, and steps through using XCode and MacRuby to develop a simple GUI application. Read More

Working With Video From Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / October 17, 2008

With only the performance of a scripting language, Ruby isn’t considered a particularly suitable choice for intense video work (direct transcoding, encoding, and the like.). Nonetheless, there are a handful of Ruby libraries and Ruby-based technologies you can use to work with video and movie files – primarily through interacting with faster tools or libraries.

RMov (Ruby Quicktime Library)

RMov is an awesome new Ruby library by Ryan Bates that wraps around Apple’s QuickTime API and allows you to open, edit, and export QuickTime movies from within Ruby. It is, unfortunately, OS X only.

RVideo (Ruby Video Processing)

RVideo (Github) is a Ruby library that interfaces with tools like ffmpeg to let you inspect and process video and audio files. Read More

Ruby’s Popularity On The Up; An Ideal Haven For The Recession?

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By Peter Cooper / October 15, 2008

A week ago, in a story published by eWeek.com, Darryl K. Taft asked “Can Ruby and Rails Make Developers Shine in a Downturn?“

The general gist is that with a generally lower total cost of development, projects using Ruby and Rails will continue to increase, and even thrive in a recession, ensuring the success of Ruby and Rails developers. An analyst with Forrester, John Rymer, however, countered:

I respectfully suggest that the type of application someone is working on is a more important factor than language usage. In a downturn, companies tend to go back to basics.

Whatever the final outcome, Ruby’s popularity is still increasing. Read More

4 Weather Libraries for Ruby and Rails Developers

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By Peter Cooper / October 14, 2008

Want to retrieve weather conditions in your Ruby script / application? There are four great solutions: WeatherMan, RWeather, rubyweather, and the Yahoo Weather Ruby API.

RWeather

RWeather, by Carlos Kozuszko, is a Ruby wrapper for the Weather XML data feed from The Weather Channel’s weather.com. Carlos has put together a basic tutorial / overview of the library’s use. Currently it has two main features: searching for locations, and then retrieving the current weather for locations of your choice. It’s a nice, simple library.

WeatherMan

WeatherMan, by Jared Pace, goes a little deeper than RWeather. Read More

Ruby + MIDI: Giles Bowkett’s Ruby Musical Mystery Tour

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By Peter Cooper / October 14, 2008

Giles Bowkett is anything but a quiet chap – indeed, he’s one of the more outspoken members of our community. With the roar, however, comes a lot of wisdom, and Giles recent work on integrating Ruby and MIDI is inspired.

In July, Giles attended the RubyFringe conference and gave a talk with the unpronounceable title of “Archaeopteryx: A Ruby MIDI Generator“, named after his Archaeopteryx project. This talk has been very well received generally. Pete Forde of Unspace called it “the most important video of 2008″, Pete Yandell said it’s the “must-watch geek talk of the year” and *** **** said Giles “Ruled The World.” It’s an awesome talk, even if music and MIDI don’t interest you. Read More

Nanite: Self Assembling Cluster of Ruby Daemons

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By Peter Cooper / October 12, 2008

It was with much excitement that Merbcamp started yesterday with a keynote from Ezra Zygmuntowicz, initial creator of the Merb Web application framework. Aside from covering Merb-related news, Ezra revealed a project called Nanite – a “self assembling cluster of Ruby daemons.”

A Nanite installation is based around a “mapper exchange” with which Ruby daemons (called Nanite “agents”) register. Nanite mappers (running in, say, Rails or Merb applications, or even command line apps) can then call the exchange and gain access to the functionality of the agents. The mapper exchange makes it possible for daemons / agents to start, stop and die while allowing the whole cluster to be self-healing. Read More

Rails Envy Podcast Celebrates 1st Birthday

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By Peter Cooper / October 9, 2008

It was a year ago that the Rails Envy podcast was born. Run by the now infamous Jason Seifer and Gregg Pollack, Rails Envy has been entertaining and informing us with Rails (and some Ruby) news since October 2007, and they’ve become almost household names in the Ruby community and on the conference circuit. If you weren’t reading Ruby Inside a year ago, check them out – it’s an entertaining way to get a weekly Rails news fix.

I decided to ask the guys a few irreverent questions to see how their year has gone:

So guys, what’s the most surprising bit of news you’ve reported over the last year? Read More

11 Top Ruby and Rails Jobs for October 2008

By Peter Cooper / October 7, 2008

More jobs – more opportunities! It’s not entirely Rails-only opportunities this time around, although all the positions are in the US (primarily in San Francisco). 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.

So, on with this month’s interesting opportunities:

Ruby Developer (New York, NY): Animoto is a Web application that produces videos using user selected images and music at the click of a button. They’re looking for a Ruby developer with computer science fundamentals to join their team. Read More

Ruby 1.8′s Dismal Net/HTTP Performance

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By Peter Cooper / October 5, 2008

A week ago, Adam Nelson (a Virginia-based Ruby developer) complained about Ruby’s “absolutely bullshit Ruby HTTP client situation.” He was running into a nasty situation where Ruby’s standard HTTP client library (net/http) was sending data in 1 kilobyte chunks, causing his CPU to redline. Due to net/http’s popularity (particularly with other libraries), Adam saw this as a big issue.

Today, Adam returns with a more scientific analysis of Ruby 1.8.x’s HTTP client performance. He discovers that while Ruby 1.8.6 and below have a hard-coded 1KB buffer size for HTTP reads, Ruby 1.8.7 extends the buffer to 16KB.

The results are very interesting and worth checking out, and while Adam’s his ultimate conclusion is that “Ruby’s Net::HTTP implementation blows,” he’s looking to work on the necessary changes to bring net/http up to speed. Read More

Ruby Manor: Experimental Ruby Conference in London – November 22, 2008

By Peter Cooper / October 3, 2008

Ruby Manor is an interesting new event that will hopefully become a regular fixture on the Ruby events calendar! Taking place in London (at the University of London Union) on November 22, Ruby Manor is taking an “all hands on deck” approach to event organization, with intense discussion between attendees as to how it should be run. The initial organizers are Murray Steele and James Adam.

Tickets cost £12 and, as of writing, 92 tickets are left. Any profits will go “behind the bar.” If you’re within London’s catchment area (or just fancy a trip) signing up looks like a no-brainer. Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper

Why To Get Excited

Russia / Россия / русско

What’s a “Style Guide” then?

RMov (Ruby Quicktime Library)

RVideo (Ruby Video Processing)

RWeather

WeatherMan