Peter Cooper Page 34 : Ruby Inside

Mack: A Fast, “Best of the Rest” Web App Framework

8 Comments

By Peter Cooper / April 11, 2008

Mack is an interesting new Ruby Web app framework (of which, as we know, there are many !) that takes some of the best elements of other Web app frameworks (including Rack support!) and presents itself in a very modular, “agile” way. Developer Mark Bates gives the inspiration for Mack’s development as “portals” and says that a lot of Mack’s development will be focused on this, including features like a distributed routing system and interoperability between multiple trusted, local apps.

I’ve personally used Mack (along with jQuery) in the last day or two to develop a chat client. Read More

GitHub Officially Launches: Git Hosting A-Go-Go!

6 Comments

By Peter Cooper / April 10, 2008

It’s been the programming world’s worst kept secret, but the covers are finally off as GitHub officially launched today. No more beta invites needed – hurrah!

GitHub is, officially, a Git repository hosting service (where Git is a source code control system – think decentralized, distributed SVN) built by Chris Wanstrath (Err the Blog), Tom Preston-Werner (creator of Chronic and God), and PJ Hyett. GitHub’s early users are calling it a “social programming network,” a “FaceBook for coders,” and all sorts of wonderful things. This is because Git’s decentralized nature makes it easy to fork, branch and merge code, and so does GitHub, which makes GitHub an ideal platform for collectively working on software, especially open source. Read More

RubyFlow: A New Ruby News Site

12 Comments

By Peter Cooper / April 10, 2008

RubyFlow is a new Ruby news site developed by… me over the last couple of days. It will suit developers looking more for a “filtered firehose” of Ruby news.

RubyFlow will be faster, quicker and more raw than Ruby Inside. Ruby Inside will continue with 1 – 2 “you gotta see this!” posts per day (max) but RubyFlow will be the place to go for immediacy and volume. Another big difference is that anyone can post to RubyFlow. You don’t need to sign up to post although you’ll be CAPTCHAed and suffer rel=”nofollow” on your links if you don’t (to prevent spam). Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #21

10 Comments

By Peter Cooper / April 9, 2008

RubyAMP: Amazing Ruby Bundle for TextMate

RubyAMP is a TextMate bundle that goes above and beyond the typical TextMate bundle in usefulness. It adds auto-complete from all open tabs, easy jumping to methods and classes, improved RSpect debugging support, breakpoint support (set and remove from TextMate), Merb / Rails server or console launching, development log tailing, and a lot more. There’s a screencast on the project page itself so you can get a direct look at how it all works within a minute or two.

Bicycle Location Visualization with Ruby and RMagick

Paris has a shared bicycle scheme for those who want to get around downtown called Velib. Read More

Couldn’t Be At MountainWest RubyConf? Watch The Presentations Now!

2 Comments

By Peter Cooper / April 7, 2008

If you couldn’t get to the popular MountainWest RubyConf two weeks ago, don’t fear. In conjunction with Confreaks, videos of all of the presentations are available to watch online. 14 videos are available, including the following:

Strengthening the Ruby Ecosystem Part I: Rubinius by Evan Phoenix – Evan gives a general overview of Rubinius, how the project has worked out so far, and what the goal is with its development.

Strengthening the Ruby Ecosystem Part II: Merb by Ezra Zygmuntowicz – A similarly general overview of Merb, a Ruby Web applications framework. A great executive overview of the Merb project generally. Read More

Railscasts Releases 100th Free Screencast; Holds a Contest

1 Comment

By Peter Cooper / April 7, 2008

If you’re a Rails developer you will, I hope, be familiar with Ryan Bates’ Railcasts, an amazing site chock full of free Rails related screencasts, and just over a year after posting the first video, Ryan has released video #100, entitled “5 View Tips”, which presents five quick tips relating to your use of views in your Rails applications.

To celebrate a solid 13 months of top-notch screencast production, Ryan has collaborated with a number of sponsors to launch a Railcast 100th Episode Contest.

The contest’s “grand prize” includes an iPod Touch (!), a Code Spaces Subversion hosting plan, a Harvest plan, a $50 Pragmatic Programmers coupon, a $50 Amazon gift card, and a $50 iTunes gift card! Read More

Thanks to EURUKO 2008′s Sponsors

By Peter Cooper / April 6, 2008

As anyone who was present at this year’s European Ruby Conference, EURUKO 2008, will attest: it was a great event! Over 300 Rubyists from all over Europe (and the world, with attendees from Japan, Australia and the US too) got together to talk, drink, and be merry.

The level of attendance came as a shock to the organizers, but they dealt with it excellently and put on a great event for all of us. Thanks must go to the CSRUG (Czechoslovakian Ruby Users’ Group) and its chairman Jiří Kubíček, along with Karel Minařík who played a big role. Read More

A Fresh Overview of Rubinius

5 Comments

By Peter Cooper / April 4, 2008

Mathieu Martin has written a great, up to date overview of Rubinius, a rapidly growing alternative Ruby implementation created by Evan Phoenix and now being developed by a large team (with significant financial help and manpower from Engine Yard).

Mathieu’s overview explains what Rubinius is (a new Ruby implementation with a heavy focus on implementing Ruby in a subset of itself), examines the ideas behind the implementation, and presents some up to date(ish) benchmarks that show how Rubinius compares to MRI (Matz’s Ruby Interpreter) so far. According to experts from trustedcasinosnotongamstop.com, the technical advancements Rubinius has made are a testament to the growing trend of open-source innovation. Read More

Easily Accessible Rails Documentation on OS X

1 Comment

By Peter Cooper / April 4, 2008

In Fluid Rails Docs on OSX, Jacques Crocker takes a look at a couple of ways to get good-looking Rails documentation within Mac OS X. Firstly, he provides a site specific browser for NoobKit, an online Rails / Gems documentation site. Secondly, however, is an app that accesses a locally available set of documentation called “RailsBrain” that works offline. Read More

Interesting Rails Tidbits #6

4 Comments

By Peter Cooper / March 30, 2008

Getting Started With Rails 2.0

Craig Webster has put together a tutorial called Getting Started With Rails 2.0 that does pretty much what it says in the title. Craig demonstrates how to start a project, get it up and running, use version control, put your project into a Git repository, and create models, views and controllers. Craig is also involved with the charity tutorial day at Scotland on Rails on April 3rd.

Custom Resource Name Plugin

Carlos Brando has developed a Rails plugin that enables you to add “aliases for your routes.” This is useful, he says, if you’re developing a Rails application targeting a non English-speaking market and want to have the URLs appear in the native language. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #20

4 Comments

By Peter Cooper / March 28, 2008

Ruby 1.9 Coming To Symbian OS

David Wood talks about the development of a port of Ruby 1.9 for Symbian OS (as used in many portable devices). The port includes TCP/IP and filesystem access, although GUI-level features are expected to be implemented by third party developers if the interest is there. An initial release is scheduled for April 2008. (Thanks to Jose Marinez for the lead.)

Rubyizumi – Open Source Ruby-Powered RMTP Server

The official site says it best: “RubyIZUMI is an open source RTMP Server for Flash Video/Audio Streaming. It is written in (Pure) Ruby and it supports to broadcast MP4(H.264 + AAC).”

Ruby Inside in Indonesian! Read More

Going To EURUKO 2008 Tomorrow? See You There!

14 Comments

By Peter Cooper / March 27, 2008

After putting out the call on Ruby Inside in February, the EURUKO European Ruby Conference is breaking all previous records with 300 Rubyists expected to descend on Prague, Czech Republic this weekend (March 29 – 30). The attendee list includes Matz, Koichi Sasada, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo of the JRuby team, David Black (Ruby for Rails), Dr. Nic, Peter Szinek (scRUBYt!), me (of this place!), and many more. Even David Heinemeier Hansson will be there in spirit, as he’s doing a video session over Skype.

I’ll be on site from Friday night through to Sunday afternoon attending the parties, doing interviews, trying to find out about some of the lesser known exciting Ruby projects people are working on, and generally seeing what people are up to. Read More

Scout: A Ruby Powered Web Monitoring and Reporting Service

5 Comments

By Peter Cooper / March 27, 2008

Disclaimer: Scout is a commercial service. I have received no compensation for mentioning this service and am posting about it merely due to my own interest in it.

Scout is a new “a la carte” monitoring and reporting service, primarily for tracking servers and Web applications, developed by HighGroove Studios. Scout lets you use plugins (provided both by HighGroove and other Scout users) written in Ruby to customize and manipulate your monitoring arrangements. You can also write your own plugins. Subscription levels will vary from a free account (one server, up to 3 plugins, 30 minute reporting intervals) up to over $100 per month for the highest level (supporting many more servers, shorter intervals, unlimited plugin usage, etc.)

The installation process and plugin system are what make Scout particularly unique and interesting. Read More

Is Windows a First Class Platform for Ruby?

89 Comments

By Peter Cooper / March 26, 2008

Luis Lavena is the new maintainer of the popular Ruby “One-Click Installer” for Microsoft Windows. As part of this new role, Luis has set a milestone of cutting the dependency on pre-built packages. He wants to move development from Visual C++ 6 to MinGW, so that Windows-based Ruby developers will, at least, be able to take advantage of a Linux-esque build system for Ruby libraries in future. Back in January, Luis wrote Ruby for Windows, a post where he elaborated on these ideas and wrote candidly about the state of Ruby on Windows (inability to compile some gems without VC6, etc.)

Unfortunately, he didn’t get much of a reaction, and was led to write Is Windows a support platform for Ruby? Read More

HotRuby: A JavaScript & Flash Virtual Machine That Runs Ruby

7 Comments

By Peter Cooper / March 26, 2008

HotRuby is a JavaScript and Flash powered virtual machine that can run Ruby code compiled to opcode by YARV.

You can write Ruby script within a Web page within <script type=”text/ruby”> .. </script> tags, and HotRuby will then extract it, send it to be compiled by a remote script, and then return it for the JavaScript and Flash powered virtual machine to display within the page. There are lots of demos, including a physics Flash application (as seen in the screenshot above), a very curious pinball game, and a benchmarking script (which shows HotRuby as being 78% faster than Ruby 1.9 on my machine?)

There’s also a live “do it yourself” coding environment if you want to give it a test by writing some code of your own. Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper