Peter Cooper Page 37 : Ruby Inside

Ruby Cheat Sheets

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By Peter Cooper / February 8, 2008

Ruby is an easy language to learn, but it’s often necessary to look up something we’ve forgotten. A combination of Google plus any Ruby books we have on our shelves can help, but sometimes it’s handy to refer to a simpler set of notes – such as a “cheat sheet.” This post attempts to cover the most interesting ones.

The idea for this initial list came from Scott Klarr’s own list. Scott has been quite prolific lately in putting together lists of cheat sheets. Some of his lists are: Apache cheat sheets, MySQL cheat sheets, PHP cheat sheets, and JavaScript / AJAX cheat sheets. Read More

Where Next For Ruby Inside? Your Opinion Is Needed!

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By Peter Cooper / February 7, 2008

When I founded Ruby Inside in mid 2006, I decided to settle on a simple format. I post several times a week about the most interesting things that appear or happen in the Ruby community with just enough editorial that the news has a curated, experience-backed feel, as opposed to a fire-hydrant “wall of news.” The keystone to this technique is to post several times a week so that you don’t get either bored or fatigued (I unsubscribed from TechCrunch when they began to post more than a couple of times each day). This format has clearly worked well, with over 13000 subscribers now reading Ruby Inside on a daily basis, but times are changing. Read More

The Ultimate List of RubyCocoa Tutorials, Tips and Tools

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By Peter Cooper / February 6, 2008

RubyCocoa is a Ruby library and Mac OS X framework that bridges the Ruby programming language to the delights of Objective C and, more precisely, Cocoa, Apple’s primary OS X application development framework. Included with Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.x), but also available to install for Tiger, RubyCocoa makes it easy to develop Ruby applications that take full advantage of what OS X’s internal frameworks and libraries have to offer, whether it’s building a regular GUI application or interacting with low level elements of OS X.

This post rounds up a lot of RubyCocoa-focused resources, tutorials, and other links, so that if you’re new to RubyCocoa and just want to “dive in,” a lot of the pages you’ll want to visit are organized here. Read More

ActiveMerchant E-Book by Cody Fauser

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By Peter Cooper / February 5, 2008

ActiveMerchant is a new e-book written by Cody Fauser and produced by Geoffrey Grosenbach’s PeepCode which, unsurprisingly, is about the Active Merchant Ruby library and Rails plugin (past Ruby Inside reference). Cody Fauser is a key developer on the Active Merchant project, so all the knowledge is from the “horse’s mouth,” as it were!

The Active Merchant library was initially developed as part of the Shopify e-commerce system, and is an excellent library for interacting with payment gateways from Ruby (and Rails) code. It’s been in production use handling tens of thousands of payments since 2006 and it now has support for several payment gateways, including PayPal, Authorize.Net, and TrustCommerce. Read More

21 Merb Links, Tutorials and Other Resources

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By Peter Cooper / February 5, 2008

Merb is a Ruby Web framework that most Ruby and Rails developers are familiar with, even if they haven’t used it. Merb is a Model View Controller based framework, somewhat like Rails, but it’s significantly lighter, faster, and more customizable. Merb’s strength is that it has a lightweight core and relies on plugins, selected by the user, to provide most of the extended functionality.

This post is to summarize some of the more interesting Merb tutorials and references, so that newcomers to Merb, or those who want to refresh their knowledge, can get started quickly:

Official Stuff

Merb’s official homepage – The typical launching point for learning about what Merb is, and for accessing stable and trunk builds or learning how to contribute to the project. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #15

By Peter Cooper / February 4, 2008

Fixing Ruby & Rails’ slow performance with patches!

Gleb Arshinov has put together an information packed post about how to speed up Ruby’s garbage collector, particularly to speed up Rails applications, as well as how to speed up Rails by applying a few interesting monkey patches. This is a compelling must read for performance junkies!

The Guerilla’s Guide to Optimizing Rails Applications

Following on from this Ruby and Rails performance post (above), Gleb Arshinov moved on to writing The Guerilla’s Guide to Optimizing Rails Applications, another must read for Rails optimizing and performance junkies.

Scoped Structs for your classes

Mike Ferrier has created an interesting gem called scoped_struct that provides you with the ability to roll out structs within sub-scopes of a class. Read More

SwitchPipe: My New Rapid and Easy Way To Deploy Web Apps

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By Peter Cooper / February 4, 2008

It’s not very often I get to announce my own work here, but SwitchPipe is a new project I’ve been working on since my “No True mod_ruby Is Damaging Ruby’s Viability On The Web” post. It was Ruby Inside’s most commented-on post yet and inspired a lot of discussion about the state of deploying Ruby apps online, and got me to thinking about how to build something to achieve ultra-easy Ruby Web app deployment.

SwitchPipe is a proof of concept Web application process manager and request proxy. Backend Web applications are loaded into their own processes, making SwitchPipe language and framework agnostic. Read More

Introduction to XMPP and XMPP4R for Ruby Developers

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By Peter Cooper / February 3, 2008

As Wikipedia says, XMPP is “an open, XML-inspired protocol for near-real-time, extensible instant messaging and presence information.” It’s used by Jabber, the Gizmo Project, Google Talk, Pidgin, Kopete, and all sorts of open source instant messaging applications. It can also be used by any applications you want to develop yourself to pass messages back and forth, for example.

XMPP support in Ruby comes, primarily, from the XMPP4R library (Jabber4R and Net::XMPP are both semi-abandoned), and Frank Lamontagne (of Ruby Fleebie) has written a two part tutorial / guide to using XMPP4R to integrate with Instant Messaging systems. The first part is a basic overview, and the second part is a basic demo of creating an XMPP client. Read More

European Rubyists! Come to Euruko 2008, Prague, March 29-30

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By Peter Cooper / February 1, 2008

European Rubyists, it’s time to open up your calendar and pencil in March 29th and 30th, 2008, as Euruko 2008 is heading to Prague. Heck, if you’re willing to fly to one of European’s most cultural cities, you’re welcome from any continent! Registration is not yet open for the conference, but is planned to open sometime in the next week. There will be another post here on Ruby Inside when that happens. Registration is only €20 ($30 / £15) and gets you entrance, some food and drinks, a t-shirt, and some other stuff, so it’s really just to cover expenses.

Euruko is a truly grassroots, Ruby-focused European conference that has taken place each year since 2003, and this year it’s set to double in size (in 2007 there were about 80 attendees, with 150-200 expected this time). Read More

Interesting Rails Tidbits #3

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By Peter Cooper / January 30, 2008

Ext JS Powered Administration System Generator for Rails 2.0

Davide D’Agostino writes in with news about Lipsiadmin, his Ext JS powered administration system generator for Rails 2.0. Ext JS is an interesting JavaScript framework that lets you quickly put together AJAX-powered Web pages that look and feel somewhat like Windows applications. Lipsiadmin takes this attribute of Ext JS and builds backend administrator systems for your Rails applications that feel more like GUI apps than Web pages. It’s pretty interesting work.

RailsConf 2008 Registration Now Open

Just a quick note to those who are interested that the registration for RailsConf 2008 is open. Read More

Watch the RailsConf 2007 Keynote Videos

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By Peter Cooper / January 29, 2008

Both David Hansson and Chad Fowler have announced that videos of the keynote presentations given at RailsConf 2007 are now available to view online. The downside is that you only see the speakers and not their slides or accompanying code, so keep that in mind before digging in too deep. The best presentations are David’s keynote and Ze Frank’s (though Ze’s is totally irrelevant in topic, naturally). Read More

Ruby Gets Its Own Reddit

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By Peter Cooper / January 26, 2008

In the past week, Reddit made it possible for some users to create “sub-reddits”, areas of Reddit focused on a particular niche or topic. Naturally, it didn’t take long for someone (James Golick, specifically) to make a Ruby-specific Reddit. It’s available at http://ruby.reddit.com/ and while it’s early days, I can see this taking off and becoming a great source for Ruby news as time goes by. Read More

Treetop – Powerful But Easy Ruby Parser Library

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By Peter Cooper / January 25, 2008

Treetop is a very well put together Ruby library for building Ruby-powered parsers. Treetop makes it possible to rapidly put together parsers for your own mini languages (a basic “arithmetic” parser is the main demonstration used on the Treetop site) and relies on parsing expression grammars to make it a pretty easy process.

Back in 2006 I posted about my own Ruby recursive descent parser on Ruby Inside, but Treetop goes a lot further in making it developer friendly and more powerful overall, even going as far as making blending grammars together as easy as mixing Ruby modules! Another key difference between a raw recursive descent parser and Treetop is that Treetop actually generates Ruby code that works on your particular grammar, somewhat like yacc or Ragel. Read More

Ruby Fools Conference in Denmark – April 1 & 2, 2008

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By Peter Cooper / January 25, 2008

Ruby Fools is a new, European Ruby-focused conference being hosted in Copenhagen, Denmark on April 1st and 2nd. It’s being organized by Trifork, the company behind the popular QCon and JAOO conferences. I’m going to be speaking there on the first day giving my “Introduction to Ruby” presentation between 11am and midday. Unfortunately I’m on at the same time as Evan Phoenix will be giving a presentation on Rubinius, which makes me a little nervous, but I can certainly promise plenty of sizzle.. preparations are already underway! Along with Evan Phoenix, there’s a large collection of other speakers, including Dave Thomas, Dr. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #14

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By Peter Cooper / January 20, 2008

Rubular – Online Ruby Regular Expression Editor

Rubular is a Web-based regular expression editor and tester for Ruby developers, and particularly well suited for those who don’t find regular expressions particularly easy. Very slick.

FXRuby Book Available

Harmon Vinson reports that a new book is available in beta form from the Pragmatic Programmers, namely “FXRuby: Create Lean and Mean GUIs with Ruby.” As you can expect, the book covers how to create GUI applications using Ruby and the cross-platform FOX widgets library using FXRuby. The only downside is that FOX, so far, has no native support for OS X’s default Aqua window manager, but will work through X11. Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper