Peter Cooper Page 38 : Ruby Inside

Obie Fernandez’s HashRocket Builds Your Web App In 3 Days

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By Peter Cooper / January 19, 2008

Community celebrity, all round Rails good guy, and The Rails Way author Obie Fernandez writes in with news about his latest venture, HashRocket, a Rails-powered Web application development agency on steroids (or at least a lot of caffeine).

Their main “product” is 3-2-1 LAUNCH, a “get a site built in 3 days” affair, where you can get whatever idea it is you want to be developed sorted out by Obie and his crack team of 9 developers and various subcontractors in just three days. That’s called cooking your Agile cake and eating it! The pricing model is fixed bid, in the range of approx $30k-$60k, but you’re getting a lot for your money, since the team has many different resources to pull on, including stockpiled library code, Flash exports, visual design talent, and so forth. Read More

Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development by Elliot Smith and Roch Nichols

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By Peter Cooper / January 19, 2008

I was kindly sent a copy of Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development (or amazon.com link) by Elliot Smith and Roch Nichols by publisher Packt. As the authors are both British and the leading author is called Elliot Smith (close enough to the name of my favorite recording artist) I felt compelled to give it a look over and mention it here.

The book states that it’s aimed at corporate developers who already have a rudimentary knowledge of Rails but who want to move on to building a full-scale application with a view to deployment within the enterprise. Read More

The 30 Second Guide to Ruby Command Line Debugging

By Peter Cooper / January 15, 2008

Chad Woolley has put together a helpful blog post called “ruby-debug in 30 seconds (we don’t need no stinkin’ GUI!)” that covers how to use the ruby-debug command line debugger to debug Ruby applications. Also of interest will be this cheat sheet by the guys over at ErrFree.

If you’re not into GUI editors or haven’t found a GUI Ruby debugging solution, it’s worth looking into ruby-debug. Chad says now that he actually prefer this “IRB-style” of debugging to the graphical alternatives. Read More

Ruby Plus: Another Ruby/Rails Screencast Site

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By Peter Cooper / January 14, 2008

Ruby Plus is a site offering free Ruby and Rails related screencasts recorded by Bala Paranj, much in the same vein as Ryan Bates’ Railscasts. The screencasts are generally similar in length and overall format to those from Railscasts. So far there are 29 episodes you can download.

The first twelve screencasts in the archive (for which you have to register to download, alas) were exclusively Ruby, covering topics like blocks, class_eval, modules, recursion, and so on, but unfortunately the rest of the screencasts have been entirely Rails focused beyond those first twelve. It’s still a source worth checking for Ruby and Rails screencasts though, so give it a look. Read More

Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen

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By Peter Cooper / January 12, 2008

Design Patterns in Ruby (non-affiliate link to Amazon) is a new Ruby book by Russ Olsen and published by Addison-Wesley as part of their Obie Fernandez-led “Professional Ruby” series. It’s currently for sale at $42.99 at Amazon, but is also available on Safari if you’d rather read online.

Let me cover the bases by quoting my own quote found within the book:

This book provides a great demonstration of the key ‘Gang of Four’ design patterns without resorting to overly technical explanations. Written in a precise, yet almost informal style, this book covers enough ground that even those without prior exposure to design patterns will soon feel confident applying them using Ruby. Read More

Rails Web Host Engine Yard Now $3.5 Million Richer!

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By Peter Cooper / January 11, 2008

(photo credit: The Consumerist – CC Attribution 2.0)

Prominent Rails Web hosting company Engine Yard have raised $3.5 million from Benchmark Capital, a particularly successful venture capital firm who backed AOL and eBay in the early days. Money is afloweth into the Ruby and Rails sector!

The best write up of this news is by Obie Fernandez over at InfoQ. He talks about Engine Yard’s operation, their hiring of Rubinius developers, and Engine Yard’s thoughts for the future. Interestingly:

In discussing the benefits of taking VC money at this time, Engine Yard CEO Lance emphasized the fact that unlike hosting, Rubinius development is a longer-term play, which along with Merb may eventually become part of a commercially-available technology stack. Read More

No True “mod_ruby” Is Damaging Ruby’s Viability On The Web

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By Peter Cooper / January 10, 2008

Note: This post was drafted before DHH’s “The deal with shared hosts” post, but as it covers similar ground, it’s worth reading too. DHH’s opinion appears to be that shared hosts should put up or shut up, but I disagree and suggest this is something we need to solve as a community.

Most of us in the Ruby community know that deploying Web apps powered by Ruby can be like pulling teeth. Running up simple CGI scripts is easy enough, but once you move on to more robust systems, using things like Rails, Sinatra, Ramaze, Merb, Camping, whatever, it deviates significantly from the well-established “just upload it” route. Read More

Merb + Shoes = Interesting Web / GUI App Crossovers

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By Peter Cooper / January 10, 2008

Shoes Meets Merb: Driving a GUI App through Web Services in Ruby by Gregory Brown and Brad Ediger leads us on a six page tutorial extravaganza through not only building a cross-platform GUI app (namely, a pastebin of sorts) using WhyTheLuckyStiff’s Shoes system, but using Rails-killer Merb as a backend for storing the data. It’s an impressive enough effort that Why himself has linked to it and added a few notes of his own (including the provision of a much better illustrative screenshot – as used above).

In related news, yesterday Why announced the launch of a new version of Shoes, known as “Curious.” Read More

Skynet – Ruby Implementation of MapReduce

By Peter Cooper / January 8, 2008

Skynet is a new Ruby implementation of Google’s MapReduce mechanism developed by Adam Pisoni. Rubyists may already be familiar with the more established Starfish by Lucas Carlson. I must confess that while Starfish’s examples make immediate sense to me, without even needing to try the library, Skynet’s are a little more focused on the interface of the library rather than how you actually put the backend mechanisms / algorithms together, but as a new library it’s worth a look. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #13

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By Peter Cooper / January 8, 2008

Anvil (Ruby GUI App Framework) Gets an Update

A new version of Anvil, a Ruby framework for developing GUI applications, previously covered here on Ruby Inside, has been released. Lance Carlson has done a great job of making developing a basic GUI application on OS X, Windows or Linux a job that takes minutes rather than hours. All you need to do is install the Anvil gem, run a basic app generator, and a “Rails-esque” structure and basic app is created. If you haven’t taken a look at Anvil yet, give it a look.

Lucas Carlson also wanted to let everyone know that Anvil now includes the “widget_wrapper” gem which is a new gem focusing on “DSLing GUI toolkits” starting with WxRuby but progressing on to RubyCocoa, Swing, IronRuby, OpenGL, and so forth. Read More

Thin: A Ruby HTTP Daemon That’s Faster Than Mongrel

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By Peter Cooper / January 5, 2008

Thin is a new Web server / daemon written in Ruby by Marc-André Cournoyer that uses the EventMachine, Rack, and Mongrel libraries. EventMachine makes it super fast at processing network I/O, Rack makes it easy to integrate with existing Ruby Web app frameworks, and Mongrel helps it parse HTTP. So, yes, the title is slightly misleading. Thin actually relies on Mongrel, but is ultimately faster than it, even against Mongrel’s EventMachine-enhanced guise.

You can get started with Thin with a simple sudo gem install thin and then you can use it with any Rack supporting Web app / framework. Read More

A Great Ruby on Rails Security Presentation

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By Peter Cooper / January 4, 2008

Jonathan Weiss recently had a session about Ruby on Rails security at 24C3, the 24th Chaos Communication Congress, in Germany. He has made the slides (44 of them) available, as well as a 45 minute long Google Video with the slides, video, and sound to enjoy. Jonathan goes into data sanitation, cross site scripting attacks, cookies, and lots of similarly good stuff.

(Credit for letting me know about this: Martin Sadler) Read More

Getting Code Ready for Ruby 1.9

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By Peter Cooper / January 3, 2008

In Getting Code Ready for Ruby 1.9, James Edward Gray II is attempting to put together a comprehensive blog post on the various things you need to do to migrate your Ruby 1.8 code over to working on Ruby 1.9. So far, James only looks at a handful of potentially sticky areas, but commenters have already started chipping in with suggestions, including how to rewrite the BlankSlate class for Ruby 1.9.

Further afield, Sam Ruby has written Porting REXML to Ruby 1.9 where he rattles off a laundry-list of things he’s had to do to get REXML ported to Ruby 1.9. Read More

Halcyon – A Ruby and JSON Powered Web App Framework

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By Peter Cooper / January 3, 2008

Halcyon is a interesting new Web app framework by Matt Todd, written in Ruby. What makes Halcyon interesting is that while it’s very small and fast, as many of the Web app framework newcomers (such as Sinatra) are, its focus is entirely on using JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) for communications to and from the server. This could make Halcyon particularly well suited for providing the backend to simple “single page” AJAX driven applications. Another bonus is that Halcyon’s source code is full of comments and explanations and there’s documentation out the wazoo. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #12

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By Peter Cooper / December 30, 2007

RubyCamp 2008 in Vancouver, Canada – January 26, 2008

RubyCamp 2008 is a one-day “Ruby camp” in Vancouver, Canada, taking place on January 26, 2008. All are invited, Rubyists and Railers alike, and it runs from 9am to 5pm at “WorkSpace” in downtown Vancouver. There’s a lot more about it at the official RubyCamp site. Two “tracks” will be in flow, a traditional conference-style track with speakers giving talks, and a “Hackathon” track taking an un-conference approach where you can just show off your cool application, Ruby tricks, and stuff like that.

Solving Rails Performance Bottlenecks with RM-Manage

Solving Rails Performance Bottlenecks with RM-Manage is an article by enterprise Rails deployment company FiveRuns that looks at how to use their RM-Manage service to, unsurprisingly, deal with bottlenecks in your Rails applications. Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper