Gregg Pollack of the always amusing RailsEnvy duo has put together a great 30 minute video presentation called “How I Learned to Love Testing” where he looks at how to test code, why to test code, the steps to take to become a testing or behavior driven development fanatic, and a live demonstration of the concepts in action. Read More
Ruby on Rails Workshop and Training in New Brunswick, CanadaSpheric are hosting a Ruby on Rails training and workshop session called “Why Ruby On Rails?” in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada on October 9th – 11th.. next week! The training is with Ruby veteran, Bruce Tate, and costs $2400. The workshop, however, is free and Bruce Tate is involved directly with that too. It’s a bit off the beaten path but if you’re in eastern Canada (or even Maine!), check it out.The “UK’s first” Ruby on Rails Focused VPS Hosting
Four months ago I posted “BrightBox: Finally a Rails-focused VPS in the UK? Read More
My publisher has just let me know that BookPool.com, a discount computer books store, is selling most Apress-published books at 50% off, so now Beginning Ruby is available for just $19.95 (compared to $28 on Amazon.com)! This also means you can get other Ruby and Rails books like Beginning Rails for $17.25, Practical Rails Social Networking Sites for $22.25 and Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce for $17.25.
The Back Story..
Ruby Inside was created to be a promotional site for my then in development book, Beginning Ruby. Things turned out rather differently for Ruby Inside in the end but the book came out in March 2007 and has done reasonably well. Read More
DeepTest is a new library that allows you to run test suites in separate processes simultaneously. The obvious benefit is that on multiple core machines, as are becoming hip with the kids nowadays, test performance can be increased significantly. Initial tests by the developers showed that a test suite ran in half the time on a dual core machine, although real life performance is bound to vary.
With the perennial complaints from developers of how long test suites take to run, DeepTest looks like a promising development. The developers say they’re looking at implementing a similar system for RSpec in future. Read More
Back in February, I did a brief review of “Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Applications” written by Patrick Lenz and published by SitePoint. For my impressions of the book, refer to the review, but my opinion of the book was generally good, especially for newer Rails developers. Now SitePoint has made the book freely available in PDF format for the next two months, so if you didn’t get the book the first time around, check it out! Read More
David Heinemeier Hansson gives the Rails™ community its birthday and Christmas presents all at once with the announcement of a preview release of Rails 2.0:
Behold, behold, Rails 2.0 is almost here. But before we can slap on the final stamp, we’re going to pass through a couple of trial release phases. The first is this preview release, which allows you to sample the goodies in their almost finished state.
The King goes into quite some depth and covers a wide range of different and new features that have made it into Rails 2.0.
Keep in mind that this is just a preview release, so if you’re not used to living on the edge, wait a little while until the release candidates or Rails 2.0 proper. Read More
Manuel Holtgrewe presents Ruby’s Multithreading: On Processes and Threads, a great look at the processes (pun intended) involved with Ruby’s threading system and the difference between kernel level threads and pure user level threads. He then makes an argument why a process oriented system for division of labor can make more sense than a thread oriented one. Read More
Tracking Down a Rails App Memory LeakTom Copeland posts about how he tracked down a memory leak in a Rails application. The results are interesting. RubyGems Runs on Ruby 1.9-ishEric Hodel reports that all of the tests for RubyGems now pass on Ruby 1.9 and that a 1.9 compatible beta version will be due shortly.R2Check – Tiny app that checks your pre-Rails 2.0 apps for compatabilityMislav Marohnic has built a pretty cool Ruby script that checks the source code of a Rails app for compatibility with Rails 2.0 and then points out the changes required.Advice for Ruby Beginners – Part 1Satish Talim has posted the first part of mass interview with 13 Ruby gurus with questions surrounding topics important to Ruby newbies. Read More
Charles Nutter says:
It is a glorious day in JRuby-land, for the compiler is now complete.
But not only is it a glorious day in JRuby-land, but in Ruby-land proper as Charles has announced that the JRuby-based Ruby 1.8 compiler is now “complete!” Excellent work guys. This is still early days, but with the leaps being made by both the JRuby, Rubinius, and Ruby 1.9 teams as of late, the state of Ruby interpretation and compilation is set to radically evolve over the next year. No longer shall our runtimes be mocked by the Pythonistas! Read More
The guys at RailsOnWave have done a great job of recording David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote speech at the latest RailsConf Europe and have put it online, viewable within a Flash video player. Nice work! Read More
Derek Sivers, quite the Rails champion when he decided to rebuild his CD Baby e-commerce site using Rails two years ago, has now admitted defeat. After two years of wrestling with Rails while building the new site, Sivers along with coder Jeremy Kemper, decided to face up to reality. Kemper went off to 37signals and Sivers rebuilt the entire site in PHP in just two months. As such, Slashdot is jumping on the bandwagon by telling developers to “think again” about using Rails in future. Read More
Nakul Aggarwal and Ritesh Arora have put together a concise, to the point, Ruby on Rails Security Guide that looks at how to tackle security issues in your authentication system, models, controllers, views, and elsewhere. Lots of links, lots of tips, and a must-read for anyone who’s not feeling 100% confident in the security of their Rails app. Read More
(photo credit: dwortlehock)
RailsConf Europe 2007 is over and it’s time to wrap up. As before, there are oodles of pictures on Flickr with the “RailsConfEurope” tag (yah-boo to you miserable sods who don’t use Creative Commons licenses for your photos) and DHH points to all of the presentations given at the conference (covering areas as wide as Ferret, REST, Adobe Flex, Amazon S3 and JRuby). Continuing from his fine coverage of Monday, the first day of the conference, Robert Dempsey succinctly wraps up the Tuesday morning and afternoon sessions, as well as the Wednesday morning sessions, and then Wednesday in its entirety. Read More
NetBeans is an open-source IDE written in Java (somewhat like Eclipse, but not the same), and version 6.0 is the first with a Ruby-specific edition that focuses solidly on the things that Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers need. The NetBeans team have just released the first beta version.
NetBeans is a powerful and free. You can create Ruby and Rails projects, run Ruby files, configure interpreters (MRI and JRuby), install Gems graphically, run tests, run RSpecs, debug Ruby code, run Rails apps, and so on, all from the IDE. The Ruby edition is only a 19MB download and it’s available right now. Read More
Serving PDFs with Rails using Inkscape Satya X has written “Serving PDFs with Rails using Inkscape,” an article that goes into amazing detail about how to set up a system where customized PDFs can be created and served from a Rails application (or any Ruby app, with amendments). Ever wanted to set up your own Pragmatic Programmers’-esque PDF stamping system for selling e-books? Now you can do it for free. Ruby on Rails vs DJ AngoThe RailsEnvy guys are at it again with another Rails vs X “commercial.” This time it’s Ruby on Rails vs Django.. with stellar hip hop beats.Ruby On The iPhone?Giles Bowkett writes with news that “Ruby runs on the iPhone” and presents these two sites as evidence (see ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz on the second). Read More