Calendar Date Select is a new(ish) “date and time picker”, developed by Tim Harper, designed primarily for developers to use in Rails applications. It uses the standard Prototype JavaScript library, and is easily installed as a Rails plugin:
script/plugin install http://calendardateselect.googlecode.com/svn/tags/calendar_date_select
Take a look at the collection of demos of the picker to see its full range. Read More
Ryan Davis has released the second major version of ParseTree, a much loved Ruby library that extracts parse trees for Ruby classes and methods and returns them in an s-expression type format using standard Ruby data types. It relies on Ryan’s other well known library, RubyInline. In his announcement, Ryan gives a demonstration:
As an example:
def conditional1(arg1)
if arg1 == 0 then
return 1
end
return 0
end
becomes:
[:defn,
:conditional1,
[:scope,
[:block,
[:args, :arg1],
[:if,
[:call, [:lvar, :arg1], :==, [:array, [:lit, 0]]],
[:return, [:lit, 1]],
nil],
[:return, [:lit, 0]]]]]
There are many significant enhancements beyond the 1.x.x family, so check it out. Read More
Fred George, a Thoughtworks consultant with some 38 years’ development experience, presents “Applying Agile to Ruby”, a 50 minute video and slide-based presentation. He looks at the usual Agile practices (and a few design patterns) and applies them to the Ruby ecosystem. Be warned, there’s a lot of comparison of Ruby to Java, but George’s delivery is dynamic enough to keep things interesting. Read More
There are three jobs from the Ruby Inside Job Board from the last month:
Rails Developer for Startup (San Francisco, CA)
A Rails Developer or Senior Rails Developer is needed at Affinity Labs, Inc, based in San Francisco, California. Affinity is a typical fast-moving startup, and they’re looking for people especially with skills in areas like Ruby, Rails, ERB, AJAX, RJS, YAML, REST and Capistrano. Basically, it’s a SF-based Rails developer’s dream job! You can even pick which OS you work on, you get a fully stocked fridge, and bi-weekly happy hour parties.
Rails Developer, System Integration Engineer, and Platform App Developer for Clinical Research Software Co (St. Read More
method_missing is one of Ruby’s coolest bits of metaprogramming voodoo. Two years, Why wrote about it, and now Amy Newall, half of a Massachusetts-based husband-wife development team, writes about 10 things you should know about method_missing. Read More
Ruby Inside hasn’t had any new items for the last several days as I’ve just bought a house, and have had to enjoy the various work that brings. So, to get things back on track with Ruby Inside, here’s a roundup of some of the key news and articles I’ve seen over the past week instead:
Why Releases His Shoes To The World
Despite the finest Ruby blog in the land, Why’s RedHanded, slipping into a coma earlier this year, Why continues to wow the Ruby community with his contributions. This time around, he’s built a cross-platform toolkit for making “Web-like Desktop Apps” using Ruby called Shoes. Read More
Charlie Savage, author of ruby-prof, recently baked in support for Rails to ruby-prof, so now it’s possible to profile your Rails application, see where the delays are, and work on improving performance.
Hot on the heels of this development, Charlie wrote “How to Profile Your Application“, an article that does just what it says on the tin, and which demonstrates how to profile the CPU time used on a single Rails request, and visualize the call tree.
This was quickly followed up with “Making Rails Go Vroom“, another great article that looks at what parts of Rails significantly slow things down. Read More
(credit: yarrg)
This morning, Pete Forde of Unspace prodded me to write about a new book, “Beginning Rails” by Jeffrey Allan Hardy and Cloves Carneiro Jr. (with Hampton Catlin). And, when I receive my copy from Apress, I will be reviewing it here. Of more immediate interest to me, however, was a note that David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby of Rails, had denied the authors the right to use the Rails logo on the front of their book:
Jeff wanted the Rails logo on the cover of the book but was informed by Apress that David Heinemeier Hansson has been “politely resisting” permission to use the logo, and has said in the future, it will only appear on his books. Read More
Railscasts, maintained by Ryan Bates, continues to release one great free screencast after another, with 9 so far this month, although we’re going to include one from June 29 for good measure. We first looked at Railscasts a few months ago, so if you haven’t visited again since, it’s worth it. Here are the latest screencasts:
Charlie Savage has released the 0.5.x family of ruby-prof, a profiling library for Ruby. We last posted about ruby-prof over a year ago, but 0.5 is a major leap forward with improved or new-found support for:
Learn more in the release post. Read More
Adhearsion is an open-source, telecommunications application framework that uses Ruby, coupled with Asterisk, the popular open source telephony platform. It lets you build telecommunications systems and scripts in a quick and powerful way:
Creator Jay Philips has written a chapter for O’Reilly forthcoming “Asterisk: The Future of Telephony” about Adhearsion, and O’Reilly have published an extended excerpt of it online. It covers the installation of Adhearsion, basic script writing, database integration, and how to put together “micromenus” that operate in a vendor-independent fashion.
Learn more about the framework at the official Adhearsion site, and enjoy twisting together your phone system with a little Ruby! Read More
I’m proud to announce the tentative launch of.. JRuby Inside, the latest addition to the Ruby Inside media empire (if two sites counts as an ‘empire’!). JRuby Inside is like Ruby Inside, but for JRuby, the Ruby implementation that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.
Like Ruby Inside it has editorial direction. It’s not just a bunch of links submitted by thousands of people, as you’d find on fine sites like DZone, Digg, Reddit, or del.icio.us. It features links from lots of different sources, but I choose which ones make it to the RSS feed (so you don’t get overwhelmed with junk, repeat stories or spam), which to delete, and which I want to edit the titles of. Read More
Remember when we first announced Joyent Slingshot, the technology that lets you run Rails apps within a native Windows and OS X client, a few months ago? Well, both Slingshot and Joyent Connector have just been open sourced, and they’re yours to play with now. For those unfamiliar with Slingshot, here’s what Joyent have to say:
Joyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications like a standard desktop application, which work online and offline (with synchronization), have drag and drop, and interact with all the other desktop applications.
With Joyent Slingshot:
* Create a hybrid Web/desktop application
* Synchronize online and offline data
* Use the same code for online and offline application(s)
* Deploy and update your application easily
* Drag into and out of application
Joyent Connector, a suite of collaboration and communication applications for small businesses, has also been open sourced. Read More
Robert Dempsey, of Atlantic Dominion Solutions, has put together a comprehensive introduction to Amazon’s Web Services for Ruby developers. AWS has a lot to offer, from e-commerce services through to the EC2 “Elastic Compute Cloud” and the popular S3 “Simple Storage Service”. Robert looks at how Ruby can access AWS using RESTful techniques, demonstrates how to use S3 from Ruby, and provides a batch of links to further resources. Read More
Profligacy is a new library by *** ****, the mastermind behind Mongrel:
Profligacy is a JRuby library that makes building Swing Graphical User Interface much easier than with raw code. It’s not a builder as with many other projects, but instead a simple Ruby way to structure the UI for the 80% common cases you’ll encounter.
Profligacy features some clever magic, such as LEL, a “Layout Expression Language” that lets you build layouts from basic ASCII representations.
Check out the official homepage and look at a whole collection of examples *** has put together (as seen in the screenshot above). Read More