Peter Cooper Page 47 : Ruby Inside

Haml 1.7 Released: Now 16 Times Faster Than Markaby

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By Peter Cooper / July 10, 2007

Hamlagain

Ruby Inside has mentioned Haml, a couple of times before. It’s a template language for Rails developed by Hampton Catlin, and it acts as a high-level, highly semantic alternative to RHTML. It relies on indentation for structure (a la Python) and includes a CSS meta-language (Sass) to make it super easy to dynamically produce XHTML-compliant pages that are easy to tweak later on.

Hampton has just released Haml 1.7, a major revision that boosts Haml’s speed to merely 30% less than that of raw Erb (which RHTML templates rely on), which, supposedly, makes it 16 times faster than Markaby, another alternative page generation library. Read More

The Beauty of Ruby: A 54 Minute Presentation

By Peter Cooper / July 9, 2007

Glennv Eddquote

The Beauty of Ruby is a 54 minute presentation by Glenn Vanderburg that looks at Ruby’s idioms, syntax, and “subtle beauty” such as mixins, open classes, metaprogramming, the syntax of case, and the beauty of ===. Read More

How and Why Companies are Using Ruby on Rails: The Thesis!

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By Peter Cooper / July 9, 2007

Thesis

Michel Barbosa is a bachelor student at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam in the Netherlands and has just completed his thesis: “Delivery of the Key Adoption Factors and Key Characteristics of Companies Using Ruby on Rails.” Or, in layman’s terms, he’s produced a document that goes into the hows and whys of how companies have migrated over to using Ruby on Rails.

Thesis2

There are lots of graphs, charts, and tables, so enjoy!

(first seen at Riding Rails) Read More

Oracle Looking for Rails Developers

By Peter Cooper / July 9, 2007

Oracleappslab

Oracle Corporation, the gigantic company behind the Oracle Database system, is looking for Ruby on Rails developers who “love to build Web 2.0 style applications.” Oracle has a small in-house team that’s “applying 2.0 style concepts” to Oracle’s apps. It seems like they’re focusing on JRuby based on an Oracle stack, so experience with those technologies is a major plus. Read More

June Ruby Jobs Roundup

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By Peter Cooper / July 6, 2007

Each month I do a round-up of the new jobs on the Ruby Inside job board. June was a slim month with only two new jobs. Both are pretty good though!

Telecoms in Tampa – $80,000 per year

The latest vacancy is for a Ruby Programmer at a Tampa, Florida based company that specializes in telecommunications. You’ll be expected to analyze business requirements, write design specs, and program in Ruby, as well as develop Rails applications. The interesting part about the job is that it requires Asterisk (open source VOIP software) knowledge, so there’s clearly some telecoms development involved there. Read More

Is it time for a RailsForge?

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By Peter Cooper / July 6, 2007

Rubyforge

One of the best Ruby resources out there (if not the best) is RubyForge. It’s a home for Ruby-related open source projects and acts as a default home for the hundreds of RubyGems we all use and love.

A small team, made up of Jason Perry, K. Adam Christensen, Scott Becker, and James Seaman, however, think that it might be time for a RailsForge to come onto the scene. They’ve set up a community survey at RailsForge.com that anyone can fill out, and they’re looking for your opinions:

At first glance, there’s a resistance to drawing a line between Ruby and Rails—that’s certainly not what we aim to do. Read More

How to Build a FaceBook Application with Rails

By Peter Cooper / July 2, 2007

Chickenfacebook

Liverail.net has a comprehensive tutorial covering how to build a Facebook platform application using Ruby on Rails from start to finish.

The guys over at Thoughtbot also wrote a post two weeks ago looking at some of what they’ve learned while porting an application to the Facebook platform. Read More

Contribute Documentation to Ruby on Rails and Win!

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By Peter Cooper / July 1, 2007

Rccontest

Ryan Bates, creator of Railscasts – a free Rails screencast site, has created a great screencast about how to contribute code and documentation to Ruby on Rails, from actually checking out Rails, preparing the test environment, making your changes and building a patch, through to submitting the patch and basking in the glow of having contributed to the project.

Not only all that, but he’s also launched a contest. All you have to do is submit a good Rails documentation patch to the Ruby on Rails development site and drop the link to an e-mail address provided for the contest, and on July 27, 2007 eight random winners will receive prizes (which include a Nintendo DS, Railcast t-shirts, Pragmatic Programmer books, a Peepcode subscription, and an iPod Shuffle). Read More

rocaml – Write Ruby extensions in OCaml

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By Peter Cooper / June 29, 2007

Camllogo

OCaml (short for Objective Caml) is an object oriented implementation of Caml, a derivative of ML. Like Ruby, it’s an open source language, but it provides extremely high performance (at least 50% that of compiled C code, in general) and features static typing. You can learn more, and look at code examples, at OCaml’s Wikipedia entry.

Mauricio Fernandez of Eigenclass has put together rocaml (readme), a bridge between Ruby and OCaml that lets you write Ruby extensions in OCaml. It handles the type conversions for you and creates boilerplate code that registers Ruby methods and wraps the calls to your OCaml code. Read More

Google Bites Thumb at Ruby; Ports Rails to JavaScript

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By Peter Cooper / June 25, 2007

Yegge

John Lam, a Foocamp attendee, reports that Steve Yegge gave a presentation called “Google Rails Clone” that looks into a JavaScript clone of Rails developed at Google. I can’t find any other references yet, and John only mentions the basics, but if this is all true, it could eventually become a big deal.. especially if Google open sources it and JavaScript does become the “next big language”.

It does sound rather unlikely that Yegge ported the entirety of Rails to JavaScript entirely by himself (although he is a coding god, and one of my own computer science heroes) but I’m guessing more news will leak out of the big G in the near future.. Read More

Ruby on Rails Image for Amazon EC2

By Peter Cooper / June 24, 2007

Paul Dowman has put together a feature-packed Ruby on Rails focused “appliance” for Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud – effectively an on-demand, flexible VPS service). Those who know what they’re doing can try it out right away, using the AMI id: ami-4e907527.

The image is built upon Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty), Rails 1.2.3, Ruby 1.8.5, MySQL 5, and includes the EC2 command line tools along with automatic backup of MySQL databases to S3 every ten minutes. Applications are served up using Mongrel clusters behind Apache 2.2. Paul’s blog post includes more details and a guide of how to use it. Read More

How would you define “quality” Ruby documentation?

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By Peter Cooper / June 24, 2007

This is a call for help and opinions! One of our finest needs your input..

Jeremy McAnally (a.k.a. Mr. Neighborly), author of the fine Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book, is busy working on his Google Summer Of Code project, dcov, a Ruby documentation analyzer. Some aspects of developing dcov are easy (such as reporting or basic coverage analysis), but Jeremy’s having problems when trying to work out how to analyze the quality of documentation.. so he’s looking for input:

The first part of the analysis is quantity: is something documented? Right now, this works famously: it can give you a precise precentage of your functional unit documentation coverage. Read More

How to Build Simple Console Apps with Ruby and ActiveRecord

By Peter Cooper / June 24, 2007

Gregory Brown has put together a great four-page tutorial on how to build a database driven console application using Ruby and ActiveRecord (no Rails needed!). As well as delivering what the title suggests, Brown also looks at some neat Ruby techniques for structuring applications in general (such as using modules and module_function). The end result is an app called “EarGTD,” a basic time / task management tool. Read More

Powerset to Launch on Ruby; Ruby Scales!

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By Peter Cooper / June 22, 2007

Powerset

Kevin Clark revels that Powerset – a “natural language” based search engine, seen by some as a future “Google killer” – is going to launch with a Ruby powered front end. In itself, this isn’t particularly amazing, although if Powerset realizes its Google-killing goals, having a major search engine powered by Ruby will be kudos indeed.

Of more interest is that Powerset is using a mixture of Rails, Merb, and Camping apps throughout the company, and that Powerset is “not worried about scaling.” Clark quotes Blaine Cook of Twitter:

Rails and Ruby haven’t been stumbling blocks, compared to any other language or framework. Read More

Lone Star Ruby Conference – Austin, TX – September 7 & 8

By Peter Cooper / June 20, 2007

Lonestar

Registration is now open for the Lone Star Ruby Conf taking place in Austin, Texas on September 7 and 8 (Friday and Saturday) of this year. If you book before August 10, you’ll get in for the early bird rate of $200. There’s a wide range of speakers from Rick Olson (Mephisto) and P J Hyett through to Charles Oliver Nutter (JRuby) and *** **** (Mongrel) so if you can get to Texas in September, check it out. Read More

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