Peter Cooper Page 48 : Ruby Inside

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

Review of “Practical Ruby Gems” by David Berube

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By Peter Cooper / June 19, 2007

Practicalrubygems

Practical Ruby Gems is a new book written by David Berube and published by Apress that looks at the practical uses of a collection of Ruby gems. Tim Hunter, who also reviewed my Beginning Ruby (which is doing a good job of tanking in the Amazon rankings, but I’m in it for the long haul!), has written a lengthy review for Slashdot. Here’s a direct affiliate-free link to the book on Amazon.com. I was expecting to review a copy myself, but I’m more than happy to trust Tim based on his previous reviews of Ruby books. Read More

Easy RubyGem Publishing With Hoe

By Peter Cooper / June 18, 2007

Geoffrey Grosenbach, author of the famous PeepCode screencasts, has written a tutorial about using Ryan Davis’ hoe library to make releasing your own RubyGems a cakewalk. Geoffrey says that using Hoe turns a laborious, multi-step twenty minute process into only a few Rake tasks. Hoe takes the automation of Gem publishing seriously, and once you’ve set it up properly you can go as far as let it post announcements (to your blog and/or Rubyforge), build your docs, create an e-mail announcement, run testing packages against the library, as well as actually releasing and uploading the gem to Rubyforge ready for public consumption. Read More

Lazibi: Python-style indenting for Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / June 16, 2007

Pythonesquemigration

Last month, a lengthy discussion kicked off on Ruby-Talk called “Why not adopt Python style indentation for Ruby?” .. it wasn’t anything particularly new, because a similar discussion occurred six years ago. Nevertheless, a coder called Jinjing has been inspired to create Lazibi, a Ruby pre-processor to allow one to use Python style indentation within Ruby code.

It’s clever enough, but I can’t see standalone pre-processors becoming popular. It does make me think that official support for pre-processing of some sort within Ruby itself would be pretty cool though for people who want to use hacks like these. Read More

BrightBox: Finally a Rails-focused VPS in the UK?

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By Peter Cooper / June 15, 2007

Brightbox

Brightbox is a soon-to-launch Rails-focused VPS hosting provider in the UK. I’ve whined about the gap in this market a few times before, so it was literally guaranteed I’d e-mail about the first attempt I was told about. They’re going to be offering Ubuntu Dapper based VPSes with an optimized Rails stack (using Apache 2.2 and Mongrel cluster) along with a mirror MySQL cluster and mirrored RAID storage. They seem set to launch on July 1st. There’s an e-mail mailing list available on the site for those who want a reminder.

In the meantime, Jeremy Jarvis of Brightbox is looking for beta testers of the service. Read More

Registration for RailsConf Europe 2007 Now Open

By Peter Cooper / June 15, 2007

Railsconfeurope

If you want to get to Rails’ top European event, RailsConf Europe, the registration process for this year’s event is now open! If you sign up before August 6, you get €150 ($200 / £100) off the usual fee, so check it out now. The event itself is September 17-19, and general attendance for the 2 days of conference sessions will set you back €645 ($858 / £435).

Here’s an abridged version of O’Reilly’s announcement:

Co-produced by Ruby Central and O’Reilly Media, this is the largest European conference dedicated to everything Rails. [..] The three-day program spotlights particularly creative experts, industry leaders, and under-the-radar innovators worldwide. Read More

The Top 10 Ruby / Rails Blogs (and Why)

By Peter Cooper / June 12, 2007

Top Blogs Thumb

Peter Szinek (of ScRUBYt! fame) has put together a script that works out the “top 10 Ruby / Rails blogs” using data from Alexa and Technorati. Check out the results! Ruby Inside comes in at #2.
Full Workflow

For those more interested in the technique than the results, Peter has also put together an article showing how he used ScRUBYt and other sites and APIs to pull it off along with some of the source code involved. Read More

The Ultimate Introduction to Rake

By Peter Cooper / June 11, 2007

Rakemonkey

The tutorial-writing geniuses over at RailsEnvy.com have unveiled their latest work.. “Ruby on Rails Rake Tutorial (aka. How Rake turned me into an alcoholic)“. It’s a solid, and amusingly illustrated, overview of Rake, how it works, how it works alongside Rails, and so forth. Read More

JRuby 1.0 Released

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By Peter Cooper / June 10, 2007

Jrubylogo
JRuby, a Java implementation of the Ruby interpreter, has reached version 1.0. A massive congratulations are due to the team. At the time of writing, the release has not been announced on the official site, but you can download the final build.
JRuby originally came into being in 2001 as a simple Java port of the Ruby 1.6 code, but has blossomed into a free-standing project that has chosen to innovate in its own way. In September 2006, Sun “acquired” the JRuby project by bringing its then two main developers on board, and since then work appears to have continued at a rapid pace. Read More

Ruby Unroller: A Ruby script execution tracer

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By Peter Cooper / June 9, 2007

Unrollernew

Ruby Unroller is an exciting tool developed by Tyler Rick that generates human readable execution traces of running Ruby scripts. It can display the code currently being executed by a script in real-time, as it’s actually executed. This makes it a great tool for getting familiar with, say, the darkest depths of Rails, or for debugging troublesome scripts that rely on external Ruby libraries. Read More

Some Fun New Ruby and Rails Videos

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By Peter Cooper / June 8, 2007

Standout Jobs Need a Ruby Guru

Standout Jobs are looking for a Ruby guru, and they’ve put together a whole video explaining who they are and what they’re looking for. I think more people should be posting job ads in this way.. it makes me feel a lot better informed about who they are than a dry list of job benefits.

Animated Ruby on Rails “Commercial”

Thanks to Jay Phillips for pointing this one out. It’s a reasonably content-free but humor-full animated commercial for Ruby on Rails.

RailsEnvy “Rails Vs.” Commercials

Every RailsConf attendee will already be familiar with these videos, produced in the same vein as the “Mac vs PC” Apple commercials, but in case you’re not.. Read More

Textpow + Ultraviolet: TextMate Powered Syntax Highlighting for Everyone!

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By Peter Cooper / June 6, 2007

Textpow Ultraviolet

Textpow and Ultraviolet are a pair of interesting, new(ish) Ruby libraries that co-operate together to parse TextMate bundles and perform syntax highlighting. Textpow is a library that parses and processes the TextMate bundles (special files included with the TextMate text editor that specify how different types of plain text content should be delimited and colored). Ultraviolet then uses Textpow and performs syntax highlighting either as a standalone application or as a Ruby library.

Currently, Textpow can process syntax (tmLanguage and tmSyntax) and theme (tmTheme) files.. and you can obtain these from the free trial download of TextMate if you don’t have them already (although, I imagine, non OS X users might be able to find other TextMate bundles and themes elsewhere, such as the Vibrant Ink theme downloadable from here). Read More

“Ruby Multipled By Agile” – A Video with Matz

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By Peter Cooper / June 3, 2007

Matzlive

Here’s an interesting video for all you Matz die-hards. It features Kenji Hiranabe, Shintaro Kakutani, and our own Yukihiro Mastumoto and looks at the history of C++, Java, Ruby, and agile development practices. It’s in Japanese with English subtitles. It’s not dated, but from what I can make out, it’s very recent. Read More

How to build OS X GUI applications with Ruby and RubyCocoa

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By Peter Cooper / June 1, 2007

Osxguirubycocoa

Erik Kastner has put together a great tutorial showing you how to build a graphical OS X app using Ruby and RubyCocoa. For a less wordy approach, there’s also a short screencast which shows you the whole process from start to finish.

With the continual improvements of the RubyCocoa library, and Apple’s commitment to Ruby for Cocoa development in OS X 10.5, Ruby is rapidly becoming a viable alternative to Objective C and Java for developing OS X apps.
Rubycocoacom

Another great resource is RubyCocoa.com, a site that features several RubyCocoa tutorials and articles. Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper