Peter Cooper Page 50 : Ruby Inside

RailsBrain: Fast, AJAX-powered Rails documentation

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By Peter Cooper / May 7, 2007

Railsbrain

Rails documentation sites are almost ten a penny, but today I was surprised by a new site called RailsBrain. RailsBrain takes the usual “list of methods down the left” approach, but couples it with some nifty AJAX and (so far) a very quick server to serve up the docs in record time.

Being in Europe, I usually notice a couple of seconds here and there when loading pages, but RailsBrain is scarily quick at delivering pages when I click on a method name. Furthermore, RailsBrain makes it a lot easier to find the method you need to documentation for with a “live search” type effect in the left hand box. Read More

ActiveScaffold: AJAX-powered Rails scaffolding redux

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By Peter Cooper / May 5, 2007

Activescaffold-1

AjaxScaffold was an early attempt to implement Rails’ scaffolding features in an AJAXy way, providing a single-page interface for showing, editing, deleting, and sorting items from your Rails models. ActiveScaffold is the newest implementation of the concept, making AjaxScaffold obsolete. It includes RESTful API support, sorting, search, pagination, automatic handling of ActiveRecord associations, along with the features you were used to from AjaxScaffold. It’s also guaranteed to work on relatively new versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. Read More

Free Rails Workshop in Denver, May 17-18

By Peter Cooper / May 4, 2007

Learn on Rails has just let me know that due to a major booking pulling out, they are now making their Denver Ruby on Rails workshop free on May 17 and 18. All they ask is for a small $10 – $15 donation at the door to cover the cost of refreshments.

Here’s the info, straight from organizer Drew Blas:

We originally had a large group scheduled to attend this event, but the company canceled on us at the last minute. Because we must still pay for the hotel conference room, we have to decided to offer this workshop for FREE!!! Read More

Silverlight (and Ruby on the .NET CLR)

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By Peter Cooper / May 3, 2007

Silverlight

At MIX07 a few days ago, Microsoft announced “Silverlight“, a new Flash-esque .NET-based platform for delivering “media experiences” and “rich interactive applications” on the Web. It’s interesting, and some people seem to think it’s going to revolutionize the Web, but that’s not why we’re interested in it at Ruby Inside.

The most interesting part of the Silverlight announcement is that it’s based on a subset of the CLR (Common Language Runtime) from Microsoft’s .NET platform. The .NET CLR has become a common target for programming language runtimes recently, but Microsoft has officially announced C#, Javascript, VB, Python and Ruby support for Silverlight’s CLR. Read More

“Introduction to Ruby” Videos for Beginners

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By Peter Cooper / May 3, 2007

Begrubyvids

Ian Ozsvald wrote to tell me that ShowMeDo now features a new series of introductory Ruby videos by Chinmoy Gavini. There are currently five videos in the series and they start off with a basic walkthrough of irb and Ruby’s basic features, moving on to topics such as creating and using classes, deep copy versus shallow copy, regular expressions, marshaling, and CSV. Read More

April’s Ruby Related Jobs from the Ruby Inside Job Board

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By Peter Cooper / May 2, 2007

Jobbbbb

At the start of April, the Ruby Inside Job Board was launched. Since then, four companies have signed up and posted a job, although, oddly, none have taken up my invitation to have a blog post about their position placed on Ruby Inside. Therefore, I’m going to post a quick roundup of the past month’s jobs at the start of each month. Regular enough for you to possibly apply for a cool Ruby or Rails related job, but not so regular to piss you off! Without further ado, April’s jobs:

Senior Software Engineer with MeeVee (Burlingame, CA 94010) – MeeVee is an online, personalized TV guide. Read More

BleakHouse: Tool to find memory leaks in your Rails applications

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By Peter Cooper / April 30, 2007

Bleakhouse

Bleakhouse is a new Rails plugin by Evan Weaver that helps you find memory leaks in your Rails applications. It does this by hammering ObjectSpace for information throughout the execution of your app and by producing pretty charts to show you what’s going on. It’s easy to install and get running, so if memory leaks or application stability have proven to be sore points for you, give it a try straight away. Read More

Sample Rails App with SSL / HTTPS Support

By Peter Cooper / April 29, 2007

Only two weeks ago I linked to Courtenay’s “Sample Rails App”, a bare-bones Rails application featuring authentication, timezone support, and all sorts of other goodies. I’m compelled to give a small link to his newest branch, however, as it’s a sample app but with full SSL (HTTPS) support. This sort of thing isn’t the easiest thing to put together unless you’re experienced in deployment, so I’m sure it’ll come in useful to many. It comes with a lighttpd configuration file, all ready to go, along with a self-signed certificate. Read More

MyConfPlan: Plan your RailsConf 2007 schedule now

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By Peter Cooper / April 28, 2007

Myconfplan

MyConfPlan is a new Rails and Hobo powered conference session scheduling site by Dr. Nic Williams. MyConfPlan’s biggest use at the moment is planning RailsConf schedules. Frustrated by the sheer unfriendliness of the official RailsConf Sessions schedule, Nic put together MyConfPlan to make it easy to plan your own choice of sessions to attend.
Myconfplan2

The sessions are laid out in a grid-like layout, with all sessions taking place at the same time on the same row. You can click on each session you want to visit in each row and you end up with an easy-to-follow conference attendance plan. Read More

Rails Developers I’d Recommend For Your Projects

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By Peter Cooper / April 27, 2007

I constantly get mails from various readers who are looking for Rails developers for their projects. As I don’t do this myself, I have to keep giving out a list of Rails developers I know and trust or have had good feedback about. I figured I should make a blog post with a list instead, so I could point people to it, and keep it updated as a resource for everyone to use. You can even leave “review” type comments if you’ve used any of these guys. The list is not very long, but here we go..

(Disclaimer: None of these companies has ever paid me a cent and none requested this post.. Read More

Hackety Hack: An Amazing Ruby Environment for Beginners

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By Peter Cooper / April 26, 2007

Hacketyhack

Why The Lucky Stiff is set to guarantee himself a place in the Programming Hall of Fame with his new project, Hackety Hack, an uber-simple programming environment for kids, beginners, and amateur coders. It attempts to resolve a problem brought up in an old article of why’s, “The Little Coder’s Predicament”, which lamented the ability for kids to quickly get coding on modern platforms, unlike in the Commodore 64 days.
Hacketyhack2

Currently the system is in beta and only available for Windows, but OS X and Linux are to follow. Why’s ingenuity even goes as far as the installation program which makes it really easy for users to specify where they want their programs to be stored. Read More

Radiant 0.6 Released: A Top Rails Content Management System

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By Peter Cooper / April 25, 2007

Radiant-2

Almost a year ago I posted about Radiant, a then ‘diamond in the rough’ Rails content management system that was under development by John W. Long. Since then Radiant has come along in leaps and bounds and a significant release, namely that of version 0.6, has been made today.

Radiant2

Radiant is an open-source CMS developed with Ruby on Rails which features a new extension system enabling users to create third party add-ons (which already include extensions to do backups, LDAP, virtual domains, vim editing, Flickr integration, page aggregation and more). It can be installed simply using RubyGems (gem install radiant) and getting an instance of the application up only takes a few lines at the command prompt. Read More

Data Structures and Algorithms with OO Design Patterns in Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / April 24, 2007

Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Ruby is an online book (free to read!) by Dr. Bruno R. Preiss, an incredibly well qualified engineer and computer scientist. It covers all of the various data structures and algorithms that beginning Computer Science students have to learn, but from a Ruby perspective and using object oriented design patterns.
The book itself is now a few years old, but I’ve only just come across it and it still seems relevant although, rather sadly, the on-page code is in graphics only (a ZIP file containing the source is available) and feels like a line-by-line conversion from C++ rather than true Ruby code. Read More

JRuby 0.9.9 Released: Yes, it’s a Big Deal

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By Peter Cooper / April 23, 2007

Just an hour ago, Thomas Enebo announced the release of JRuby 0.9.9, a stabilization release in anticipation of JRuby 1.0. You can download it directly from the JRuby file directory.

Hundreds of issues have been resolved including 180 Jira issues and problems with YAML, marshalling and Java integration. Some major performance overhauls of core classes have also occurred. The result is an increase in performance of 40% compared to JRuby 0.9.8. More Ruby (and Rails) software now works on JRuby than ever before, including, finally, the Mephisto blogging system.

JRuby is rapidly becoming a big deal where Ruby is concerned. Read More

acts_as_solr Tutorial: More Search Goodness in Rails

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By Peter Cooper / April 23, 2007

Solr
(photo credit: RBerteig)

A couple of months ago I posted about an acts_as_ferret tutorial, where Ferret is a Ruby port of Apache Lucene and acts_as_ferret provides almost automatic search features to any of your Rails models. It works great on a small scale but some people in the blogosphere pointed out that Ferret has a number of concurrency and stability issues (particularly on very large indexes).

Enter Solr. Solr is an open source ‘server’ based upon the actual Java version of Lucene which is well known for its stability. acts_as_solr therefore acts as a conduit between your Rails applications and a Solr/Lucene server meaning that you get full ‘enterprise quality’ search features based on proven software. Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper