Mosquito is a new, automatable, testing tool that uses RubyCocoa and OS X to perform Web operations and take screenshots of each point along the way. It’s a little like the Windows-only Watir. I can see the technology used by Mosquito also being useful for automating Web operations even without the testing focus. Read More
In case the title of this post is giving you deja-vu, we’ve looked at “How To Create A Ruby Extension In C” before at Ruby Inside. We’ve also looked at using RubyInline to make the process even faster by not having to write a specialized C extension.
Despite this, Wim Vander Schelden has written such a detailed and interesting guide called “Writing Your Own Ruby Extension With C” that it’s a must-read if this area interests you, especially since it goes far beyond what was covered in our previous articles. Read More
Ralf Wirdemann and Thomas Baustert (the authors of the first German Rails book, “Rapid Web Development mit Ruby on Rails”) have just released an online ‘add on’ for their book covering Rails’ REST capabilities. It’s thirty pages long, in PDF format, and looks to be a good read (if only I could read German).
(Thanks to Florian Goersdorf for the lead) Read More
It’s good to start seeing those Rails 1.2 guides coming out of the woodwork. Hopefully I’ll get able to do a roundup of them shortly, but for now Andre Lewis presents a quick, practical guide to nesting CRUD resources in Rails 1.2. Read More
The wonderful people over at DZone (a Digg-like site for developers) are expanding their online publishing empire with a step into the Ruby community. The new site is tentatively named RubyZone and DZone is looking to hire an editor-in-chief and a couple of contributing editors. If you’re a good writer and/or editor and you want to make a bigger name for yourself in the Ruby community, this is a great stepping stone. In my experience, the guys at DZone are incredibly nice too, so don’t be afraid to get in touch! Read More
SyntaxHighlighter is a WordPress plugin that provides code presentation and syntax highlighting features for your blog (if it’s WordPress powered, naturally!). It supports a plethora of languages such as C, C++, C#, HTML, and PHP, as well as Ruby. On my blogs so far I’ve tended to use a homebrew approach with the Syntax gem, but this WordPress plugin should make it a whole lot easier in the future. If you’re a WordPress powered blogger who likes to post code snippets, check it out. Read More
In Concerns in ActiveRecord, Jamis Buck writes about a simple technique of using modules to mix in functionality shared by multiple models without resorting to STI. This technique has been possible in Rails since.. ever, but I must admit I’d never considered it before, so I’m sure a lot of people will find it useful. Read More
No editorial on this, as I want to get it out quick, and I know some readers aren’t subscribers to the official Rails blog.. but.. Rails 1.2 has just been released! Or, more accurately, Rails 1.2.1, as the obligatory bug-fix release followed on a little more quickly than usual :) You might want to get it straight away before the servers melt down with the rush tomorrow. Just use gem install rails –include-dependencies as usual.
David Heinemeier Hansson has put together a great, info packed post about what to expect and looks at some of the new features. Read More
Just a few weeks ago, a new Rails chart system called ZiYa was briefly mentioned on Ruby Inside. ZiYa is unique in that it can render graphically complex charts from data in your Rails application with a bare minimum of code. The layout and style of the charts is defined via special YAML stylesheets, sprinkled with a bare minimum of Ruby code.
Since ZiYa was first mentioned here, a lot has happened with it. ZiYa’s official site is now full of comprehensive samples and documentation, and even a screencast is available demonstrating how to get a ZiYa chart working in just several minutes. Read More
Bruce Tate continues his fine Crossing Borders series with a look at Ruby’s support for closures. If code blocks and block techniques used by routines such as Rails’ respond_to confuse you, it’s a great primer. Read More
Vsevolod Balashov has taken a PHP PageRank decoder and rewritten it in Ruby. It works and it’s fast. Simply, it retrieves the PageRank value for a supplied URL from Google and decodes it back to the PageRank value between 0 and 10. Each page indexed by Google has one of these numbers, and have historically represented how well linked a Web site is and how well it will rank in Google. The usefulness of PageRank has dropped a lot in the past year or two, but it can still be a useful indicator of how significant a Web site is. Read More
Russ Olsen has been putting together a small series of blog posts about building a DSL in Ruby. The first part dates from October 2006, but the second part has just been released, making it a good double length read. In the mini-series, Russ looks at the motivation for developing a DSL and develops a basic DSL called Potemkin. Read More
Geoffrey Grosenbach has continued his series of Peepcode screencasts with Capistrano Concepts, a screencast that walks you through the world of Capistrano, automated deployment systems, and server maintenance using Ruby. The screencast is an hour long and shows you how to use Capistrano and develop your own tasks. The screencast costs $9 to download.
Geoffrey has also released a free screencast demonstrating how to build a full Rails stack on Ubuntu. It’s only ten minutes, but covers all of the basics to get your Ubuntu installation up and running with Rails. Read More
Tattle is a project from Chad Fowler, Jim Weirich, and Bruce Williams that allows you to submit information that would be useful to the RubyGem developers and, ultimately, developers of other Ruby gems. You can see charts showing the data submitted so far here.
You install Tattle with a simple gem install tattle and then run the tattle program provided. A few non-personal details are retrieved about your Ruby setup (you can preview the information that is sent with tattle report) and then sent to the Tattle team. This information will enable developers to improve the behavior and support of their gems, as well as RubyGems itself, across multiple platforms and architectures. Read More
The well respected TIOBE programming language index has Ruby placed at #10 for January 2007, up from #21 in January 2006. Ruby has climbed steadily throughout the year and its rapid growth has earned it TIOBE’s award of “Programming Language Of 2006″. Ruby is now hot on the heels of JavaScript, Python, C#, and Perl on the index, and if things carry on as they have, Python might see itself below Ruby by next year.
TIOBE says:
We are glad to announce that Ruby has become “Programming Language of the Year 2006″. Ruby has the highest popularity increase in a year of all programming languages (+2.15%). Read More