Heckle is a great new library from Kevin Clark (though Ryan Davis wrote a proof of concept at RubyConf) that ‘torments your tests’. It uses ParseRuby and RubyToRuby to rip your code apart and forces random data into your code (currently it does this for strings, symbols, regexps, ranges, booleans, and numbers) to see how good your tests really are.
Simply, it’s fuzz testing for your Ruby tests, and that’s a good thing if you want your test suites to be strong and far-reaching. Read More
Geoffrey Grosenbach demonstrates how you can use Rails 1.2′s “respond to” features to return dynamic graphic files on request. Short, sweet, to the point, and a great demonstration of the dynamic response capabilities of Rails 1.2. Read More
Chris Wanstrath laments that the Ruby Inside Advent Calendar isn’t Rails-specific, and since Rails does ‘everything faster’, he has produced an entire Rails Advent Calendar in one post! Curiously though, Planet Err has 39 days leading up to their Christmas.. but regardless, Chris presents 39 choice Rails snippets. Read More
If you haven’t got tab-completion and syntax coloring in your irb, you owe it to yourself to follow these instructions right away (should work for Linux, OS X, and Cygwin users). First, install the Wirble gem:
sudo gem install -y wirble
Next, create or edit a file called .irbrc in your home folder (~/.irbrc), and make sure these lines are included there:
require ‘rubygems’
require ‘wirble’
Wirble.init
Wirble.colorize
Now play with irb and see joy similar to that in the screenshot above. Try tab-completion too. It’s great! Read More
Almost anyone who’s tried to install Image/GraphicsMagick and RMagick on several different systems has experienced the pains of compilation, having to download this and that, and inconsistencies here and there. When all you want to do is produce some quick thumbnails from your Rails app, you can quickly feel it’s a bit overkill.
Enter ImageScience, a “clean and happy” Ruby library focused on producing thumbnails quickly and easily. According to the author it “kicks the living crap out of RMagick” and “doesn’t leak memory like a sieve”. I haven’t experienced any issues with RMagick myself, beyond the installation of its dependencies, but I haven’t been paying attention. Read More
css_dryer is a Rails plugin by Andrew Stewart that makes putting together stylesheets for your Rails applications more efficient than ever before. It supports nesting and basic variable interpolation. For example, here’s an example of nesting:
div {
/* comment for div */
color: green;
p {
/* comment for div p */
color: red;
b { color: blue; }
}
}
And using variables makes it easy to update constants in your stylesheet:
<% sleek_grey = ‘#fefefe’ %>
#sidebar { border: 1px solid <%= sleek_grey %> }
#footer { footer: 1px dashed <%= sleek_grey %> }
Andrew has put together some great instructions on how to get it all going here. Read More
Given the audience that Ruby Inside has, I think there’s a potential for us to make some big changes in the Ruby world. I propose accepting some advertising and sponsorship on Ruby Inside, and in return I will publicly disclose the amounts and give all of the money back (minus any forced costs, such as tax) to the Ruby community as donation to Ruby-related projects, offered as bounties, and/or pay for even better articles and tutorials. Rest assured, it will not be money that will sit in a big pot waiting for decisions to be made. The choice of where the money will go will be influenced by Ruby Inside readers, naturally. Read More
Dhaka is a set of tools written in Ruby by Mushfeq Khan that can generate tokenizers, parsers, and evaluators of context-free grammars (my own shabby contribution in this field was posted to RubyInside recently!). Dhaka’s ultimate goal is to make a pure Ruby, flexible parser generator. From the official site:
Dhaka provides DSLs specialized for specifying grammars, tokenizers and evaluation rules. It can take a grammar and generate a finite-state automaton for parsing it. The generated parser can then be ‘compiled’ to ruby source-code so that it need not be generated again. Dhaka also supports exporting generated parsers to the GraphViz dot format for visualizing states and actions. Read More
DevPals is a brand-new ‘questions and answers’ site for programmers. As well as covering Ruby, it also covers Java, .Net, and PHP. Developer Pat Toner asked if I’d link to it in the Ruby Inside sidebar, and I said it’d also be good to do a mini interview. I was intrigued as to why Ruby was included alongside the other admittedly more popular languages at the expense of, say, JavaScript, Python, or VB. Read More
Exactly one year ago David Heinemeier Hansson and the rest of the Rails core team (smaller back then!) unveiled Rails 1.0, the first ‘production quality’ release of Ruby on Rails. Alongside the release came an entirely new Rails Web site, the same as the one we’re familiar with now. The next day, December 14, DHH followed up with some brief insight and wondered: “I can’t wait to see where this will all go in 2006.” Read More
Ilya Grigorik has put together a great article explaining how he has used Ruby, along with the Scruffy graphing library, to develop a basic visual database explorer.
Last night I wrote a quick database explorer for one of my projects (screenshot above). I had a database of lead stories for BBC, Yahoo News and NY Times over a period spanning Sept. 2004 to Aug. 2005 and I wanted to juxtapose and visualize different queries. The concept is simple, given two words (ex: war / peace), I wanted to see some aggregate calculations over the available document corpus.
At first, I wanted to write about a great Ruby graphing library (Scruffy) I found, but later realized that I could nail three different concepts at once: writing a simple threaded web-server, interfacing with a database, and generating live graphs (SVG/XML). Read More
The JRuby team has just announced the release of JRuby 0.9.2 (download). Despite being a minor point release, a lot of things have been tweaked and added. Direct from the team:
This release has some great improvements:
Extensions openssl and readline now working
Code for a new graphical irb console
Partial support for iconv and bigdecimal extensions
RSpec now supported
Improved Rails support
Fixed all known block and scoping bugs
Enhanced parser performance
More compiler and performance work
Refactored variable scoping logic
127 Jira issues resolved since 0.9.1
Congratulations to the JRuby team for their continuing efforts! Read More
After reading this interesting post about using Ruby and a microcontroller for homebrew electronics projects, I discovered Ruby/SerialPort. It’s a Ruby library that works on Windows, Linux, BSD, OS X, and other POSIX operating systems. It’s reasonably old, but as demonstrated in the first link, works on OS X pretty well even now in 2006. There’s some code demonstrating its use here.
Using Ruby/SerialPort and Arduino, an open-source physical computing platform (basically a microcontroller with a standardized serial interface, it seems), it’s pretty easy to connect Ruby to electronics circuits. Tied up with a nice LED display or mini text display, this could become a cute tool for building desktop display devices for showing RSS, weather, etc. Read More
Another month, another step up the TIOBE Programming Community Index! Just last month we reported that Ruby had moved from 13th to 12th, and now it’s up one more, to 11. The TIOBE Programming Community Index isn’t the most official chart in the world, but is one of the most objective. Ruby has moved up from 27th in September 2004, to 11th now.
For those who are not familiar with the index:
The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. Read More
There was no “Troll of the Month” feature in November, because I couldn’t find any. December has started off strong, though, with two articles: Why Django Kicks Ruby on Rails’ Collective Ass and Constructive Reasons to use Django Instead of Rails. While the first is definitely the most inflammatory, both make bizarre arguments (amongst some good ones, admittedly) and seem to be nothing but “let’s bitch about Rails to make Django look better”-fests.
One key argument is, essentially: ‘Django is better because Python is better’. This seems as wise as ‘God must exist because the Bible says so’. Just because somebody thinks Python ‘is’ better doesn’t mean that it is. Read More