I just had Paul Levy send me a link to this video. It’s a fast-paced 2 minute video about Ruby and Rails that takes a pretty surreal route. You probably won’t learn much from this but it’s never a bad thing to encourage a bit more artiness in programming ;-) Read More
In 2001 Hal Fulton released The Ruby Way, only the second English language Ruby book available. Since then Ruby has become popular in the West and with the help of Ruby on Rails has achieved significant critical success. With a significant number of enhancements and changes to the Ruby language and ecosystem of libraries and developers, Fulton decided a second edition was in order. That second edition of The Ruby Way, as published by Addison-Wesley, is now available.
I’ve had this link sitting in my brew pile for some time and wanted to see if I could get it to work with the latest version of Ruby and Rails, but since I’ve been too busy so far, I wanted to post it anyway in case a reader would find it useful.
Erik Veenstra has demonstrated how to use his Tar2RubyScript and RubyScript2Exe tools to take a Rails application and a SQLite database and package it up into a single re-distributable executable file. This allows you to distribute your Rails app in a single file to users who don’t have Ruby or Rails installed. Read More
From Juixe of Techknow Zenze comes a stunning 13 pages of notes (PDF) from the recent RubyConf 2006 conference. He covers over 15 sessions in the notes including Matz’s keynote, and Tim Bray and Adam Keys’ presentations. Anyway, Juixe has put together a surprisingly compelling read (for what are really notes), check it out. Read More
Burnalytics is a new library just released by Alex MacCaw (the developer also behind the popular Juggernaut plugin for Rails) that makes it easy to retrieve statistics from both FeedBurner and Google Analytics. As well as making it easy to retrieve statistics from these two sources, it also makes it a one line operation to produce graphs from the data retrieved as demonstrated by the screenshot above. Read More
Ruby genius Mauricio Fernandez has been playing with an attempt at processing Prolog using Ruby found on a Japanese coding site and has come up with tiny_prolog.rb. Read More
require ‘tiny_prolog_ext’
# rules
# read as “X and Y are siblings if Z is the parent of both”
sibling[:X,:Y]
Seymore is a new Rails-based content management system developed by Thomas Mango and released to the public in the last couple of days. Six screencasts are provided demonstrating how the system looks and operates. Version 0.1 is available now as a complete build in .tar.gz and .zip formats and a more up to date trunk copy is available via SVN from Seymore’s Google Code repository. Read More
I don’t think the Ruby Jobs site at RubyNow gets enough link love from the community, and I want to put that right. If you haven’t been there for a while, you’ll be surprised. In just the last two weeks there are 30 new Ruby and Rails jobs available. That’s even more than on the 37signals Jobs Board. Even better, if you’re an employer you can post to the RubyNow jobs board for free, so check it out. Read More
Jason Garber has got in touch about his new Rails plugin, form_test_helper, that makes testing forms easier than before. As the plugin’s official home page has less information than the mail he sent me, I’m reproducing his mail in full as it’s the useful reference so far: Read More
With my form_test_helper Rails plugin, your functional and integration
tests can work more like the browser. No longer do you need to feed
params to an action:
post :create, :name =’Pickaxe’, :category =1, :out_of_print =0
…and then wait for it to break silently when you change your form but
forget to change the test.
Those of us who primarily develop Rails applications on OS X are mostly familiar with TextMate, a great, powerful and stylish editor that seemingly entices more Rails developers over to the Mac platform every day (judging by the comments on the #rubyonrails IRC channel). However, another option available to all platforms is the GNU Emacs editor, an open source Emacs-based text editor that’s been around since the computer dark ages.
Marshall Vandegrift has put together a compelling screencast of his Emacs setup which sports as many, if not more, features as TextMate, and is just as powerful. He has syntax coloring for Ruby and erb, a project view, and built-in links to tools such as svn and diff. Read More
The Ruby Visual Identity Team have released a Ruby logo kit for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The kit includes high resolution JPEG and PNG bitmaps, along with PDF, Adobe Illustrator, Xara, and Flash vector format versions. Subject to the Creative Commons license, this logo pack makes it easy to use the official Ruby logo within your own projects and Web sites (perhaps a redesign of Ruby Inside’s logo should be on the cards..) Read More
Corban Brook presents a step-by-step guide to producing ‘great looking collages’ using Ruby and the RMagick graphics library. Rather than be stuck with a dry picture-by-picture view, Brook uses RMagick to great effect to produce a complex, dynamic image that looks as if it were put together by hand. If for nothing else, this is a great look at some reasonably advanced RMagick code and a great way to learn about a few of the more arcane methods it offers. Read More
Nick Sieger has put together pretty dependency graphs for Ruby, Java, and JavaScript using the YACC definitions for each. If none of this makes sense, at least the pictures are enjoyable, and if you print out the high res copy it’d look great as a wall poster. Read More
Want to get the Google-powered Ruby Search (searches over 40 Ruby sites – blogs, forums, references in one hit) easily accessible in your Firefox browser? Now you can, head over to the Google Ruby Search site and click the link to add the search to your search bar. Read More
Hot on the heels of the last post comes a new feature to Ruby Inside.. a Ruby and Rails search engine powered by Google. It’s on the front page here at Ruby Inside (link for those reading via RSS) and lets you search a bumper collection of Ruby and Rails sites in one go.
If you search for ‘Integer’ you get the Ruby class references, rather than the Java and Wikipedia links you get with Google.com, and you can use it as a quick, reliable way to pin down the Ruby information you need. So far there are 23 sites in the search engine, including the main reference sites, the Rails forum, and several key weblogs, but I’m adding more sites over time. Read More