It’s time for us to thank the companies who help keep Ruby Inside (and often other Ruby sites) going by sponsoring our work. Luckily, they’re all pretty interesting in their own right and have some worthwhile products and services to check out.

Joyent — Public Cloud Hosting for Rails

Joyent is a leading infrastructure provider to some of the fastest growing businesses on the web, including those in the social gaming, digital agency, publishing, eCommerce, and iOS industries. Joyent helped customer AKQA, an agency for many of the world’s leading brands, scale on demand to meet wildly successful online campaigns. Read More

9 months in the making comes RSpec 2.0, the latest major version of Ruby’s most popular behavior driven development (BDD) framework (now at a gem install rspec near you). Kudos to the 82 contributors and RSpec’s team lead, David Chelimsky.

What has RSpec 2.0 got that RSpec 1.x doesn’t?

• Modularity. RSpec has been split up into multiple gems each with a particular focus like mocks, core, and “expectations.” The theory behind this is that you could pick and choose parts from other frameworks, though I suspect most users will not benefit from this.
• Totally new runner. RSpec 2.0 has borrowed heavily from the Micronaut, a BDD framework that adds more metadata and more structure to test suites.

Read More

The MacRuby team has announced the release of MacRuby 0.7. No significant feature releases but stability and performance boosts are always particularly welcomed in alternative Ruby implementations.

To me, the most exciting “new” feature is the exposing of MacRuby’s built-in “sandboxing” functionality through a Sandbox class. Sandboxing goes a lot further than Ruby’s typical safe mode features, since it blocks activities performed by all of the libraries and system services called by your app’s process too.

If MacRuby hasn’t been on your radar recently, it’s also worth checking out the new MacRuby-powered Control Tower server that’s based on Rack and takes full advantage of MacRuby’s concurrency facilities. Read More

Charles Max Wood of Teach Me To Code Screencasts has put together a 13 minute screencast demonstrating how to use some Ruby metaprogramming magic along with Rack in order to build a small Sinatra-esque webapp framework. Watch the HD version at Vimeo or download the video to get the best quality.

Charles is also trying to raise a little money to help him get to RubyConf and do some coverage from there. If you enjoy this screencast, I’m sure he’d love a few bucks (and might sing your praises into the bargain). Read More

Let’s straight into it. There are currently 10 great positions being advertised on the Ruby Inside jobs board. Here’s a roundup:

CTO of Nurph at Nurph (a Twitter chat startup)
London / Remote, United Kingdom

User Interface Designer in the Solar Industry at Enphase Energy
Petaluma, California

Experienced Rails Developer at Daily Burn (a fitness webapp)
New York, New York

ProFounder Front end Developer at ProFounder Financial
Los Angeles, California

Lead Software Developer – New Media at America’s Test Kitchen
Brookline, Massachusetts

Rails App Support Engineer at Engine Yard (who hasn’t heard of these guys!?)
San Francisco, California

Software Engineer at HealthCentral
Arlington, Virginia

Lead Ruby on Rails Developer at TCI
Mountain View, California

Lead Software Engineer at HealthCentral
Arlington, Virginia

Sr. Read More

It’s time for us to thank the companies who help keep Ruby Inside (and often other Ruby sites) going by sponsoring our work. Luckily, they’re all pretty interesting in their own right and have some worthwhile products and services to check out (and Linode recently put their prices down!).

Interested in sponsoring Ruby Inside & 17 other Ruby sites? Click here to learn more.

Recurly — Subscription Billing In 3 Easy Steps

Recurly is a recurring billing service, ideal for webapps and other subscription based systems. Recurly’s goal is to help you boost your monthly subscription revenue without getting in the way. Read More

Read Ruby is an online “book” about Ruby 1.9 in a mostly referential style. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license so is reasonably “free” if you want to make and share changes, as long as you’re not doing so for profit.

The author stresses that the book is in “a very rough state” but it looks pretty good to me so far. There are 19 chapters covering broad topics like strings, character encoding, IO, files, and objects in general. Notably, the book is heavily focused on syntax rather than instruction.

The book’s source files are hosted on GitHub if you want to get involved. Read More