Peter Cooper Page 9 : Ruby Inside

Chronic 0.3.0 Released: Improved Natural Language Date/Time Parsing

9 Comments

By Peter Cooper / October 26, 2010

Tom Preston-Werner has pushed out version 0.3.0 of Chronic, the popular natural language date and time parsing library for Ruby. It’s a significant release because the last was 0.2.3 back in July 2007! Grab it now with gem install chronic

Despite the long time between releases, Chronic hasn’t gone without attention. It’s been sitting on GitHub and attracting patches for years, but Tom (who’s already pretty busy, y’know, running GitHub) has now decided to bundle it up and push it live.

What does 0.3.0 get you?

Improved time-zone support
Handles “on” in phrases like “10am on Saturday”
Now ignores commas (which could throw it off before)
Supports “weekend” and “weekday”
Allows numeric timezone offsets (e.g.

Writing Parsers in Ruby using Treetop

2 Comments

By Peter Cooper / October 22, 2010

Treetop is one of the most underrated, yet powerful, Ruby libraries out there. If you want to write a parser, it kicks ass. The only problem is unless you’re into reading up about and playing with parsers, it’s not always obvious how to get going with them, or Treetop in particular. Luckily Aaron Gough, Toronto-based Ruby developer, comes to our rescue with some great blog posts.

Aaron, who has a passion for messing around with parsers and language implementations, recently released Koi – a pure Ruby implementation of a language parser, compiler, and virtual machine. If you’re ready to dive in at the deep end, the code for Koi makes for good reading. Read More

Microsoft Jettisons IronRuby Into The Open Source Community

By Peter Cooper / October 22, 2010

Back in August, Microsoft seemed to get tired of IronRuby so its project leader Jimmy Schementi jumped ship while asking the Ruby community to step up and get involved in its future. Today, Microsoft has announced new leadership for IronRuby (and IronPython) and has effectively jettisoned it into the community as a true fully open source project.

So who’s in charge of IronRuby now? Jimmy Schementi, naturally, and Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the Mono and Gnome projects and generally all round super famous open source dude.

Schementi has written about what the leadership changes and Microsoft’s announcements mean in the greater scheme of IronRuby’s development. Read More

MacRuby + Mac App Store == Low Hanging Fruit for Rubyists

7 Comments

By Peter Cooper / October 21, 2010

At its “Back To Mac” presentation yesterday, Apple unveiled the Mac App Store, an equivalent of the iOS App Store for the Mac. Given the relentless development and improvement of MacRuby and the power it brings Rubyists in developing complete OS X applications, I’m convinced that the time is right for Ruby to make a big splash on the OS X GUI app development front.

When I mentioned the above observation on Twitter, Geoffrey Grosenbach of PeepCode pointed out:

He’s right, but things like app stores have a funny way of acting as catalysts for developers to come out of the woodwork and try new things out. Read More

The Companies Making Ruby Inside Possible in October 2010

By Peter Cooper / October 20, 2010

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

Phusion Passenger 3 Released: The Next Gen of Ruby Webapp Deployment

By Peter Cooper / October 19, 2010

We talked about the road to Passenger 3 a few months ago but Phusion have now reached the end of it with the final, production release of Passenger 3.0.0! Congratulations to the team.

Phusion’s Passenger is the de facto way to deploy Ruby based webapps (a statement backed up by Hampton Catlin’s Ruby Survey) so if you haven’t yet made the jump, 3.0.0 provides a good excuse. It’s as stable as ever but there’s even more performance and a ton of new features, as covered in Phusion’s four “technological preview” blog posts.

RVM users will also be happy to learn that it’s now reasonably easy (and I say “reasonably” because you’ll still need to do some reading) to deploy Passenger to cover multiple Ruby versions. Read More

Michael Hartl’s 15 Hours of Rails 3 Screencasts

3 Comments

By Peter Cooper / October 13, 2010

Have you seen Michael Hartl’s RailsTutorial.org? It’s a free online “book” that walks you through from start to finish with building either a Rails 2.3 or Rails 3.0 app (though a $39 PDF rendering is also available). After finishing the book, Michael set to work on some screencasts covering the same ground in video form and it’s now released: the The Ruby on Rails Tutorial screencasts, clocking in at over 15 hours of content, are now live.

Michael’s project is the latest in a line of self publishing efforts in the Ruby and Rails communities and it’s gone down a storm on Hacker News. Read More

RSpec 2.0 Released: Ruby’s Leading BDD Framework Grows Up

1 Comment

By Peter Cooper / October 10, 2010

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.

How Santiago Pastorino Went From Ruby Newbie to Rails Core in 2 Years

9 Comments

By Peter Cooper / October 8, 2010

Just a month ago, David Heinemeier Hansson welcomed Rails’ newest core team member, Santiago Pastorino. Strikingly, Santiago only started to contribute code to Rails earlier in the year and it’s not every day that DHH is trumpeting someone else’s productivity, so I had to catch up with him and learn his story.

When did you first get into Ruby programming and how did it occur?

I started around mid 2008 when I decided along with my friend José Costa to start our company WyeWorks. I wasn’t deeply familiar with Ruby and Rails at the time since we had to do a bunch of stuff to keep the company alive and focused on what we already knew. Read More

MacRuby 0.7 Released: More Stability and Easier Sandboxing

2 Comments

By Peter Cooper / October 5, 2010

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

Infinity Test: Flexible Continuous Testing with Multiple Ruby Implementations

3 Comments

By Peter Cooper / September 29, 2010

Infinity Test is a new library by Tomas D’Stefano that pitches itself as a “flexible alternative to Autotest.” If you want your project’s tests (both RSpec or Test::Unit are supported) to be automatically run when changes are made, this is a great place to start.

The big benefit of Infinity Test is the support for testing across multiple Ruby implementations, powered by RVM (a candidate for Ruby project of the year, if ever there were one). For example, if you have some Test::Unit tests that you want to be run on Ruby 1.8.7, JRuby, Ruby Enterprise Edition, and Ruby 1.9.2, you could run:

infinity_test –test-unit –rubies=1.8.7,jruby,ree,1.9.2

There’s also a configuration file system with its own DSL to build more complex automated testing systems with customized notification systems and callbacks. Read More

Building your own Fake Sinatra with Rack and Metaprogramming

By Peter Cooper / September 27, 2010

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

10 Top Ruby Jobs for September 2010

By Peter Cooper / September 26, 2010

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

Rubinius 1.1 Released: It’s Just Better

By Peter Cooper / September 24, 2010

Version 1.1 is the latest release of Rubinius, a Ruby implementation based around a C++ and LLVM virtual machine but with the bytecode compiler and majority of the core written in Ruby itself. It’s often called a “Ruby in Ruby.” We celebrated and explained the background to Rubinius’ 1.0 release 4 months ago.

The Rubinius 1.1 release brings the typical benefits to the table — performance improvements, bug fixes, improved memory usage, and increased stability (notably with Rails 3) — and brings together 546 commits from 16 developers led by Evan Phoenix. More technically, additions include block inlining within the JIT system, a new GIL algorithm, a “report” system for VM crashes, and better checks for detecting bad extensions. Read More

Check Out The Companies That Make Ruby Inside Possible

By Peter Cooper / September 20, 2010

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

Author Archives: Peter Cooper

Joyent — Public Cloud Hosting for Rails

Recurly — Subscription Billing In 3 Easy Steps