Open Gem: A RubyGems Plugin to Quickly Get Inside Gems

Adam Sanderson has written an extremely useful RubyGems plugin called open_gem. It makes it really quick to inspect what's inside your gems, e.g.: gem open rails. You'll need to be running RubyGems 1.3.2 first.

Testy - A New BDD Testing Framework

Sure, we already have RSpec, but Testy is an intriguing new BDD testing framework by Ara T Howard. It's very minimalist. You don't need to learn(any.clever.dsls) and there are just two new method calls to learn. It produces machine readable results for continuous integration purposes and is generally very flexible and light. This has the potential to become popular.

Phusion Passenger 2.2.2 Released - Important!

Over the weekend, Rack 1.0.0 was released and.. all hell broke loose on certain deployments (RubyFlow, for one). Passenger 2.2.1 had its own 1.0.0-esque vendorized version of Rack that conflicted with the all new Rack 1.0.0 and Rails 2.3.2 applications suffered severely. Quick as ever, the Phusion team got together and released Passenger 2.2.2. Not only the Rack-related bug fix but many Nginx related bugfixes too. Go grab it.

Ruby Proxies for Scale and Monitoring

Over on Igvita, Ilya Grigorik (of AideRSS/PostRank fame) has put together a dual presentation and blog article on using Ruby proxies for scale, performance, and monitoring. Solid, well presented stuff as all Igvita's posts tend to be. Many different types of proxying are covered with the prime demonstration being of an EventMachine based technique.

Ruby and Rails Development on Ubuntu 9.04 using Ruby 1.8.6 (and VirtualBox)

Nazar Aziz has written a guide to setting up a Ruby and Rails development environment under Windows using VirtualBox, Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty), and Ruby 1.8.6.

How to Clone TinyURL in 40 lines of Ruby Code

A walkthrough of how to implement a TinyURL service in 40 lines of Ruby code, thanks to Sinatra.