Last Week’s Top Ruby News: Rails 3.1.3, autoload deprecated, and conferences
It's a couple of days late but here are the main headlines from the last week of Ruby news. We have a couple of Rails releases, some event news, and the usual gaggle of great articles and jobs.
Headlines
Rails 3.1.3 Released (Very Quickly After 3.1.2)
This release mainly contains fixes for regressions that popped up in 3.1.2, including a downgrade to Sprockets. 3.1.2 itself was primarily a bug and security fix release and cleared up a XSS vulnerability in the translate helper.
Matz says 'Autoload will be dead' (in Ruby 3.0)
Matz says he should have removed 'autoload' from Ruby when he added threads to the language but he has now deprecated them. Due to Ruby 2.0's backwards compatibility demands, though, they won't be fully gone until Ruby 3.0 but Matz now discourages using autoload.
MountainWest RubyConf 2012 Call For Proposals Open
Want to talk at a popular Ruby conference in 2012? MWRC's call for proposals is now open until January 7, 2012. The conference itself takes place in Salt Lake City, Utah on March 15-16, 2012.
Scottish Ruby Conference 2012 Registration Open
You can now buy tickets for June 2012's Scottish Ruby Conference. It's been very popular in the last couple of years so if you fancy going, check it out soon.
Articles and Tutorials
Configuration for Rails, the Right Way
Mike Perham notes that he still sees people promoting various gems and plugins to handle configuration elements in Rails apps, but that one little known secret is that Rails 3 allows you to define your own configuration elements trivially.
Rails 3.1 Subdomains and Devise Example App and Tutorial
Daniel Kehoe has been working on some interesting Rails demo apps recently and now he presents a detailed Rails subdomains tutorial showing how to create an example Rails 3.1 application with subdomains and authentication using Devise.
Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough: A Bumper Set of Ruby 1.9 Notes
Martin Carel recently bought and watched my Ruby 1.9 video and has put together a bumper set of notes with the main Ruby 1.9 changes outlined.
Unobtrusive Object Deletion in Rails, The Easy Way
Using RESTful routes, the HTTP DELETE verb is necessary to delete resources. But what if your users aren't running JavaScript and want to delete items? Ryan Townsend shows a way to get everything running smoothly.
The Rails 3 Asset Pipeline in (about) 5 Minutes
Michael Erasmus was feeling unsure about how the asset pipeline in Rails 3.1 worked but after digging around for a while, he's put together a simple high level overview.
Installing Ruby, Rails, and MySQL on OS X Lion
My Ruby Show co-host Jason Seifer has written a guide to setting up a basic Ruby development environment on Mac OS X Lion over at Think Vitamin.
Screencasts
Contributing to Open Source (RailsCasts)
In the 300th Railscasts episode, Ryan Bates shows how to submit a pull request to an open source Ruby project on GitHub.
Libraries and code
Faye 0.7: New Event APIs and an Open WebSocket Stack
The latest release of Faye adds a few new event hooks and ships with a stand-alone WebSocket client/server implementation that makes adding WebSockets to any Rack app dead simple.
Ruby Command-Line One-Liners
A large collection of Ruby 'one liners', all set up to run from the command line, to perform various functions, mostly involving processing text files.
rack_mailer: Rack End Point for a Contact Form
rack_mailer is a simple piece of Rack middleware that takes passed parameters and sends an e-mail to a preconfigured address.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Last but not least..
Ruby Reloaded: Boost Your Ruby-Fu in December with Peter Cooper
My live, online Ruby Reloaded course has its 4th outing on December 5/6 (next week) and only 7 6 seats remain. Learn more about what it's about by following the link and use the code 'INSIDE' to get $50 off.
