Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news.

Infinity Test: Flexible Continuous Testing with Multiple Ruby Implementations

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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

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: A Free, 19 Chapter Ruby 1.9 Reference Guide

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By Peter Cooper / September 20, 2010

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

The 3 Step Guide to Slick Local Documentation for all your Ruby Gems

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By Peter Cooper / September 14, 2010

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about RubyDoc.info, a “good looking, up-to-date Ruby documentation” site powered by YARD. Well, as of YARD 0.6 you can get the same greatness that RubyDoc.info provides applied to your local machine’s collection of gems in just a few steps. Try it out – you won’t regret it.

Step 1: Install YARD. Install the yard gem with sudo gem install yard or similar.

Step 2: Run the YARD server. Run yard server –gems. Take note of the hostname and port given in the output.

Step 3: Get browsing. Visit http://0.0.0.0:8808/, where the IP address and port should be replaced with those provided by the YARD server. Read More

How to Build a “Spy Camera” App for an Android Phone with Ruby and Sinatra

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By Peter Cooper / September 2, 2010

In Turn your Android Phone Into a Remote Spy Camera with Ruby in 15 Minutes, Mike Leone demonstrates how to use Ruby, Sinatra and Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A) to build and deploy a phone-hosted “spy camera” Web service.

SL4A is a system that allows you to run “scripting language” scripts and interactive interpreters on the Android platform. It currently supports JRuby, Python, Perl, Lua, JavaScript, BeanShell, and Tcl. Mike demonstrates how to set up a Sinatra project to use SL4A to run on an Android phone using JRuby. Upon receiving a request, Mike’s app takes a picture using the phone’s camera and serves it back over HTTP. Read More

RubyDoc.info: Good Looking, Up-To-Date Ruby Documentation

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By Peter Cooper / August 30, 2010

RubyDoc.info is a new, automatically updated Ruby documentation site by Loren Segal and Nick Plante that builds upon their earlier success with rdoc.info (which we posted about in 2009). It’s powered by YARD, a tool that puts out great looking Ruby documentation (there’ll be more about YARD in a post later this week).

RubyDoc.info automatically generates documentation for all gems on rubygems.org (it updates its index once per day) but it does GitHub-hosted projects too. For RubyDoc.info to automatically update with documentation for your Ruby-related GitHub project, use the “Add Project” link on RubyDoc.info and then add http://rubydoc.info/checkout as one of your post-commit hook URLs in your repository’s settings – on each future commit, your latest documentation will be built on RubyDoc.info. Read More

27 Video Presentations from RubyKaigi 2010

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By Peter Cooper / August 30, 2010

RubyKaigi is Japan’s “home” Ruby conference and the organizers have just put 27 videos from the RubyKaigi 2010 conference online. Unfortunately I can’t link to them individually as they’re embedded on a single page, so head over to rubykaigi.tdiary.net and check them out.

Presentation titles include: Ruby 2.0, Ruby API is Improved Unix API, Rocking The Enterprise With Ruby, Mapping the World with DataMapper, The Necessity and Implementation of Speedy Tests, A Metaprogramming Spell Book, Conflicts and Resolutions in Ruby and Rails, and User Experience for Library Designers.

Two caveats: 1) Be aware that some of the presentations are in Japanese (unsurprisingly) although most of the slides include English and, of course, any Ruby is still readable. Read More

Rails 3.0 Released (And 22 Free Videos To Bring You Up To Speed)

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By Peter Cooper / August 30, 2010

DHH rings the bell and announces that Rails 3.0 (final) has been released after two years of determined effort by the Rails core team (and, significantly, Merb team members, since Rails 3.0 is heavily influenced by the Merb merger). Grab it now with gem install rails –version 3.0.0 or, if you’re in no rush, Rails 3.0.1 might come along within a week or two.

The Videos

DHH gives a quick roundup of some of Rails 3′s new features but like Emma Watson’s head PhotoShopped onto yet another naked body, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. If you’re really fresh to Rails 3.0, though, Gregg does an admirable job of boiling everything down into a digestible format with his (free!) Dive Into Rails 3.0 screencast series:

Ryan Bates has also produced a fistful of his typically succinct but precise RailsCasts videos on a wide array of Rails 3.0 topics. Read More

EuRuKo 2010: Summaries, Videos, and Photos from Europe’s Ruby Conference

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By Peter Cooper / August 29, 2010

EuRuKo is the brand of Europe’s principal Ruby conference series and EuRuKo 2010 took place in late May. Why, then, am I posting about it in August? First, I’m a strong supporter of EuRuKo and promised to post a roundup of the event here. Secondly, it turns out it took a while for the videos to all be uploaded ;-) Third, I’ve taken my time in getting round to it. Nonetheless, there are some amazing presentations you can watch and they’re still fewer than three months out of date!

One of the event’s organizers, Ela Madej, gives a summary:

While there are 37 videos on offer, some standouts include:

Ruby Weekly: A Ruby E-mail Newsletter from Ruby Inside

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By Peter Cooper / August 25, 2010

It’s time to unveil my latest project: Ruby Weekly, a once-weekly e-mail roundup of 10-20 Ruby related links with a few sentences on each. It’s had a brief alpha testing period and it’s now ready to roll.

Click here to subscribe to Ruby Weekly – it’s a one click process. It’s also ultra simple to unsubscribe if it’s not eventually to your taste.

As well as featuring links and (very) brief summaries, the weekly e-mail will also occasionally include new event, book, and job announcements and, if something significant is going on in Rubyland, a few paragraphs of editorial. The aim, though, is to keep the e-mail reasonably brief, in a plain format, and, above all, useful. Read More

SimpleCov: A Powerful, Straightforward Ruby 1.9 Code Coverage Tool

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By Peter Cooper / August 24, 2010

SimpleCov builds on the ideas presented in Aaron Patterson’s recent, and awesome, Writing a Code Coverage Tool with Ruby 1.9 blog post. The result is a powerful yet straightforward code coverage tool that puts out some well formatted stats. Read More

home_run: Ruby’s Date and DateTime Classes, But 20-200x Faster

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By Peter Cooper / August 23, 2010

Jeremy Evans (of Sequel fame) has created home_run, a performance-focused C reimplementation of Ruby’s Date and DateTime classes. They work out to be significantly faster than the native Ruby classes while retaining compatibility (mostly).

Jeremy makes the surprising claim that “the standard library Date class is slow enough to be the bottleneck in much (if not most) of code that uses it”, but goes on to prove the point with a Rails related benchmark where retrieving all objects for two different models gets a 2x and 3x speedup with home_run loaded.

I hope that Jeremy ultimately aims to get his work included into MRI (as happened with FasterCSV replacing CSV in the stdlib) as standard. Read More

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