Dropbox is a popular file hosting service (4m+ users) that provides synced backup and file hosting to OS X, Windows, and Linux users. You get up to 2GB of space for free. RDropbox is a library by Tim Morgan (of Autumn fame) that takes advantage of the official Dropbox API from Ruby.

With RDropbox you can log into a Dropbox account using OAuth and then upload and download files. A requirement, however, is that you apply for Dropbox API access and are approved, as the API is not fully open to the public without going through the approval process (this appears to be in order to avoid overloading their service). Read More

Cinch (or GitHub repo) is a new Ruby “microframework” for creating IRC bots. Effectively, Cinch is a library that both abstracts away all of the complexities of dealing with IRC servers and presents a DSL for rolling out your own functionality.

Cinch’s Hello Bot example demonstrates how you can easily create a bot that connects to an IRC server (irc.freenode.org), joins a channel (#cinch) and then replies to greetings:

irc = Cinch.setup :verbose =true do
server “irc.freenode.org”
nick “Cinchbot”
channels %w(#cinch)
end

irc.plugin “hello” do |m|
m.reply “Hello, #{m.nick}!”
end

irc.run

Cinch isn’t the first attempt at building a DSL for creating bots in Ruby. Read More

awesome_print is a Ruby tool that provides “pretty printing” support for your objects. It’s a bit like p, pp or, if you prefer, puts obj.inspect, but with significantly improved, contextual, colored output. Its creator and maintainer is Michael Dvorkin of Fat Free CRM fame.

Being able to see “inside” Ruby objects on the fly can prove useful whether you’re debugging some code your tests did not dare reach or you’re just playing around in irb. The most common way to examine objects is with p or the inspect method, but these don’t format their output in a particularly easy-to-read way. pp – part of the standard library – is a pretty printer that improves matters but it still leaves a lot to be desired. Read More

Supermodel is a new library by Alex Maccaw that uses the Rails 3.0 ActiveModel library to provide ActiveRecord-esque in-memory “database” storage in Ruby.

Supermodel is best demonstrated with a basic example:

require ‘supermodel’

class Person < SuperModel::Base; end

a = Person.new( :name => “Jim” )
a.save

Person.find_by_name(‘Jim’) # => #<Person>
Person.all # => [#<Person>]

This is just the start! Out of the box, Supermodel supports validations, callbacks, observers, dirty change tracking, and serialization. It also allows you, with only a little magic, to go beyond ephemeral memory-only structures and marshall your SuperModel-based objects to disk or even to a Redis store. Read More