RubyPulse is a screencast site that publishes regular videos about different Ruby libraries. It’s a month old so far and German Ruby developer Alex Peuchert has put out 9 episodes already. With a little support, perhaps Alex will be able to keep it going and become the pure Ruby equivalent of Ryan Bates!
Each RubyPulse episode is in Quicktime format and about 4 minutes long – each is also available in an iPod/iPhone tailored format. The nine episodes of RubyPulse so far include:
RubyMine is a Ruby and Rails IDE (for Windows, OS X, and Linux) by JetBrains, the guys behind the popular Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA. We’ve previously posted about how much people seem to like RubyMine, and it looks like things will get even better, as they’ve just released the beta of RubyMine 2.0. Notably, RubyMine 2.0 will be free to existing 1.0 users as it falls within the year allowed for free updates!
The New Stuff
RubyMine 2.0 was initially meant to only be RubyMine 1.5 but Eugene Toporov of JetBrains told me that they’ve considered 2.0 to be more appropriate given the number of updates and additions. Read More
Today Phusion has announced the release of Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE) 1.8.7 (more specifically, 1.8.7-20090928). Once considered a bit of a joke, given the name, REE has proven itself to be anything but, with significant memory usage and speed improvements over the stock “MRI” Ruby implementation (achieved by way of patches to the MRI code). The key development with this release is compatibility with Ruby 1.8.7, rather than the 1.8.6 of previous versions.
While REE has shown itself to be a good performer compared to the unpatched MRI implementation before, this week Evan Weaver of Twitter revealed how a release candidate version of REE 1.8.7 has resulted in a significant throughput increase on the same codebase. Read More
A couple of weeks ago, popular micro-blogging service Twitter unveiled a beta “streaming API.” Twitter’s nature means they get hammered with polling requests so they’ve begun to experiment with the concept of streaming relevant data within a single HTTP request (in a Comet style). TweetStream (or GitHub repo) is a new Ruby library by Michael Bleigh to handle interacting with Twitter streams from Ruby.
TweetStream is available as a gem from both GitHub and Gemcutter (which, incidentally, got a fresh design today) and installation instructions are given in Michael’s blog post about TweetStream. Once you’re all installed, though, reading the live stream becomes as simple as:
require ‘tweetstream’
TweetStream::Client.new(TWITTER_USERNAME, TWITTER_PASSWORD).sample do |status|
puts “[#{status.user.screen_name}] #{status.text}”
end
Beyond basic functions, though, TweetStream also include daemonization features that allow you to create scripts that run in the background “out of the box.” You could add these features yourself with the daemons library, sure, but having this at hand to quickly throw together Twitter scripts is pretty cool. Read More
Watchr is a continuous-testing tool by Martin Aumont in the vein of Autotest (part of the ZenTest package).
At its heart, Watchr basically watches any (or all!) of your project’s files, then executes arbitrary Ruby code of your choice when things change. Watchr configuration takes such a form:
watch(‘pattern’) { |match_data_object| command_to_run }
For example, to produce Autotest-like functionality, you’d just specify Watchr to run the tests whenever a test or some library code changes, like this (taken from Martin’s blog post):
watch(‘test/test_.*\.rb’) { |md| system “ruby #{md[0]}”}
watch(‘lib/(.*)\.rb’) { |md| system “ruby test/test_#{md[1]}.rb”}
…but Watchr can be used for much more than just testing. Read More
Wanted to go to JRubyConf or RubyConf this year? Tough – they’re sold out already. Luckily, though, there are some interesting upcoming events that you can still get in to – some online, some in multiple cities, some held in youth centers, some in hotels, and even one on a tropical island. Whew!
(Update: Removed Aloha on Rails as it has sold out – thanks to Tammer Saleh for the note.)
New Relic is running a free webinar event on Thursday, September 24 for developers and customers interested in optimizing e-commerce sites ready for the 2009 holiday season. Read More
Learnivore is a new(ish) site by 
French Rubyist Thibaut Barrère that aims to aggregate all of the best screencasts in any easy to navigate, searchable manner. Learnivore is worth following (you can even follow it on Twitter) because unlike blog posts, screencasts from disparate sources haven’t really been specifically indexed and presented well before.
Currently, Learnivore has a very strong Ruby and Rails focus though it’s not exclusively Ruby – there are some Web design and iPhone videos mixed in there (though mostly still of interest to the average Rubyist, IMHO). The sources are BDDCasts, EnvyCasts, New Relic, SitePoint, Peepcode, Railscasts, RubyPulse, and the Pragmatic Programmers – all Ruby-leaning sources. Read More
Create Your Own Programming Language is a interesting new information product and community by Marc-André Cournoyer (of Thin fame) that promises to teach you how to create a simple programming language. The official site is well worth checking out, even if you don’t want to buy it, as it’s a great example of how to sell a product like this. Create Your Own Programming Language costs $39.99 and has a two month money back guarantee.
The package includes a 53 page PDF (only 44 pages in the earlier copy I received), a pile of source code (for two different types of bootstrapped languages), and a screencast, along with access to a community of other users. Read More
Evan Light has recently pushed his Coulda project to Github – it’s a test framework based on Test::Unit, inspired by Cucumber, Shoulda and Thor.
Coulda works like Cucumber in that it’s a Domain Specific Language for capturing the behaviour expected by your code, as part of the Behavior Driven Develoment approach (BDD). Others have noted it’s a little like the RSpec story runner.
Where Coulda differs is that instead of using Gherkin to convert your statements about the behavior to code using regular expressions, it uses standard method calls. This is less of a cognitive leap for the developer… Read More
Looking for a Ruby/Rails job in Texas, California, Florida, Illinois, or Texas? We might have want you want in this post. This is perhaps the most diverse set of states featured in a Ruby Inside job post – usually it’s just California and New York! It seems Ruby and Rails are now finding a full-time billing in a whole new set of companies.
Ruby Application Developer – EquityMetrix LLC – Dallas, TexasEquityMetrix LLC, a Dallas based business services company, is looking for a Ruby application developer to work alongside experienced developers building applications for internal and client use. You’ll be working with Ruby, Linux, Postgresql and other open source software. Read More
Welcome to the latest in the series of random Ruby related links I’ve picked up over the past few weeks. It’s a crazy grab-bag of links this time around! Whatever your job, interest, or fetish, there’s bound to be something in here that tickles your fancy if you’re a Rubyist. Enjoy!
Note: Don’t forget that if you like quick-fire links like this, check out our sister site RubyFlow. There are usually anywhere between 3 and 15 Ruby and Rails related links each day coming from developers just like you :)
James Edward Gray II looks at a case where he used eval and got chastized for it. Read More
I’ve been reading the Merb Way by Foy Savas (Addison Wesley). I was a little sceptical about this book at first, because of the recent marriage of the Merb and Rails core teams and the announcement that the Merb codebase would be merged with Rails as part of the march towards Rails 3. As Yehuda Katz put it, “Merb 2 is Rails 3″.
So, is this book now redundant? I don’t think so. As Obie Fernandez explains in the foreword, knowing about Merb is still valuable as it is a fairly widely used framework, and it will probably continue to be seen in the wild for a good while after Rails 3 is released. Read More
Ruby5 is a new twice weekly podcast dedicated to Ruby and Rails news. It’s headed by Gregg Pollack (formerly of the RailsEnvy podcast which Jason Seifer has now taken over) and Nathan Bibler. They aim to cover several bits of Ruby and Rails news in five minutes. You can also leave comments about the stories on their site as you listen. As of today, there are 7 episodes in the archives if you want to catch up, all in the 5-6 minute range.
I’m not a big fan of listening to news, but Ruby5 has done a great job of also making it possible to learn about what they’ve featured without listening to the audio if you don’t want to. Read More
Try Ruby was a Web site by Why The Lucky Stiff that provided a Web-based version of irb (the interactive ruby prompt) and a 15 minute tutorial for people to learn and play with Ruby. With Why’s disappearance, however, the site went down and an invaluable Ruby community resource was lost.
Luckily, Andrew McElroy has made a great effort in getting Try Ruby back online. It’s not precisely the same, but it’s as close as you’re going to get for now (one key difference is that the irb process is not persistent – instead the history is re-run on each new line). Read More
I have been contemplating the use of document-stores in my Ruby apps for a few months (you might remember my MongoMapper post from back in June), and I’ve been following developments in the No-SQL movement. George Palmer’s presentation at Rails Underground on his couch_foo gem inspired me to explore the possibilities further, and I’ve recently started work on incorporating CouchDB into some projects that I’m working on.
Couch is one of several available document oriented databases (the other main contender being MongoDB, for which there’s a good comparison on the Mongo website). Document stores go some way to bridging the gap between traditional functionality-rich relational databases (like MySQL, Postgres) and fast, highly scalable key/value stores (such as Toyko Cabinet). Read More
