I recently came across the interesting-looking Monk framework. It allows you to specify a list of dependencies for technologies to use in your project (in the form of git repositories or gems), and it will take care of extracting them into your application’s vendor folder.

With the default skeleton (for which you’ll need a Redis key/value database installed), you’ll get a Sinatra application with Haml, Rack, Contest, Stories, Webrat and Ohm. However, you can create your own skeleton with its own dependencies if you like.

You can install Monk with:

gem install monk

… and then initialize a project with the default skeleton:

monk init myapp

This will give you a familiar structure with helpers, models, routes, views, lib and vendor folders. Read More

Simone Carletti of Altura Labs recently announced on his blog the release of a new pure-Ruby Whois library, inventively named “Whois“.

He needed a whois library for one of his projects, but found that the existing options didn’t satisfy his requirement of being able to query both IP addresses and top level domains.  Simone’s offering replaces the original whois gem by Cyril Mougel, with which it’s backward compatible.

Using the ‘all-in-one’ whois class-method will give you the default behaviour, with a timeout of 5 seconds. If you want more control you can initialize a new instance of the client:

Whois.whois(“rubyinside.com”)
# =whois response for rubyinside.com

client = Whois::Client.new
client.timeout = 3
client.query(“74.125.67.100″)
# =whois response for 74.125.67.100

For more details, check out Simone’s blog post, the docs, and the Github repository. Read More

TwitterLand (Github repository) is a single Ruby library that packages up access to, currently, 5 different Twitter-related data services. Note, however, it’s not a library that allows you to post to Twitter – you’ll want Twitter4R or John Nunemaker’s Twitter gem for that.

More services are sure to be added to TwitterLand, but currently it makes it easy to get data from these five:

• Follow Cost – A service that gives a “cost” on how annoying it will be to follow a specific Twitter user.
• Twitter Grader – Provides info on how Twitter users measure up to each other in terms of popularity.

Read More

Bowline is a new MVC GUI framework for developing cross-platform desktop applications using Ruby, HTML, CSS and Javascript. The author, Alex MacCaw, aims to make building a desktop app as simple as creating a Rails site.

Unlike pure Ruby desktop libraries like Shoes, Bowline builds on Appcelerator Titanium, an SDK for building desktop apps that basically gives you a Webkit window and a set of APIs for interacting with various operating systems. This lets you develop for the desktop using familiar web technologies, including CSS3 and HTML5 (think Adobe Air!).

To allow your Ruby code to interact with your HTML, Bowline introduces the concept of “binders” which can update your views as the underlying data changes (a bit like controllers in Rails). Read More