The Interactive Ruby Shell (irb) and the Rails console are great for interacting and experimenting with your ruby application code, but sometimes it’s hard to visualize the output. Gabriel Horner has come to the rescue with Hirb: a ‘mini view framework’ for irb which is designed to improve the default output to make it more human-readable.

Hirb does this by formatting console output according to its type, and paging if there’s more than a screenful to display. For example, Hirb will automatically display ActiveRecord model instances in a non-wrapping, table-like view.

irb>> Tag.last
+—–+————————-+————-+
| id  | created_at              | description |
+—–+————————-+————-+
| 907 | 2009-03-06 21:10:41 UTC | blah        |
+—–+————————-+————-+
1 row in set

There’s also a helper provided which displays a collection of arrays or hashes as a tree. Read More

This post is by Matt Sears of Littlelines.

Rdoc.info is simple web service that uses YARD (a documentation generation tool for Rubyists) to generate documentation for Ruby libraries hosted on Github. If you’re not familiar with YARD, it allows you to add metadata to Ruby documentation similar to other languages such as Java and Objective-C. Another cool thing about YARD is its extensibility and allowing you to plug in custom handlers and output.

Rdoc.info, announced in April, was launched as a side project by Nick Plante. Nick leveraged Github’s post-receive-hooks to automatically generate and host Ruby documentation each time a Github project receives a commit. Read More

Ilya Grigorik has written an interesting article called Profiling Ruby with Google’s Perftools about using a port of Google’s Perftools (perftools.rb) to build graphs showing the results of profiling sessions on your Ruby code. As with all of Ilya’s great posts, it’s punchy and to the point.

Ilya starts by explaining what Perftools is and shows how to use its regular profiling features from Ruby, which are impressive enough, but then moves on to showing how to generate graphic profiling charts that graphically demonstrate where your application is spending most of its time. Aman Gupta, the developer of Perftools.rb, has produced such graphs for RubyGems, Merb, Rails, and EventMachine, which you might find interesting. Read More