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

IRB: Let’s Bone Up On The Interactive Ruby Shell

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By Peter Cooper / May 14, 2009

irbism.pngThe Interactive Ruby Shell, more commonly known as IRB, is one of Ruby’s most popular features, especially with new developers. You can bash out a one-liner, try a method you’ve just learned about, or even build a small algorithm or two without going the whole way to writing a complete program.

I’ve not posted much about IRB before and it doesn’t tend to get a lot of love generally, so while I’ve been digging through some of the best content I can find on IRB learning all about its internals and ways to get more out of it, I thought I should share:

Demystifying Irb’s Commands – An awesome look at the hidden internals, special methods and features within IRB and the impetus for starting this post. Read More

Ruby Fibers: 8 Useful Reads On Ruby’s New Concurrency Feature

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By Peter Cooper / May 13, 2009

fibers.pngNew to Ruby 1.9 is the concept of fibers. Fibers are light-weight (green) threads with manual, cooperative scheduling, rather than the preemptive scheduling of Ruby 1.8′s threads. Since Ruby 1.9′s threads exist at the system level, fibers are, in a way, Ruby 1.9′s answer to Ruby 1.8′s green threads, but lacking the pre-emptive scheduling.

Now that Ruby 1.9 is becoming more important with each passing month, I’ve rounded up some of the best articles about Ruby 1.9′s fiber functionality so that you can be up to speed with all of the major concepts in perhaps 10 to 15 minutes. If you’re getting interested in Ruby 1.9, you’ll want to read on:

Fibers & Cooperative Scheduling in Ruby – Ilya Grigorik hits it out of the ballpark with perhaps the best overview of fibers. Read More

Typhoeus: A High Speed, Parallel HTTP Library for Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / May 13, 2009

typhon.jpgPaul Dix, of Feedzirra fame, strikes again! This time with Typhoeus (Github repo), a high-speed, parallel HTTP request library for Ruby. At first glance, you could be forgiven for wondering what the point is when we already have John Nunemaker’s awesome HTTParty to build simple HTTP clients, but Typhoeus is, in many ways, like HTTParty on ten cans of Red Bull.

Typhoeus was built because Paul wanted to make numerous simultaneous HTTP requests at a time from his Ruby code. He didn’t want any blocking and the whole setup had to be as fast as possible. To do this, he’s interfaced with libcurl and libcurl-multi to pull off high speed concurrent HTTP requests and then laid a tidy Ruby API over the top. Read More

4 Upcoming Ruby and Rails Events To Check Out (in Berlin, London, Hawaii, and Washington)

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By Peter Cooper / May 12, 2009

rwc.png

RailsWayCon – Berlin, Germany, May 25-27, 2009

Overview: RailsWayCon is, in many ways, a logical replacement for RailsConf Europe this year. Taking place in Berlin, as RailsConf Europe did, there’s a wide range of well known Ruby and Rails faces attending and a significant number of sessions organized into three tracks.

Well-known attendees/speakers: Amy Hoy, Yehuda Katz, Neal Ford, Thomas Fuchs, Michael Koziarski, Steven Bristol, Ola Bini, Stefan Tilkov, Jonathan Weiss

Registration: You can buy a ticket to the main conference for €699 for both days or €349 for a single day. Freelancers and students get significant discounts. Click on “Registration” on the official site to learn more. Read More

The Mega RailsConf 2009 Round Up

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By Peter Cooper / May 12, 2009

A week ago, RailsConf 2009 kicked off in Las Vegas. As usual, it didn’t fall short on drama, interesting sessions, and inspiration for the 1000+ attendees. This post is an after-event summary and long-term source of links to the best RailsConf 2009 related content found so far (a bit like our mega RailsConf 2008 round up post). If you have anything to add, post a comment and it might even be added to the post!

Summaries

Rails Magazine Special Edition: Issue #2 of the Rails Magazine is a special edition dedicated to RailsConf 2009. The PDF edition is free but you can also buy a print copy. Read More

Rubystein: Wolfenstein 3D Recreated in Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / May 11, 2009

At RailsConf 2009 (of which a summary will be coming soon to Ruby Inside), Hongli Lai and Ninh Bui of Phusion (the guys behind Passenger) gave a presentation called Scaling Rails. As part of this, they wanted to demonstrate that Ruby is powerful enough to run a 3D game at a decent speed so they built Rubystein, a Wolfenstein 3D clone in Ruby, using the Gosu game development library.

Rubystein is not a true clone in the sense that it’s exactly the same as Wolfenstein 3D, but the principles are the same. It’s heavily tailored to Ninh and Hongli’s presentation, however, and features a “pack of Mongrels”, various Rubyists, and *** **** as a boss. Read More

Shoulda Roundup: Elegant, Maintainable Ruby Testing

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By Matthew Lang / May 5, 2009

It’s been a few weeks since Shoulda’s 2.10 release so it’s a good time to round up some of the new features and the best articles covering Shoulda.

For those unfamiliar with it, Shoulda is a library that allows you to write better and more understandable tests for your Ruby application. It’s like overdrive for Test::Unit and RSpec.  Shoulda allows you to provide context to your tests so that you can group tests according to a specific feature or scenario your testing.

In the latest release of Shoulda a couple of key features should be mentioned.  Firstly, you now have matchers to use in controller specs, much like RSpec. Read More

Programming Ruby 1.9 (The New Pickaxe) Now In Print

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By Peter Cooper / April 30, 2009

pickaxe2000.pngWhether you love it or not, as a Rubyist you probably have a copy of Programming Ruby (also known as The Pickaxe) floating about. It was the first English language Ruby book to be published and was instrumental in boosting Ruby’s popularity in the early noughties.

Now, after quite some time, the latest, third, edition of Programming Ruby has gone into print and is now available in both print and PDF/e-book formats. Direct from the publisher, The Pragmatic Programmers , you can pick it up as a eBook + Paper Book package for $59.95, an eBook only for $25, or the print version for $49.95. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #23

By Peter Cooper / April 27, 2009

rubygems.png Open Gem: A RubyGems Plugin to Quickly Get Inside Gems

Adam Sanderson has written an extremely useful RubyGems plugin called open_gem. It makes it really quick to inspect what’s inside your gems, e.g.: gem open rails. You’ll need to be running RubyGems 1.3.2 first.

Testy – A New BDD Testing Framework

Sure, we already have RSpec, but Testy is an intriguing new BDD testing framework by Ara T Howard. It’s very minimalist. You don’t need to learn(any.clever.dsls) and there are just two new method calls to learn. It produces machine readable results for continuous integration purposes and is generally very flexible and light. Read More

Post Retracted: It’s Not a Ruby Inside Thing

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By Peter Cooper / April 27, 2009

sweet-running-boy.pngUpdate: I retract the post Be Professional or Be Edgy: How Context Can Keep Everyone Happy of April 27, 2009 in full. It covered an issue that started as a Ruby-related thing, but quickly became focused on the behavior and sentiments of some Rails communities. Ruby Inside is a Ruby news blog; therefore my editorial was unuseful and made for dull reading. I apologize for falling into such boring territory.

If you have no idea what I’m going on about and have time to kill, go here or here or visit one of the several threads on RubyFlow about it.

Regardless, I am leaving the comments here for the public record as they have been referenced elsewhere. Read More

Thanks to Ruby Inside’s Sponsors for April 2009

By Peter Cooper / April 27, 2009

It’s time to thank those great companies and individuals who help keep Ruby Inside (and often other Ruby sites) going.

Big Nerd Ranch – Ruby and Rails Training

bnr.pngBig Nerd Ranch offers intensive, head-down computer programming courses taught by experts in a retreat environment. Classroom, accommodations, and dining all take place within the same building, freeing you to learn, code, and discuss with your programming peers and instructors.

The current focus is on their Ruby on Rails Bootcamp taking place from June 8 to June 12. Charles B Quinn will be instructing. 5 full days of learning Rails in Atlanta, Georgia. Read More

Heroku, The Git-Powered Ruby Hosting Platform, Goes Commercial

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By Peter Cooper / April 25, 2009

heroku.png It was way back in November 2007 that we first mentioned Heroku, the then online Rails development and app hosting environment. It’s a little more than that now – it bills itself as the “instant Ruby platform” – and you can host Rails, Sinatra, Ramaze, and other Rack apps and deploy them entirely using Git.

Today, Heroku has taken its next big step with its commercial launch. In its first two years, Heroku has been used to run 25,000+ apps and now users can pay for extended services. The free level remains which gives you one “dyno” (essentially a complete Ruby stack with a certain amount of processing power), two dynos then cost $0.05 per hour, all the way up to 40 dynos that’ll put you back $1.95 an hour. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #22

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By Peter Cooper / April 24, 2009

email.png It’s been just over a year since the last Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts post (number 21, specifically). I think I felt that RubyFlow filled the gap for quick-fire group posts, but.. it doesn’t, quite (even though it’s going great guns!) There are still a lot of awesome things out there that should be highlighted here but that, perhaps, don’t need their own post. So.. the series is back.

Enjoy!

How to Write a RubyGems Command Plugin

rubygems.png Following on from our news about the new version of RubyGems and its plugin functionality, Gabriel Horner has put together a great tutorial that covers how to create your own plugin from scratch. Read More

David Black’s Ruby 1.9 Video Tutorials

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By Peter Cooper / April 23, 2009

dblackenvycasts.jpg

Popular Ruby trainer and author David A Black has partnered up with Envycasts (from the Rails Envy guys) to produce a set of two Ruby 1.9 video tutorials / screencasts. You can buy each part (part 1, 2) on its own for $9 or the two together as a set for $16. If you choose the set, you’ll also get a 40%-off coupon for David’s new book, The Well Grounded Rubyist (the followup to Ruby for Rails).

I’ve watched both of the videos and they’re up to the usual extremely high production standards that Envycasts is becoming known for (see this review of their Rails 2.2 screencast and PDF). Read More

RubyGems 1.3.2: Now with Plugins

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By Peter Cooper / April 22, 2009

Last week, the latest version of Ruby packaging library/tool, RubyGems, was released. rubygems.pngVersion 1.3.2 not only has a bunch of bug fixes (including supporting https URLs for gem sources) and improvements, but a number of new features. The biggest new feature is support for plugins. Plugins can be used to add commands to the gem command line tool or install/uninstall hooks. InfoQ’s Mirko Stocker has put together a good summary of the new functionality along with some comments directly from RubyGems maintainer Eric Hodel.

Ryan Davis has already released a plugin called graph that produces a graph of your gems and their dependency states. Read More

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