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

Top Ruby Blogger of 2008 – John Nunemaker

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By Peter Cooper / December 21, 2008

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Note: This post is a part of Ruby Inside’s Top 10 in 2008 series. To learn more or see the other awards, read this introductory post.

John Nunemaker – Consistently Good Ruby Blogging in 2008!

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Rather than unethically considering ourselves or one of our sister blogs (!!), we set out to look for the best independent Ruby blogger of 2008. It wasn’t a hard search. While there are a lot of good blogs out there, few have been as consistently good as John Nunemaker’s RailsTips. John (@jnunemaker on Twitter) is always looking out for new things and ways to make life simpler for Ruby and Rails developers, and while many have fallen back to just putting code on Github or Twittering in 2008, John has consistently blogged about his new projects and those of others. Read More

Sinatra: 29 Links and Resources For A Quicker, Easier Way to Build Webapps

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By Peter Cooper / December 18, 2008

sinatra-icon.pngSinatra, a Ruby “micro framework” for developing Web applications, is hot stuff! Despite being over a year since we first mentioned Sinatra (as used on a 100 line blogging app called Reprise), only now does Sinatra seem to have reached critical mass – it’s on the cusp of becoming really popular. This is a good time, then, to check it out and see where it could fit into your own projects (with the new Rails Metal functionality (in edge/2.3 only) you can ever run a Sinatra app as a lightweight companion integrated with your Rails apps!)

Sinatra’s official homepage provides an incredible number of alluring examples. Read More

Ruby’s Top Hitter in 2008 – Jeremy McAnally

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By Peter Cooper / December 16, 2008

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Note: This post is a part of Ruby Inside’s Top 10 in 2008 series. To learn more or see the other awards, read this introductory post.

Jeremy McAnally – One of Ruby’s Busiest Hackers of 2008

jeremym.pngJeremy McAnally (Twitter @jeremymcanally) is a Huntsville, Alabama based Ruby developer who has been developing software for about 10 years and now works for popular consultancy ENTP. He takes Top Hitter (no, not Hitler!) for being, in Ruby Inside’s opinion, one of the most consistent releasers, challengers, and driving forces in the Ruby and Rails worlds this year. His releases span many media – two books (Ruby In Practice and The Humble Little Ruby Book), a magazine (The Rubyist), libraries (context, matchy, dcov, and more), and a blog (his blog – omg blog!! Read More

Fun with Ruby’s Abstract Syntax Trees

By Peter Cooper / December 15, 2008

ast-img.pngWhenever you run a Ruby program, Ruby’s parser processes the code and turns it into an “abstract syntax tree” (an AST) which can then be either turned into bytecode for YARV (on Ruby 1.9) or be interpreted immediately (as with Ruby 1.8).

While a programming language allows programmers to represent the logic of a program in a way that’s both suitable for developers and computers to easily understand, abstract syntax trees act as a low-level tree representation of the program’s mechanics. Given that ASTs are typically simple data structures, it’s possible to use them to convert one language to another, to semantically analyze what a program is going to do, to detect repetition, or to optimize how the final program will run. Read More

Ruby’s Top Teacher in 2008 – Satish Talim

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By Peter Cooper / December 12, 2008

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Note: This post is a part of Ruby Inside’s Top 10 in 2008 series. To learn more or see the other awards, read this introductory post.
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Satish Talim – Ruby Evangelist and Facilitator

Satish Talim is an established software development expert (over 30 years of experience in the industry!) based in Pune, India. He’s most recognized in the Ruby community for his ongoing work with his RubyLearning group of sites. He’s also built up a strong following on Twitter @IndianGuru.

Since 2006, Satish – along with a fast growing group of volunteers – has helped thousands of people (many of who first came into the Ruby world in 2008) in over 100 countries to learn Ruby. Read More

Ruby’s Top 10 of 2008: Thanking Those Who’ve Made Ruby Great This Year

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By Peter Cooper / December 11, 2008

rubytop10logo.png2008 has been an interesting year for Ruby. Some people are going to remember 2008 as a snarky, uncivil year, filled with call outs, lay-offs and bitchiness. There has been an increase in negative articles about Ruby, even from prominent Rubyists. Back in November, KirinDave said that Ruby is in “a very bad place” and lacks momentum.. as if!

Back in the real world, Ruby has been doing just fine. Ruby 1.9.1 is due for final release any time soon, a ton of awesome libraries and technologies have been released or previewed, and Ruby (and Rails and Merb) powered Web apps have continued to flourish. Read More

Ruby Implementation Shootout: A Bright Future for Ruby Performance!

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By Peter Cooper / December 9, 2008

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Back in December 2007, Antonio Cangiano presented The Great Ruby Shootout, a large set of benchmarks of then-current Ruby implementations (Ruby 1.8.5, YARV – early Ruby 1.9, JRuby, Ruby.NET, Rubinius, XRuby, and Cardinal). Even then, despite Ruby 1.9′s infancy and experimental nature, Ruby 1.9 came out as about three times faster than Ruby 1.8.5 – while other implementations were barely faster than 1.8.5.

Now.. for 2008: Ruby 1.9.1 is the winner..!

Now Antonio has put together an all new December 2008 Great Ruby Shootout! There’s a lot of reading to do but the results are very exciting. JRuby’s performance has come along in leaps and bounds and Ruby 1.9.1 is around five times faster than Ruby 1.8.7. Read More

RubyRun Community Edition: Diagnostics Reports for your Ruby Apps

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By Peter Cooper / December 6, 2008

rrunx.pngIt was a few months ago that Rubysophic – a Bay Area startup working on products relating to Ruby diagnostics – came quietly into the Ruby scene, launching their first product, RubyRun Community Edition, a free, standalone application-performance diagnostic tool. While the most obvious use is with Rails applications, RubyRun works on any Ruby code (within reason) though it’s primarily suited to Web applications.

I spoke with a few developers at Rubysophic recently to find out more about RubyRun and why they were offering it for free. It turns out that their team mostly comes from the J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) world (from companies including HP, IBM, and Cisco) and they wanted to release a suite of enterprise-quality diagnostics tools and services for the Ruby world. Read More

How Dr Nic Packages His Ruby Code With RubyGems

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By Peter Cooper / December 5, 2008

Picture 3.pngEveryone’s favorite Australian Ruby developer, Dr. Nic Williams, has put together a handy slide presentation called How to Package Your Ruby Code where he demonstrates how he packages his various bits of Ruby code using RubyGems. His process is backed by his own NewGem, a library that generates a framework for a new Ruby gem, and Hoe by Ryan Davis.

In his explanatory blog post, Nic also ponders Perl’s CPAN (a gigantic archive of Perl modules) and the module installation process it offers. When you install a module, the tests for the module are run in real time immediately. Read More

The 2008 Ruby Advent Calendar

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By Peter Cooper / December 3, 2008

radvent2008.png If you read Ruby Inside in 2006, you might remember our 2006 Ruby Advent Calendar. It featured the first look at the then-new AWS::S3 library, offered a Ruby code formatter for blog posts (which I still use here!), some Ruby wallpapers, and a lot more.

2007 had no Ruby advent calendar, unfortunately, but this year Lakshan Perera, a Sri Lankan Ruby developer, has put together a good-looking 2008 Ruby Advent Calendar. Day one looked at rolling out a Sinatra and Sequel powered blog. Day two covered deploying Ruby apps with Phusion Passenger (which just hit version 2.0.4). Read More

Thanks to Ruby Inside’s Sponsors for December 2008

By Peter Cooper / December 3, 2008

It’s time to thank those great companies and individuals who help keep Ruby Inside (and often other Ruby sites) going. Note: All descriptions and notes are written by Ruby Inside and are not directly influenced by the sponsors. As such, any opinions stated are those of Ruby Inside and not necessarily shared by the sponsor!

New Relic – Rails Performance Monitoring Systems

newreliclogo.pngNew Relic provides high-end performance monitoring solutions for Rails applications and they include 37signals and Shopify amongst their customers (very high praise indeed!) Recently New Relic launched an affiliate program (which you can still join), and has announced that almost 1000 customers now use RPM to manage their production Rails apps! Read More

What’s Hot on Github – November 2008

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By Zach Inglis / November 30, 2008

GitHub LogoWhat’s Hot on Github is a monthly post highlighting interesting projects that are new or updated this month, within the Ruby community that are hosted on Github. Github has become an extremely popular place for Ruby and Rails developers to congregate lately, so I wanted to list some of the new projects, and some of the updated ones, that I have found interesting and that are too small for their own blog post.

This month’s picks:

RubyConf 2008 Videos Coming Online

By Peter Cooper / November 28, 2008

rubyconf-90secs.pngAt RubyConf 2008, other than giving his own Scaling Ruby talk, Gregg Pollack of EnvyCasts was hard at work getting summaries of all of the presentations from the speakers. In RubyConf 2008 in 90 Seconds you get a fast-fire summary of the summaries. In RubyConf in 31 Minutes you get a more complete record – good viewing for anyone who didn’t attend the conference as it gives you a good idea of what’s on the Ruby community’s mind.

One of the coolest features of RubyConf in 31 Minutes is that it’s hosted on Viddler, which has allowed Gregg to tag and comment on the video so that you can see who’s speaking and how to watch their full presentation as you’re watching them give the summary! Read More

llvmruby: A Compiler Toolkit Available to Rubyists

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By Peter Cooper / November 27, 2008

red-dragon-ref.png If you’ve ever investigated how to build your own compiler, you might be familiar with LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine), a “compiler infrastructure” that makes it easy(ish) to create virtual machines, code generators, and optimizers of your own. It also has its own intermediate representation language that’s architecture independent and the instruction sets and typing system available are similarly language independent. In theory, if you want to build your own programming language and a compiler for it, LLVM will get you most of the way.

llvmruby is an attempt to bring LLVM’s power into the grasp of Rubyists. LLVM is typically used from C++, but llvmruby lets you use the LLVM compiler infrastructure directly from the Ruby interpreter. Read More

Rails 2.2 Released – 27 Links and Resources To Get You Going

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By Peter Cooper / November 22, 2008

rails22.pngRuby’s most popular Web application framework, Ruby on Rails, takes another giant step today with the release of Rails 2.2! It follows on just five months after Rails 2.1, but offers even more significant improvements, particularly in the areas of compatibility, internationalization, and documentation. Read David Heinemeier Hansson’s release post for a quick overview.

Ruby Inside’s sister site, Rails Inside, was launched alongside Rails 2.1 in June, and would, you’d think, be the ideal place for a post like this, but no. Rails is very significant to the Ruby world as a whole, so you’ll still get the biggest of the biggest Rails announcements here on Ruby Inside! Read More

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