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

Merb 1.0 RC2 Now Available: Merb 1.0 Not Far Behind!

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By Eldon Alameda / October 24, 2008

merblogo.png Following on from the highly successful MerbCamp, the Merb Framework took another big step this week with the announcement of the availability of release candidate 2 for it’s upcoming 1.0 release (due within weeks now). No major changes and The Merbist blog lists mainly a focus on bug fixes and Windows compatibility:

The main focus for this release was to fix bugs and make the stack Windows compatible. We didn’t get any major bugs in RC1 but fixed a lot of small annoyances and problems with generated resources. We also made sure Merb itself would work properly with Windows (not using incompatible signals etc..) and we spent some time getting the Data Object sqlite3 drivers compiled on Windows. Read More

Mobile Orchard: Like Ruby Inside, but for iPhone Developers

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By Peter Cooper / October 22, 2008

mobileorchard.pngA brief aside to mention my latest project (in collaboration with Dan Grigsby) – Mobile Orchard.

Mobile Orchard is a new iPhone developer news site, in a similar vein to Ruby Inside. We’ve already:

How To Develop A Mac (Cocoa) Application With MacRuby And XCode

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By Peter Cooper / October 20, 2008

macrubytutorial.pngOver a year ago we had a post about how to build OS X GUI applications with Ruby and RubyCocoa. Since then, however, MacRuby has arrived on the scene. Not just the regular version of Ruby with some bindings to Cocoa, MacRuby is as native to OS X as JRuby is native to the JVM.

It’s a significant development, then, that Apple has created a very in-depth tutorial called Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby. It’s very comprehensive. The tutorial introduces you to MacRuby, walks you through installation, demonstrates Objective-C bindings, and steps through using XCode and MacRuby to develop a simple GUI application. Read More

Working With Video From Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / October 17, 2008

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With only the performance of a scripting language, Ruby isn’t considered a particularly suitable choice for intense video work (direct transcoding, encoding, and the like.). Nonetheless, there are a handful of Ruby libraries and Ruby-based technologies you can use to work with video and movie files – primarily through interacting with faster tools or libraries.

RMov (Ruby Quicktime Library)

RMov is an awesome new Ruby library by Ryan Bates that wraps around Apple’s QuickTime API and allows you to open, edit, and export QuickTime movies from within Ruby. It is, unfortunately, OS X only.

RVideo (Ruby Video Processing)

RVideo (Github) is a Ruby library that interfaces with tools like ffmpeg to let you inspect and process video and audio files. Read More

Ruby’s Popularity On The Up; An Ideal Haven For The Recession?

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By Peter Cooper / October 15, 2008

chartgoesup.png A week ago, in a story published by eWeek.com, Darryl K. Taft asked “Can Ruby and Rails Make Developers Shine in a Downturn?“

The general gist is that with a generally lower total cost of development, projects using Ruby and Rails will continue to increase, and even thrive in a recession, ensuring the success of Ruby and Rails developers. An analyst with Forrester, John Rymer, however, countered:

I respectfully suggest that the type of application someone is working on is a more important factor than language usage. In a downturn, companies tend to go back to basics.

Whatever the final outcome, Ruby’s popularity is still increasing. Read More

4 Weather Libraries for Ruby and Rails Developers

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By Peter Cooper / October 14, 2008

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Want to retrieve weather conditions in your Ruby script / application? There are four great solutions: WeatherMan, RWeather, rubyweather, and the Yahoo Weather Ruby API.

RWeather

RWeather, by Carlos Kozuszko, is a Ruby wrapper for the Weather XML data feed from The Weather Channel’s weather.com. Carlos has put together a basic tutorial / overview of the library’s use. Currently it has two main features: searching for locations, and then retrieving the current weather for locations of your choice. It’s a nice, simple library.

WeatherMan

WeatherMan, by Jared Pace, goes a little deeper than RWeather. Read More

Ruby + MIDI: Giles Bowkett’s Ruby Musical Mystery Tour

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By Peter Cooper / October 14, 2008

singalong.pngGiles Bowkett is anything but a quiet chap – indeed, he’s one of the more outspoken members of our community. With the roar, however, comes a lot of wisdom, and Giles recent work on integrating Ruby and MIDI is inspired.

In July, Giles attended the RubyFringe conference and gave a talk with the unpronounceable title of “Archaeopteryx: A Ruby MIDI Generator“, named after his Archaeopteryx project. This talk has been very well received generally. Pete Forde of Unspace called it “the most important video of 2008″, Pete Yandell said it’s the “must-watch geek talk of the year” and *** **** said Giles “Ruled The World.” It’s an awesome talk, even if music and MIDI don’t interest you. Read More

Nanite: Self Assembling Cluster of Ruby Daemons

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By Peter Cooper / October 12, 2008

nanite.pngIt was with much excitement that Merbcamp started yesterday with a keynote from Ezra Zygmuntowicz, initial creator of the Merb Web application framework. Aside from covering Merb-related news, Ezra revealed a project called Nanite – a “self assembling cluster of Ruby daemons.”

A Nanite installation is based around a “mapper exchange” with which Ruby daemons (called Nanite “agents”) register. Nanite mappers (running in, say, Rails or Merb applications, or even command line apps) can then call the exchange and gain access to the functionality of the agents. The mapper exchange makes it possible for daemons / agents to start, stop and die while allowing the whole cluster to be self-healing. Read More

Rails Envy Podcast Celebrates 1st Birthday

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By Peter Cooper / October 9, 2008

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It was a year ago that the Rails Envy podcast was born. Run by the now infamous Jason Seifer and Gregg Pollack, Rails Envy has been entertaining and informing us with Rails (and some Ruby) news since October 2007, and they’ve become almost household names in the Ruby community and on the conference circuit. If you weren’t reading Ruby Inside a year ago, check them out – it’s an entertaining way to get a weekly Rails news fix.

I decided to ask the guys a few irreverent questions to see how their year has gone:

So guys, what’s the most surprising bit of news you’ve reported over the last year? Read More

11 Top Ruby and Rails Jobs for October 2008

By Peter Cooper / October 7, 2008

More jobs – more opportunities! It’s not entirely Rails-only opportunities this time around, although all the positions are in the US (primarily in San Francisco). The Ruby Inside Job Board (costs $99 for a 60 day listing – and you get featured on Ruby Inside like this) is the source for most of the positions.

So, on with this month’s interesting opportunities:

animoto.pngRuby Developer (New York, NY): Animoto is a Web application that produces videos using user selected images and music at the click of a button. They’re looking for a Ruby developer with computer science fundamentals to join their team. Read More

Ruby 1.8′s Dismal Net/HTTP Performance

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By Peter Cooper / October 5, 2008

htperfruby18.pngA week ago, Adam Nelson (a Virginia-based Ruby developer) complained about Ruby’s “absolutely bullshit Ruby HTTP client situation.” He was running into a nasty situation where Ruby’s standard HTTP client library (net/http) was sending data in 1 kilobyte chunks, causing his CPU to redline. Due to net/http’s popularity (particularly with other libraries), Adam saw this as a big issue.

Today, Adam returns with a more scientific analysis of Ruby 1.8.x’s HTTP client performance. He discovers that while Ruby 1.8.6 and below have a hard-coded 1KB buffer size for HTTP reads, Ruby 1.8.7 extends the buffer to 16KB.

The results are very interesting and worth checking out, and while Adam’s his ultimate conclusion is that “Ruby’s Net::HTTP implementation blows,” he’s looking to work on the necessary changes to bring net/http up to speed. Read More

Ruby Manor: Experimental Ruby Conference in London – November 22, 2008

By Peter Cooper / October 3, 2008

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Ruby Manor is an interesting new event that will hopefully become a regular fixture on the Ruby events calendar! Taking place in London (at the University of London Union) on November 22, Ruby Manor is taking an “all hands on deck” approach to event organization, with intense discussion between attendees as to how it should be run. The initial organizers are Murray Steele and James Adam.

Tickets cost £12 and, as of writing, 92 tickets are left. Any profits will go “behind the bar.” If you’re within London’s catchment area (or just fancy a trip) signing up looks like a no-brainer. Read More

Writing A Compiler in Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / October 1, 2008

compilers-dragonbook.pngBack in March 2008, Vidar Hokstad – a London based Norwegian developer – began to write a series of blog posts on writing a compiler in Ruby from the ground up. Early on, I took objection to some elements of his approach, but it still stands as a great series of posts. Vidar recently reached post 11, providing enough of a landmark to introduce the series as a whole (which is already scheduled to go up to at least 20 posts).

It’s worth noting that there are many different approaches to writing compilers of all types – so don’t take the series as a definitive way to develop a compiler. Read More

JS.Class – JavaScript in a Ruby Style

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By Peter Cooper / September 26, 2008

jsclass.png JS.Class is an attempt at making JavaScript more Ruby-like. More specifically, it’s a library that makes object oriented development easier in JavaScript (in comparison to JS’s prototype technique, at least) by implementing Ruby’s core object, module, and class systems as well as some of Ruby’s meta-programming techniques.

As well as ports of Enumerable, Observable, Comparable, and Forwardable, you get subclassing, mixins, reflection, late-binding arguments, singleton methods, method binding, and Ruby-like inheritance. Of course, JavaScript gives access to many of these elements already, but JS.Class presents things with a Ruby flavor.

The official JS.Class site is particularly well done and each main area is well documented. Read More

Making Ruby Methods Immutable

By Peter Cooper / September 24, 2008

puzzle_lock.jpgGarry Dolley has developed a Ruby module called “Immutable” (Github repository). It allows you to make your methods immutable. As Gary says, “provide it a list of methods you don’t want touched and it’ll make sure they can’t be redefined.” Effectively, it’s a smack-down against monkeypatching.

Gary developed immutable to ensure that ActiveSupport wouldn’t interfere with his attempts to improve Rails’ loading time by reimplementing some ActiveSupport methods in C (by redefining his own changes). Read More

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