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

June 2008 Ruby Security Advisory: A Summary

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By Peter Cooper / June 22, 2008

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Photo by JL2003 – CC 2.0 Attribution License

The official Ruby blog is reporting “multiple vulnerabilities” in the official Ruby interpreter (MRI). A significant number of versions are affected:

  • All versions prior to 1.8.5
  • All 1.8.5 versions prior to patch 231
  • All 1.8.6 versions prior to patch 230
  • All 1.8.7 versions prior to patch 22
  • All 1.9.0 versions prior to 1.9.0-2

Jeremy Kemper, at the official Rails blog, advised upgrading immediately, but with the warning that Ruby 1.8.7 only works with Rails 2.1 and later. Numerous commenters, however, have noted significant issues with Rails applications once they’ve upgraded to Ruby 1.8.6p230 and 1.8.5p231. Read More

“Beginning Ruby” eBook Only $10 For The Next 24 Hours

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By Peter Cooper / June 20, 2008

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I’ve had word from Apress that they’re doing a one-off 24 hour $10 sale on the e-book version of Beginning Ruby as part of their “daily deal” series. The 24 hours is up – sorry! – but the e-book is still available from Apress at the usual rate of $27.99. It comes as a password protected PDF – no crazy DRM.

Beginning Ruby (Amazon link to the print version) is the ideal book for those new to Ruby, whether fresh to programming or coming from other languages. As well as covering Ruby in a general sense, it also covers the community, a handful of interesting RubyGems, database programming & SQL, object orientation (from the ground up), Rails (though very briefly), and network programming. Read More

RubyNation – A Virginian Ruby Conference – August 1 & 2

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By Peter Cooper / June 19, 2008

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RubyNation is a new Ruby conference launching August 1 & 2, 2008. It bills itself as an annual Ruby conference serving the Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Washington DC areas. It costs $175 to register and you get admission for both days, lunches, snacks, drinks and a conference t-shirt.

Of particular note is the level of speakers the organizers have managed to obtain to such a new, locally organized conference. Neal Ford, Stuart Halloway, Rich Kilmer, David Bock, Giles Bowkett, Yehuda Katz, David Keener, Russ Olsen, Bruce Tate, and Glenn Vanderburg are all confirmed speakers so far.

As an aside, and not to detract from RubyNation, why aren’t there more multi-day Ruby / Rails events that don’t have hours of scheduled sessions, like RailsCamp? Read More

The Best of RubyFlow – Early June 2008

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By Peter Cooper / June 17, 2008

Here’s the regular update of the most interesting stories posted on RubyFlow (a community-driven Ruby news sister site to Ruby Inside) in the past couple of weeks:

Markdown – 59 times faster: Ryan Tomayko wants to “move past BlueCloth.” The result is two significantly faster Markdown libraries for Rubyists.

Cry: Cry is a Ruby library that provides a nice object oriented way to create, transfer, and manipulate frozen parse trees.

New Ruby Social Network: Acts As Community is a new social network for Rubyists.

Building an MP3 Player with Ruby and Shoes: Satoshi Asakawa has put together a cute tutorial demonstrating how to create a GUI-based MP3 player using Ruby and _why’s Shoes library. Read More

Dave Thomas’s Object Model and Metaprogramming Screencasts

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By Peter Cooper / June 13, 2008

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Disclaimer: I have no financial connection to the Pragmatic Programmers and other than through receiving these videos to review get no direct benefit from this review.

It was only a few weeks ago I announced that the Pragmatic Programmers were getting into the screencasting business. The first Ruby related videos were from the Everyday Active Record series by Ryan Bates. The reaction to these across the Ruby blogosphere has been very positive, and true to their word, the Pragmatics have been quick to release some more interesting videos. The latest addition is the Ruby Object Model and Metaprogramming series by Dave Thomas (of Pickaxe fame). Read More

What’s New In Rails 2.1: A Well Produced, Free E-Book

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By Peter Cooper / June 11, 2008

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Ruby on Rails 2.1: What’s New? (PDF, 2MB) is a free e-book written by Carlos Brando (with help from Marcos Tapajos and Daniel Lopes). It was initially written in Brazilian Portuguese (find the original version here), but this version is an English translation by several community members.

As far as community written books goes, it’s pretty good! It comes in at 124 pages, and while 30 of these are just the Rails 2.1 CHANGELOGs (formatted in a nice way, none the less), the rest definitely does a good job of presenting some of the new features of Rails 2.1 (such as named scopes, dirty objects, numerous ActiveRecord changes and time related functions) in a very easy to digest manner. Read More

RubyFringe Shaping Up; 6 Hours Left To Register!

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By Peter Cooper / June 11, 2008

RubyFringe

RubyFringe, a rather progressive and brave addition to the Ruby / Rails conference scene, taking place in Toronto, Canada in July will be closing its registration doors in just six hours. When registration initially went live, four months ago, there were many complaints of the conference being overpriced, but despite this, only a handful of tickets (certainly less than 20, I’m told) now remain and an exciting schedule is shaping up. A separate “track” for travel companions / significant others is taking place so that anyone can go to the conference without abandoning their loved ones while they geek out on Ruby all day. Read More

PoolParty: One Ruby Gem = Easy EC2 Computing Cloud

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By Peter Cooper / June 6, 2008

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Pool Party is a new tool by Ari Lerner (of ProcessorPool fame) that makes it easy to automate the deployment, monitoring (using monit), persistent storage (using S3Fuse), and load balancing (using HAProxy) of EC2 instances. While intended to be application agnostic, there’s naturally a major slant towards Ruby applications in general, with support for Rake tasks a core feature.

Ari’s announcement blog post gives more in-depth details. Development is taking place on Github (where the README is somewhat more readable than with RDoc!) along with discussions at a Google group.

Ari presented PoolParty at RailsConf last week, and his slides are available to view below (or at Scribd):

Read More

Microsoft’s Latest Bad Idea? ARAX – Ruby-powered AJAX

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By Peter Cooper / June 6, 2008

Microsoft’s got plans for Ruby beyond the fine IronRuby project in the shape of “ARAX” (Asynchronous Ruby and XML), a Ruby-flavored variety of the popular AJAX Web development techniques. Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin will be able to process and run Ruby code that’s directly within Web pages similar to how browsers process JavaScript. This allows Ruby developers to write Ruby code instead of the equivalent JavaScript as they do now.

eWeek interviewed John Lam, creator of and program manager for IronRuby, to find out more about the project. Lam seems to feel that Ruby developers aren’t happy with using multiple languages and dealing with context shifts:

[A]t some point you might have to add some JavaScript code that adds some custom functionality on the client yourself. Read More

Ruby 1.8.7 Released: Enumeration Object Support Backported From 1.9

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By Peter Cooper / June 2, 2008

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With all the excitement surrounding RailsConf 2008 and the Maglev announcement, news of the release of Ruby 1.8.7 passed rather quietly. The download URLs can be found here, but note that the official Ruby-Lang.org download page does not reflect 1.8.7′s release yet.

Ruby 1.8.7 is a point release of the stable, production-ready 1.8.x branch, so it should be ready to roll out to your deployment environments but be cautious. It features many bug fixes, but also some performance enhancements and significant back-ports of Ruby 1.9 functionality (enumeration objects in particular). More information is available in the release NEWS file. Read More

The Mega RailsConf 2008 Round Up

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By Peter Cooper / June 2, 2008

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RailsConf 2008 – the primary conference for Rails developers – took place over the last few days (May 29th to June 1st, 2008). By all accounts, everyone had a great time, but not everyone could attend so here’s a casual roundup of what happened.

The best overall “walkthrough” of the conference I’ve seen has been by Drew Blas who put together a great set of blog posts covering: Friday morning, Friday afternoon, Friday evening, Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening, Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon. He even put together a final summary. Great work Drew! Read More

Ruby and Rails Jobs for May 2008

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By Peter Cooper / May 30, 2008

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(Credit: amanito – License: CC 2.0 AO)

From the Ruby Inside job board (costs $99 for a 60 day listing – and you get featured on Ruby Inside like this) come a few new opportunities:

Rails and JavaScript Developer (Pyromedia Studios, California) – Pyromedia Studios are looking for a Ruby on Rails developer with JavaScript experience, preferably with experience with social networking and general Web design. Initially it’d start as a 4 – 6 month contract but could turn into full-time employment, if desired. It seems as if off-site might be okay, but contact them for details.

Rails Software Engineer (Limos.com, San Francisco) – Limos.com is looking for a Rails software engineer to re-engineer the Limos.com site. Read More

Active Record Screencasts: The Pragmatic Programmers Get Into Screencasting

By Peter Cooper / May 30, 2008

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The Pragmatic Programmers (who brought us the “Pickaxe“) have decided to branch into screencasting with Pragmatic Screencasts. At launch, screencasts for Expression Engine, OS X Core Animation, Erlang, and Rails are available. On the Rails front, Ryan Bates (of Railscasts fame) has been brought on board to create a series called “Everyday Active Record.” So far two episodes, each focusing on a different area of Rails / Active Record, are available (at $5 each) but more are promised over time.

The first two episodes are “Designing Models with Associations” and “Finding and Scoping Models.” I’ve watched both and they do a great job of taking a chunk of Active Record / Rails functionality and demonstrating the “right” way to use it. Read More

21 Ruby Tricks You Should Be Using In Your Own Code

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By Peter Cooper / May 26, 2008

I get to see a lot of Ruby code while writing for Ruby Inside. Most is very good, but sometimes we forget some of Ruby’s shortcuts and tricks and instead reinvent the wheel. In this post I present 21 different Ruby tricks, from those that most experienced developers already use every day to those that are more obscure. Before writing this piece, for example, I had no idea about trick number 2! Whatever your level, a refresh may help you the next time you encounter similar scenarios.

Due to the code-heavy nature of this post, I’m taking the rare step of putting this post “under the fold” and encourage you to visit the site for the full list of the 21 Ruby tricks.

Community Engine – Rails Plugin That Adds Social Networking To Your App

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By Peter Cooper / May 24, 2008

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Prolific Rails developer Bruno Bornsztein (interviewed on Ruby Inside in February 2007) does it again! Not content to settle for releasing 14-plus Rails related projects and Web sites, he has developed Community Engine, an “instant open-source social network plugin” for Rails. Unlike Insoshi and Lovd By Less, which are full social networking Rails applications, Community Engine is a plugin that can add social networking features to existing Rails applications.

Community Engine provides authentication, profile, search, blogging (with tagging, categories and rich-text editing), photo, bookmarking, forum, and other similar functionality. Community Engine has been extracted from the features of two successful social networking sites, Curbly and Uncooped, and has effectively been stress-tested by the general public for the last year. Read More

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