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

28 mod_rails / Passenger Resources To Help You Deploy Rails Applications Faster

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By Peter Cooper / May 23, 2008

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Passenger (often known as “mod_rails“) is an Apache module developed by Phusion, a small Dutch IT consultancy, that makes it easy to deploy Rails applications on Apache-based stacks. Passenger follows on well from the popular “No True mod_ruby Is Damaging Ruby’s Viability on the Web” discussion of January 2008 in that it mostly solves the Rails deployment issue (see SwitchPipe for an alternative that can deal with non-Rails frameworks).

Since its launch in April, Passenger has become quite popular and a lot of developers are already using it to rapidly deploy Rails sites. Even popular budget Web hosting company Dreamhost has got in on the action, offering affordable, Passenger-based Rails application hosting. Read More

Rubinius On Rails: Rubinius Becomes 3rd Ruby Implementation to Run Rails

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By Peter Cooper / May 19, 2008

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Evan Phoenix has announced that the Rubinius project has hit a major milestone: Rubinius can run Rails! This makes it implementation #3 (after MRI and JRuby) to join the Rails club and will help cement its reputation as a strong, key implementation to watch in the future. Chad Fowler goes as far as to assert that in a year’s time, Rubinius will be used in production deployments and quickly become the defacto standard Ruby implementation shortly thereafter.

Eyes are now on Microsoft’s implementation, IronRuby, that may also be joining the Rails club soon.

This post is sponsored by 16bugs — You know how cumbersome most bug trackers are. Read More

Deploying Rails Applications: The Book

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By Peter Cooper / May 15, 2008

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I usually try to get a review copy and read through a book before mentioning it here, but a book like Deploying Rails Applications (Amazon.com alternative) has been in demand for a long time now. Its provenance (coming from the keyboards of Ezra “Engine Yard” Zygmuntowicz, Bruce Tate, and Clinton Begin – and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf) encourages me to support it without direct review. That’s not to say it’s certainly a good book, but it darn well shouldn’t be a bad one.

The book covers deploying Rails applications under shared hosting, virtual machine, and dedicated server hosting environments, and looks at the variety of technologies you can use, such as Apache, Nginx and Mongrel. Read More

Merbunity: Merb’s Community Continues To Grow

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By Peter Cooper / May 13, 2008

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Merbunity is a new site dedicated to “news, projects, and tutorials” related to the Merb Web framework (increasingly a common alternative to Rails). It’s very early days, but it’s well designed, and the initial content is good. It feels a little like a Ruby Inside for Merb. Great job! Among the launch content, and of almost immediate interest to Mac-based Merb developers, is Dr. Nic Williams’ TextMate bundle for Merb.

It should not be hard for Merbunity to get traction with Merb fans. In the past few months the amount of amazing content for Merb developers has grown significantly. Key examples include the Merb wiki, the Merb book, the “How to create a chat wall” tutorial, and even Ruby Inside’s own list of 21 Merb links, tutorials, and other resources. Read More

Rails 2.1 Release Candidate 1 Released

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By Peter Cooper / May 12, 2008

Hours ago, David Heinemeier Hansson announced informally on Twitter:

Rails 2.1 RC1 has been tagged, the gems are on the beta server, official announcement shortly. But no need holding you back from trying it.

New features include built-in timezone support, Gem dependencies, better caching, and more.

To get Rails 2.1 RC1 from the beta gems server, just use:

sudo gem install rails –source http://gems.rubyonrails.com/

If you prefer to go native, Ryan Bates of Railscasts has already produced a screencast showing how to install Rails 2.1 RC1 using Git.

To keep up with the community chatter about Rails 2.1, check out this search for “Rails 2.1″ on Twitter Summize. Read More

Rack Makes It Onto JRuby

By Peter Cooper / May 11, 2008

rack-logo.pngMost Ruby developers should be familiar with Rack, an interface / library that abstracts away a lot of the banalities of hooking up application code to HTTP servers. It’s used by several Ruby Web application frameworks already, some as a default – such as Merb, and others as an optional extra – such as Rails. Rack is significant because it provides a standard for Web-facing Ruby applications and frameworks to adhere to and is rapidly becoming the de-facto standard in this space.

Nick Sieger has developed JRuby-Rack, a variant of Rack that runs on the Java-based Ruby implementation, JRuby. Read More

Ruby Hoedown – Huntsville, AL – August 8 & 9 (and a Canadian event too)

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By Peter Cooper / May 8, 2008

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Yee-haw! The Ruby Hoedown enters its second year, taking place in Huntsville, Alabama on August 8th and 9th, 2008. It’s billed as the “Ruby conference for the South” and is sponsored by Engine Yard. Keynote speakers so far are David A. Black (of Ruby Central fame) and Chris Wanstrath (of GitHub fame). Registration is $149 until June 2nd.

And a Bonus: Toronto Rails Project Night!

The Toronto Rails Project Night is a much smaller affair than the Ruby Hoedown, but definitely deserves some attention if you’re in or near Toronto, Canada. The 5th one is being held next week on Tuesday, May 13th. Read More

Ruby Inside Meta News – May 8, 2008

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By Peter Cooper / May 8, 2008

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It’s a rare occurrence, but there’s some “meta” news to give out about Ruby Inside. Regular programming follows this break!

FeedBurner Feed Ads Be Gone!

Subscribers to the Ruby Inside feed will be familiar with the graphical ads after each post. They perform horribly (think click through rates of 0.1%). I’m glad that Ruby Inside’s audience is so savvy and I’m sick of annoying you with irrelevant nonsense. Those ads are now gone.

Ruby Inside Turns 2 – So I Need To Eat My Hat

In just three weeks, Ruby Inside will be two years old. Unfortunately, two years ago I said I’d “eat my hat” if Ruby hadn’t beaten Python in the TIOBE index by May 2008. Read More

Converting Ruby 1.9 Bytecode to Python

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By Peter Cooper / May 5, 2008

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Never one to let us down on the ingenuity front, Why The Lucky Stiff (author of the Poignant Guide and creator of Shoes) is busy working on a system that can convert Ruby 1.9 bytecode to Python bytecode (and from there into regular Python by way of Python’s decompilation facilities). It’s exactly the sort of thing that could take off with more eyes looking at it, and Why has made it available on GitHub. This technique isn’t likely to unite Python and Ruby in any deep and meaningful way (to the point of a shared interpreter), but the research and experiments involved are worth a try. Read More

The Best of RubyFlow – April 24 to May 5, 2008

By Peter Cooper / May 5, 2008

RubyFlow – the community based companion site to Ruby Inside – has been on fire! I’m finding out about lots of new stuff on there that then gets included into Ruby Inside posts. It’s the place to be if you want the most up to date Ruby and Rails news, but don’t mind putting up with a bit of ‘noise’.

Every two weeks or so I’m going to summarize some of the best items from RubyFlow here on Ruby Inside, so that you can still keep up with the latest developments even if you don’t want to be soaked in the firehose of Ruby news over there. Read More

Thanks to Ruby Inside’s Sponsors for May 2008

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By Peter Cooper / May 3, 2008

It’s time to thank Ruby Inside’s excellent sponsors once again.

I’m keen to make these posts relevant, so I’ve tried to include any news or developments the sponsors have had within this post. For example, FiveRuns has interviewed several Rubyists over the last month, and links to those interviews are provided below. Also, Peepcode has released a new e-book, similarly linked. So even if you don’t care for what the sponsors are selling or providing, it’s worth a quick check to make sure you’re not missing out on anything useful.

Note: All blurbs and descriptions are written by me and not directly influenced or specified by the sponsors. Read More

New Relic: A New, $3.5 Million Funded Player in the Rails Application Monitoring Space

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By Peter Cooper / May 2, 2008

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New Relic is a new entrant into the nascent Ruby on Rails® application monitoring market, so far dominated by FiveRuns. The company has just taken $3.5 million in first-round venture financing from heavyweights Benchmark Capital. Rather impressively, New Relic has already been featured on TechCrunch, where writer Mark McGranaghan notes that New Relic’s founder, Lewis Cirne, previously ran a similar company in the Java space.

New Relic’s primary product at this time is “RPM,” a subscription-based Rails “Performance Management” solution. It provides useful information that Rails developers can use to quickly detect, diagnose and fix application performance problems. Read More

Insoshi: Open-Source Rails-based Social Networking Platform

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By Peter Cooper / May 1, 2008

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Insoshi is a new, open-source social networking platform developed in Ruby on Rails. It’s on GitHub, so you can fork it to your heart’s content, and it can act as a base for developing your own social Web application. Features include activity feeds, profiles, photo sharing, comment walls, blogs, forums, user messaging, and an admin panel.

Insoshi was developed by Michael Hartl, author of RailsSpace, an Addison-Wesley published book about developing a social networking site in Rails. Hartl certainly practices what he preaches! He has also collaborated with top 10 trusted online casinos Malaysia has to integrate robust social features into their platforms, enhancing user engagement and security. Read More

Migrating to Ruby 1.9

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By Peter Cooper / April 29, 2008

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Migrating to Ruby 1.9 was a presentation given by Bruce Williams at Scotland on Rails earlier this month. The slides, available in PDF format, stand on their own extremely well, and will prove a useful resource for anyone not too deeply engrossed in Ruby 1.9 yet. Bruce covers most of the key changes.

As an aside, Bruce was interviewed by Satish Talim of RubyLearning.com recently. Read More

The Promise and Peril for Alternative Ruby Implementations

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By Peter Cooper / April 27, 2008

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Promise and Peril for Alternative Ruby Impls [Implementations] is a lengthy, but interesting, essay by Charles Nutter of the JRuby team. He looks at Ruby 1.8, Ruby 1.9, JRuby, Rubinius, IronRuby, MacRuby, and some minor implementations, and covers their background along with their current development state and how they might proceed in future. For those interested in the state of the many Ruby implementations, this is a must read.

For those who want a shorter version without any of the context or smart insight Charles brings: the Ruby 1.8.7 previews have thrown a spanner in the works, Ruby 1.9 still doesn’t run Rails (but will very soon), Ruby 1.9 might not prove better enough to woo developers, JRuby rocks, Rubinius is cool but improving performance will be hard, Rubinius seems to be retreating to using more and more C primitive functions and moving away from “Ruby in Ruby”, IronRuby is clever but might have trouble running Rails properly, MacRuby is a great idea, and all of the other, minor implementations seem stuck in the mud. Read More

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