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

Building a Web App With Merb From Start to Finish

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By Peter Cooper / April 21, 2008

Slapp: A simple chat wall Merb tutorial is a perfect example of the sort of tutorial / guide that could encourage a lot of people to try out a new framework (as far as Merb is new, of course). It walks you through the process of developing a “chat wall” type application with Merb from start to finish (right from installing Merb to playing with the running application).

One thing that makes the tutorial stand out is that it puts test spec driven development at the heart of the application. After installing Merb and configuring the database, you’re straight into writing a story with RSpec! Read More

Stone: Dead-Simple Ruby Data Persistence

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By Peter Cooper / April 20, 2008

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Stone is a new Ruby library developed by Nick DeMonner that seems to have got a nice bit of buzz in the last week. It’s a data persistence library that provides “plug and play data persistence for any application or framework,” and it boasts speed and simplicity. Rather than use a database and an ORM like ActiveRecord, Stone takes care of everything in an abstract manner. Data is “persisted” to files within a directory underneath your app.

The official Stone homepage gives some interesting examples, including replacing ActiveRecord with Stone in a Rails application. It is surprisingly simple, but by its own admission Stone is “extremely immature.” It certainly looks well developed though, but if you’re already happy with SQLite 3 and ActiveRecord (a surprisingly proficient combination) there might not be any compelling reasons to switch just yet. Read More

Ruby Hero Awards: Nominate Your “Ruby Hero”

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By Peter Cooper / April 20, 2008

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The Ruby Hero Awards is an attempt to reward and support members of the Ruby and Rails communities for the hard work they do. It was founded by the guys at Rails Envy (Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer) but has support behind the scenes from people like Robert Dempsey, Dave Thomas and Chad Fowler, and a pretty large panel who will help choose the winner. Dave Thomas has suggested that the Pragmatic Programmers will even pay for trophies! The winners (of which there will be six – in various categories) will be announced at a Rails conference Ruby Central and O’Reilly are putting on in the US in late May called Railsconf 2008. Read More

The Best of RubyFlow This Week

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By Peter Cooper / April 16, 2008

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By all measures, the launch of RubyFlow, a new community-driven Ruby (and Rails) news site has been a success! We’ve had about 20,000 pageviews in the first week, and people whose sites have been getting linked on there have been reporting nice levels of traffic coming to their articles. We also have 1,500 subscribers to the main RSS feed, so there’s a great audience for your posts.

Makoto Kuwata (of Erubis fame) has started a Japanese version of RubyFlow based on translations of the regular RubyFlow posts. Japanese Rubyists will find this useful on its own, but for RubyFlow posters it provides a way to have more exposure in the Japanese Ruby community. Read More

Git and Ruby: Git tutorials, articles and links for Rubyists

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By Peter Cooper / April 13, 2008

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Following on from this weeks’ launch of Github, it’s worth rounding up some of the best Ruby-related Git content out there.

For those who still aren’t familiar with what it is, Git is a distributed source code management / revision control system. It’s vaguely similar to Subversion, CVS, Mercurial, or Bazaar in terms of managing source code, but with significant differences to all of these in varying areas. If you use any of these systems, however, Git will be of interest to you.

Git Tutorials and Introductions

The Git Screencast – A tutorial type screencast and technical walkthrough by Geoffrey Grosenbach. Read More

Mack: A Fast, “Best of the Rest” Web App Framework

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By Peter Cooper / April 11, 2008

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Mack is an interesting new Ruby Web app framework (of which, as we know, there are many!) that takes some of the best elements of other Web app frameworks (including Rack support!) and presents itself in a very modular, “agile” way. Developer Mark Bates gives the inspiration for Mack’s development as “portals” and says that a lot of Mack’s development will be focused on this, including features like a distributed routing system and interoperability between multiple trusted, local apps.

I’ve personally used Mack (along with jQuery) in the last day or two to develop a chat client. Read More

GitHub Officially Launches: Git Hosting A-Go-Go!

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By Peter Cooper / April 10, 2008

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It’s been the programming world’s worst kept secret, but the covers are finally off as GitHub officially launched today. No more beta invites needed – hurrah!

GitHub is, officially, a Git repository hosting service (where Git is a source code control system – think decentralized, distributed SVN) built by Chris Wanstrath (Err the Blog), Tom Preston-Werner (creator of Chronic and God), and PJ Hyett. GitHub’s early users are calling it a “social programming network,” a “FaceBook for coders,” and all sorts of wonderful things. This is because Git’s decentralized nature makes it easy to fork, branch and merge code, and so does GitHub, which makes GitHub an ideal platform for collectively working on software, especially open source. Read More

RubyFlow: A New Ruby News Site

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By Peter Cooper / April 10, 2008

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RubyFlow is a new Ruby news site developed by… me over the last couple of days. It will suit developers looking more for a “filtered firehose” of Ruby news.

RubyFlow will be faster, quicker and more raw than Ruby Inside. Ruby Inside will continue with 1 – 2 “you gotta see this!” posts per day (max) but RubyFlow will be the place to go for immediacy and volume. Another big difference is that anyone can post to RubyFlow. You don’t need to sign up to post although you’ll be CAPTCHAed and suffer rel=”nofollow” on your links if you don’t (to prevent spam). Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #21

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By Peter Cooper / April 9, 2008

RubyAMP: Amazing Ruby Bundle for TextMate

RubyAMP is a TextMate bundle that goes above and beyond the typical TextMate bundle in usefulness. It adds auto-complete from all open tabs, easy jumping to methods and classes, improved RSpect debugging support, breakpoint support (set and remove from TextMate), Merb / Rails server or console launching, development log tailing, and a lot more. There’s a screencast on the project page itself so you can get a direct look at how it all works within a minute or two.

Bicycle Location Visualization with Ruby and RMagick

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Paris has a shared bicycle scheme for those who want to get around downtown called Velib. Read More

Couldn’t Be At MountainWest RubyConf? Watch The Presentations Now!

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By Peter Cooper / April 7, 2008

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If you couldn’t get to the popular MountainWest RubyConf two weeks ago, don’t fear. In conjunction with Confreaks, videos of all of the presentations are available to watch online. 14 videos are available, including the following:

Strengthening the Ruby Ecosystem Part I: Rubinius by Evan Phoenix – Evan gives a general overview of Rubinius, how the project has worked out so far, and what the goal is with its development.

Strengthening the Ruby Ecosystem Part II: Merb by Ezra Zygmuntowicz – A similarly general overview of Merb, a Ruby Web applications framework. A great executive overview of the Merb project generally. Read More

Railscasts Releases 100th Free Screencast; Holds a Contest

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By Peter Cooper / April 7, 2008

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If you’re a Rails developer you will, I hope, be familiar with Ryan Bates’ Railcasts, an amazing site chock full of free Rails related screencasts, and just over a year after posting the first video, Ryan has released video #100, entitled “5 View Tips”, which presents five quick tips relating to your use of views in your Rails applications.

To celebrate a solid 13 months of top-notch screencast production, Ryan has collaborated with a number of sponsors to launch a Railcast 100th Episode Contest.

The contest’s “grand prize” includes an iPod Touch (!), a Code Spaces Subversion hosting plan, a Harvest plan, a $50 Pragmatic Programmers coupon, a $50 Amazon gift card, and a $50 iTunes gift card! Read More

Thanks to EURUKO 2008′s Sponsors

By Peter Cooper / April 6, 2008

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As anyone who was present at this year’s European Ruby Conference, EURUKO 2008, will attest: it was a great event! Over 300 Rubyists from all over Europe (and the world, with attendees from Japan, Australia and the US too) got together to talk, drink, and be merry.

The level of attendance came as a shock to the organizers, but they dealt with it excellently and put on a great event for all of us. Thanks must go to the CSRUG (Czechoslovakian Ruby Users’ Group) and its chairman Jiří Kubíček, along with Karel Minařík who played a big role. Read More

A Fresh Overview of Rubinius

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By Peter Cooper / April 4, 2008

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Mathieu Martin has written a great, up to date overview of Rubinius, a rapidly growing alternative Ruby implementation created by Evan Phoenix and now being developed by a large team (with significant financial help and manpower from Engine Yard).

Mathieu’s overview explains what Rubinius is (a new Ruby implementation with a heavy focus on implementing Ruby in a subset of itself), examines the ideas behind the implementation, and presents some up to date(ish) benchmarks that show how Rubinius compares to MRI (Matz’s Ruby Interpreter) so far. According to experts from trustedcasinosnotongamstop.com, the technical advancements Rubinius has made are a testament to the growing trend of open-source innovation. Read More

Easily Accessible Rails Documentation on OS X

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By Peter Cooper / April 4, 2008

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In Fluid Rails Docs on OSX, Jacques Crocker takes a look at a couple of ways to get good-looking Rails documentation within Mac OS X. Firstly, he provides a site specific browser for NoobKit, an online Rails / Gems documentation site. Secondly, however, is an app that accesses a locally available set of documentation called “RailsBrain” that works offline. Read More

Interesting Rails Tidbits #6

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By Peter Cooper / March 30, 2008

Getting Started With Rails 2.0

Craig Webster has put together a tutorial called Getting Started With Rails 2.0 that does pretty much what it says in the title. Craig demonstrates how to start a project, get it up and running, use version control, put your project into a Git repository, and create models, views and controllers. Craig is also involved with the charity tutorial day at Scotland on Rails on April 3rd.

Custom Resource Name Plugin

Carlos Brando has developed a Rails plugin that enables you to add “aliases for your routes.” This is useful, he says, if you’re developing a Rails application targeting a non English-speaking market and want to have the URLs appear in the native language. Read More

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