Both David Hansson and Chad Fowler have announced that videos of the keynote presentations given at RailsConf 2007 are now available to view online. The downside is that you only see the speakers and not their slides or accompanying code, so keep that in mind before digging in too deep. The best presentations are David’s keynote and Ze Frank’s (though Ze’s is totally irrelevant in topic, naturally). Read More
In the past week, Reddit made it possible for some users to create “sub-reddits”, areas of Reddit focused on a particular niche or topic. Naturally, it didn’t take long for someone (James Golick, specifically) to make a Ruby-specific Reddit. It’s available at http://ruby.reddit.com/ and while it’s early days, I can see this taking off and becoming a great source for Ruby news as time goes by. Read More
Treetop is a very well put together Ruby library for building Ruby-powered parsers. Treetop makes it possible to rapidly put together parsers for your own mini languages (a basic “arithmetic” parser is the main demonstration used on the Treetop site) and relies on parsing expression grammars to make it a pretty easy process.
Back in 2006 I posted about my own Ruby recursive descent parser on Ruby Inside, but Treetop goes a lot further in making it developer friendly and more powerful overall, even going as far as making blending grammars together as easy as mixing Ruby modules! Another key difference between a raw recursive descent parser and Treetop is that Treetop actually generates Ruby code that works on your particular grammar, somewhat like yacc or Ragel. Read More
Ruby Fools is a new, European Ruby-focused conference being hosted in Copenhagen, Denmark on April 1st and 2nd. It’s being organized by Trifork, the company behind the popular QCon and JAOO conferences. I’m going to be speaking there on the first day giving my “Introduction to Ruby” presentation between 11am and midday. Unfortunately I’m on at the same time as Evan Phoenix will be giving a presentation on Rubinius, which makes me a little nervous, but I can certainly promise plenty of sizzle.. preparations are already underway! Along with Evan Phoenix, there’s a large collection of other speakers, including Dave Thomas, Dr. Read More
Rubular – Online Ruby Regular Expression Editor
Rubular is a Web-based regular expression editor and tester for Ruby developers, and particularly well suited for those who don’t find regular expressions particularly easy. Very slick.
FXRuby Book Available
Harmon Vinson reports that a new book is available in beta form from the Pragmatic Programmers, namely “FXRuby: Create Lean and Mean GUIs with Ruby.” As you can expect, the book covers how to create GUI applications using Ruby and the cross-platform FOX widgets library using FXRuby. The only downside is that FOX, so far, has no native support for OS X’s default Aqua window manager, but will work through X11. Read More
Community celebrity, all round Rails good guy, and The Rails Way author Obie Fernandez writes in with news about his latest venture, HashRocket, a Rails-powered Web application development agency on steroids (or at least a lot of caffeine).
Their main “product” is 3-2-1 LAUNCH, a “get a site built in 3 days” affair, where you can get whatever idea it is you want to be developed sorted out by Obie and his crack team of 9 developers and various subcontractors in just three days, including specialized platforms for no KYC casinos. That’s called cooking your Agile cake and eating it! Read More
I was kindly sent a copy of Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development (or amazon.com link) by Elliot Smith and Roch Nichols by publisher Packt. As the authors are both British and the leading author is called Elliot Smith (close enough to the name of my favorite recording artist) I felt compelled to give it a look over and mention it here.
The book states that it’s aimed at corporate developers who already have a rudimentary knowledge of Rails but who want to move on to building a full-scale application with a view to deployment within the enterprise. Read More
Chad Woolley has put together a helpful blog post called “ruby-debug in 30 seconds (we don’t need no stinkin’ GUI!)” that covers how to use the ruby-debug command line debugger to debug Ruby applications. Also of interest will be this cheat sheet by the guys over at ErrFree.
If you’re not into GUI editors or haven’t found a GUI Ruby debugging solution, it’s worth looking into ruby-debug. Chad says now that he actually prefer this “IRB-style” of debugging to the graphical alternatives. Read More
Ruby Plus is a site offering free Ruby and Rails related screencasts recorded by Bala Paranj, much in the same vein as Ryan Bates’ Railscasts. The screencasts are generally similar in length and overall format to those from Railscasts. So far there are 29 episodes you can download.
The first twelve screencasts in the archive (for which you have to register to download, alas) were exclusively Ruby, covering topics like blocks, class_eval, modules, recursion, and so on, but unfortunately the rest of the screencasts have been entirely Rails focused beyond those first twelve. It’s still a source worth checking for Ruby and Rails screencasts though, so give it a look. Read More
Design Patterns in Ruby (non-affiliate link to Amazon) is a new Ruby book by Russ Olsen and published by Addison-Wesley as part of their Obie Fernandez-led “Professional Ruby” series. It’s currently for sale at $42.99 at Amazon, but is also available on Safari if you’d rather read online.
Let me cover the bases by quoting my own quote found within the book:
This book provides a great demonstration of the key ‘Gang of Four’ design patterns without resorting to overly technical explanations. Written in a precise, yet almost informal style, this book covers enough ground that even those without prior exposure to design patterns will soon feel confident applying them using Ruby. Read More
(photo credit: The Consumerist – CC Attribution 2.0)
Prominent Rails Web hosting company Engine Yard have raised $3.5 million from Benchmark Capital, a particularly successful venture capital firm who backed AOL and eBay in the early days. Money is afloweth into the Ruby and Rails sector!
The best write up of this news is by Obie Fernandez over at InfoQ. He talks about Engine Yard’s operation, their hiring of Rubinius developers, and Engine Yard’s thoughts for the future. Interestingly:
In discussing the benefits of taking VC money at this time, Engine Yard CEO Lance emphasized the fact that unlike hosting, Rubinius development is a longer-term play, which along with Merb may eventually become part of a commercially-available technology stack. Read More
Note: This post was drafted before DHH’s “The deal with shared hosts” post, but as it covers similar ground, it’s worth reading too. DHH’s opinion appears to be that shared hosts should put up or shut up, but I disagree and suggest this is something we need to solve as a community.
Most of us in the Ruby community know that deploying Web apps powered by Ruby can be like pulling teeth. Running up simple CGI scripts is easy enough, but once you move on to more robust systems, using things like Rails, Sinatra, Ramaze, Merb, Camping, whatever, it deviates significantly from the well-established “just upload it” route. Read More
Shoes Meets Merb: Driving a GUI App through Web Services in Ruby by Gregory Brown and Brad Ediger leads us on a six page tutorial extravaganza through not only building a cross-platform GUI app (namely, a pastebin of sorts) using WhyTheLuckyStiff’s Shoes system, but using Rails-killer Merb as a backend for storing the data. It’s an impressive enough effort that Why himself has linked to it and added a few notes of his own (including the provision of a much better illustrative screenshot – as used above).
In related news, yesterday Why announced the launch of a new version of Shoes, known as “Curious.” Read More
Skynet is a new Ruby implementation of Google’s MapReduce mechanism developed by Adam Pisoni. Rubyists may already be familiar with the more established Starfish by Lucas Carlson. I must confess that while Starfish’s examples make immediate sense to me, without even needing to try the library, Skynet’s are a little more focused on the interface of the library rather than how you actually put the backend mechanisms / algorithms together, but as a new library it’s worth a look. Read More
Anvil (Ruby GUI App Framework) Gets an Update
A new version of Anvil, a Ruby framework for developing GUI applications, previously covered here on Ruby Inside, has been released. Lance Carlson has done a great job of making developing a basic GUI application on OS X, Windows or Linux a job that takes minutes rather than hours. All you need to do is install the Anvil gem, run a basic app generator, and a “Rails-esque” structure and basic app is created. If you haven’t taken a look at Anvil yet, give it a look.
Lucas Carlson also wanted to let everyone know that Anvil now includes the “widget_wrapper” gem which is a new gem focusing on “DSLing GUI toolkits” starting with WxRuby but progressing on to RubyCocoa, Swing, IronRuby, OpenGL, and so forth. Read More
