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

By Peter Cooper / January 5, 2008

Thin is a new Web server / daemon written in Ruby by Marc-AndrĂ© Cournoyer that uses the EventMachine, Rack, and Mongrel libraries. EventMachine makes it super fast at processing network I/O, Rack makes it easy to integrate with existing Ruby Web app frameworks, and Mongrel helps it parse HTTP. So, yes, the title is slightly misleading. Thin actually relies on Mongrel, but is ultimately faster than it, even against Mongrel’s EventMachine-enhanced guise.

You can get started with Thin with a simple sudo gem install thin and then you can use it with any Rack supporting Web app / framework. Read More

By Peter Cooper / January 4, 2008

Jonathan Weiss recently had a session about Ruby on Rails security at 24C3, the 24th Chaos Communication Congress, in Germany. He has made the slides (44 of them) available, as well as a 45 minute long Google Video with the slides, video, and sound to enjoy. Jonathan goes into data sanitation, cross site scripting attacks, cookies, and lots of similarly good stuff.

(Credit for letting me know about this: Martin Sadler) Read More

By Peter Cooper / January 3, 2008

In Getting Code Ready for Ruby 1.9, James Edward Gray II is attempting to put together a comprehensive blog post on the various things you need to do to migrate your Ruby 1.8 code over to working on Ruby 1.9. So far, James only looks at a handful of potentially sticky areas, but commenters have already started chipping in with suggestions, including how to rewrite the BlankSlate class for Ruby 1.9.

Further afield, Sam Ruby has written Porting REXML to Ruby 1.9 where he rattles off a laundry-list of things he’s had to do to get REXML ported to Ruby 1.9. Read More

By Peter Cooper / January 3, 2008

Halcyon is a interesting new Web app framework by Matt Todd, written in Ruby. What makes Halcyon interesting is that while it’s very small and fast, as many of the Web app framework newcomers (such as Sinatra) are, its focus is entirely on using JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) for communications to and from the server. This could make Halcyon particularly well suited for providing the backend to simple “single page” AJAX driven applications. Another bonus is that Halcyon’s source code is full of comments and explanations and there’s documentation out the wazoo. Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 30, 2007

RubyCamp 2008 in Vancouver, Canada – January 26, 2008

RubyCamp 2008 is a one-day “Ruby camp” in Vancouver, Canada, taking place on January 26, 2008. All are invited, Rubyists and Railers alike, and it runs from 9am to 5pm at “WorkSpace” in downtown Vancouver. There’s a lot more about it at the official RubyCamp site. Two “tracks” will be in flow, a traditional conference-style track with speakers giving talks, and a “Hackathon” track taking an un-conference approach where you can just show off your cool application, Ruby tricks, and stuff like that.

Solving Rails Performance Bottlenecks with RM-Manage

Solving Rails Performance Bottlenecks with RM-Manage is an article by enterprise Rails deployment company FiveRuns that looks at how to use their RM-Manage service to, unsurprisingly, deal with bottlenecks in your Rails applications. Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 30, 2007

Why Rubinius Matters to Ruby’s Future is a short blog post by Reg Braithwaite that explains why the Rubinius “Ruby in Ruby” implementation project is important to Ruby’s future. In short, it’s because Rubinius lets you tweak and add new features to the language at a low level using the Ruby language itself (well, a subset, but who’s counting.. Captain Crunch?).

Ordinarily, such a short post, despite being good, wouldn’t get a post to itself on the Ruby Inside front page, but a comment from Ezra Zygmuntowicz, of Engine Yard, and a co-worker of Rubinius’ founder, Evan Phoenix, got me little tip-tappers all over-excited:

[...] we (engineyard.com) have hired a full time staff of 5 people to work solely on Rubinius. Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 28, 2007

Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. Matz) has announced the release of Ruby 1.9.0. Ruby 1.9 is a development release of Ruby, so don’t expect to switch all of your production applications over to it. Indeed, Ruby 1.8 is officially still the stable choice (pending further news), so tread with caution and don’t expect miracles. For the impatient, the main download is available straight away from ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.0-0.tar.gz

Following tradition, the new version of Ruby was released over the public holiday period (Ruby 1.8.4 was released on December 24, 2005, for example), and one of the biggest changes has been the move to a new virtual machine (YARV) that yields significant performance improvements over the 1.8.x versions. Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 24, 2007

The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez (published by Addison Wesley) is a long awaited book billing itself as the “expert guide to building Ruby on Rails applications.” More precisely, the book dives into nearly every area of the Rails libraries and APIs and acts as a reference work for them. Coming in at about 850 pages, the book is physically very similar to The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton. There’s no denying that these two books look good next to each other on the bookshelf, and a lot of comparison can be made between the two.

One of the things I love about Fulton’s The Ruby Way is how the book is divided up into chapters covering discrete topics like strings, regular expressions, math, IO, threads, and so on, and then each chapter drills down into twenty or more sections each looking at a different aspect of that topic. Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 21, 2007

There have been a bunch of interview related links coming in over the past week, so it makes sense to put them all together to give you a nice pre-Christmas injection of interesting interviews to read. Enjoy!

Why Several Ruby Experts Are In Love With Ruby/Rails

Job search site OdinJobs interviewed several “Ruby experts” (and I only use quotes there because I’m in the list!) and asked them why they like Ruby and Rails and for tidbits of advice to newcomers to the Ruby community. The experts are Satish Talim, Alex Wayne, Alex Leverington, Abhay Kumar, Adam Williams, Alex Kane, Adam Keys, and Peter Cooper. Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 21, 2007

The Future of Web Services Presentation

Gregg Pollack of RailsEnvy gave a talk last week at the Orlando Ruby Users Group called “The Future of Web Services,” where he looked at what Web services are, what REST is, how REST solves Web service related problems, how Rails works with REST, and so forth. A live Rails coding demo is included and Gregg gives it his usual well-produced, charismatic all.

Learning Rails Podcast

Learning Rails is a new, professionally produced podcast by Michael Slater that takes listeners through the concepts behind Ruby on Rails development. The podcast is designed for people who are new to Ruby and Rails, rather than seasoned developers. Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 20, 2007

Eric Hodel has just announced the release of RubyGems 1.0.0. As you probably already know, RubyGems is the de-facto package / library manager for Ruby applications and libraries, and almost every Ruby developer will have a version installed. There aren’t many new features with this major version release, but lots of fixes, tweaks, and stability and usability enhancements. One key thing to note, however, is that require_gem is no longer supported, so if you have code that depends on that, you will have a little work to do before upgrading.

If you’re on RubyGems 0.8.5 or later, then you can upgrade easily with: gem update –system .. Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 16, 2007

Two weeks ago we ran a contest where you could talk about the sort of Ruby books you’d like to see available and have a chance to win one of three copies of “Troubleshooting Ruby Processes” by Philippe Hanrigou. The three winners are CptOatmeal, Andrew Simard, and Raju Gandhi who will each receive a copy via e-mail from the publisher shortly. I’d like to thank everyone who commented.. there were 56 comments in all and tons of amazing book ideas. I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw the publishers announcing books along the lines of the suggestions soon!

Staying on the topic of Troubleshooting Ruby Processes, author Philippe Hanrigou was recently interviewed by Pat Eyler of On Ruby. Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 16, 2007

The team behind RSpec, a Behavior-Driven Development based “testing” library, have announced the release of RSpec 1.1.0. This will be of particular interest to Rails 2.0 developers as support has now been added, along with interoperability with Test::Unit. RSpec 1.1 also includes a Rails tool called “RailsStory” that allows you write “user stories” that can be tested out on the fly. Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 15, 2007

RubyRags is a new clothing company that specializes in shirts for Ruby and Ruby on Rails junkies. It’s rare I ever see anything commercial worth getting a whole post to itself here at Ruby Inside but there’s clearly some thought and sincerity behind this. The designs so far are really slick. I’d certainly love to see a WhyTheLuckyStiff designed one in the future though. Shirts are around the $20 mark, plus shipping, and there’s a 10% discount for Rails Core contributors. Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 13, 2007

In the first of a series, Andrea Wright looks at how to create games using Ruby. The series isn’t a tutorial level set of articles, but instead a walk through some of the major libraries and technologies you can use along with some code examples. In this first edition, Andrea looks at Ruby/SDL, Rubygame (inspired heavily by PyGame, a significant Python game development library) and RUDL. Read More

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