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
Thin is a new Web server / daemon written in Ruby by Marc-André 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
