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
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
We’re taking a brief break from the regular “Interesting Ruby Tidbits” posts to focus on Rails™ only for a change. Rails has just made it to version 2.0 so there’s been plenty of action in the community. Here are some of the highlights:
The First Rails 2.0 Screencast
I can’t confirm the validity of its title, but The First Rails 2.0 Screencast is a screencast by Fabio Akita that walks through building a RESTful blog system in 30 minutes using Rails 2.0.
PeepCode Rails2 PDF (now in Spanish too!)
“Rails2” is a 58-page e-book (available in PDF format) by Ryan Daigle and published by Geoffrey Grosenbach’s Peepcode that demonstrates how to use Rails 2.0′s new features. Read More
Utility Belt bills itself as “a grab-bag of tricks, tools, techniques, trifles, and toys for IRB,” the interactive Ruby shell. If you’re a keen IRB user, Utility Belt offers up a metric ton of features that will promote you to power user in no time including interaction with your favorite text editor, clipboard support, Pastie posting, Amazon S3 shortcuts, auto-indentation, and more. Utility Belt appears to be optimized somewhat for OS X but most of the features will work on other platforms too. Read More
After two successful release candidate releases, Ruby on Rails™, a popular Ruby-based Web application development framework in a similar vein to Merb or Nitro, has successfully made it to the final release of version 2.0. Previously called an “evolutionary rather than revolutionary” step, Rails™ 2.0 nonetheless packs a whole ton of new features that make it a worthwhile upgrade from 1.x. Unsurprisingly, David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails, has the best writeup in the official launch announcement.
Also bound to be of interest to Rails 2.0 users:
Rails 2 Upgrade Notes – Some notes from Ben Smith covering the process of upgrading an application from using Ruby 1.2.6 to Rails 2.0. Read More
ActiveJax is a Rails plugin developed by Nicholas Schlueter that acts as a bridge between ActiveRecord and Prototype-backed JavaScript. This means you can call ActiveRecord model methods from JavaScript using AJAX. Example:
ActiveJax.Author.find_by_name(“Nicholas Schlueter”).each(function(author) {alert(author.name);});
I asked Nicholas how this differs from the existing Jester library developed by Thoughtbot. One significant difference is the syntax. ActiveJax’s mechanisms are all embedded underneath the ActiveJax object, whereas Jester offers up the “models” more directly within JavaScript. ActiveJax also doesn’t depend on the application providing RESTful services, it’s possible to call any method on the models. All this said, the motivations for using Jester versus ActiveJax cross significantly, so it’s worth checking out both libraries if this is an area that interests you. Read More
Rak, by Daniel Lucraft, is billed as a “grep replacement in pure Ruby.” Even though it’s a reasonably generic system tool simply written in Ruby, it actually has a bunch of features that are useful to Ruby and Rails developers specifically. It’ll ignore the .svn, .cvs and pkg directories that might be present in your projects. It uses ANSI to give color highlighted output (as seen in the screenshot above). It also accepts Ruby syntax regular expressions and even lets you perform basic Ruby operations on the displayed output. There are a bunch of examples at the official Rak site. Read More
Almost a year ago, Antonio Cangiano performed some benchmarks on the then present Ruby implementations: Ruby 1.8.5, YARV (now Ruby 1.9), JRuby, Ruby.NET, Rubinius and Cardinal. The results were that YARV, although nowhere near ready for production use, was streets ahead of Ruby 1.8, and the other implementations raised enough errors to still be considered ‘experimental’.
Now Antonio has rerun the tests on Ruby 1.8.6, Ruby 1.9 (from trunk), JRuby (from trunk), Rubinius (from trunk) and XRuby 0.3.2. Ruby 1.9 again takes the lead by quite a margin, but the best development is that instead of being a distant third (behind Ruby 1.8), JRuby has made significant improvements and is smack bang in between Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 in terms of performance (while offering, of course, the benefits of the Java ecosystem). Read More
I love finding a library that does exactly what it claims to do, and does it in the simplest way possible. Faker by Ben Curtis is a Ruby library, packaged as a Ruby Gem, that generates “fake data” for you, in the form of names, telephone number, e-mail addresses, addresses, and so forth.
For example:
Faker::Name.name # =”Gwendolyn Wehner”
Faker::Internet.email # =”ava.conn@emmerich.info”
Faker::Internet.free_email # =”angelina.labadie@hotmail.com”
Faker::Internet.user_name # =”mitchel.heaney”
This could be particularly useful for throwing data at any libraries or systems you develop that need to process personal details.
I had trouble installing Faker in the usual way (with gem install faker) as the Ruby Gems server reports that the file could not be found. Read More
Troubleshooting Ruby Processes is a “digital short cut” (i.e. an e-book) written by Philippe Hanrigou and published by Addison Wesley. Unlike most Ruby books, my own included, this one really digs into its topic and looks quite low down at how Ruby processes interact with the operating system. While some of the topics are deep, however, the book is only 56 pages long, so it’s a useful book to read to learn why problems occur and which tools to solve the problem, even if you’re not going to be able to write a dissertation about it. Tammer Saleh of Thoughtbot wrote a review if you want to learn more. Read More
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Control Library
amazon-ec2 is a super slick library that makes it super-easy to control Amazon EC2 instances in Ruby code. It also comes with a special shell “ec2sh” that gives you a much nicer (in my opinion) interface to control and manipulate EC2 instances than the usual command line tools provided by Amazon. The documentation for this is superb with examples of using all of the various methods it provides, ec2sh, and examples of EC2 control from Ruby and Rails apps.
RubyWorks Production Stack on Amazon EC2
Continuing with the Amazon EC2 theme, Nutrun posts about rubyworks-ec2, a set of Capistrano recipes and utilities to deploy the Rubyworks Production Stack (a complete Ruby and Rails stack) on Amazon EC2 instances. Read More
The following article is a guest article written by John Philip Green of Savvica, a Toronto based educational technology company whose development efforts are focused on Ruby and Rails.
Hiring Rails full-time Rails developers is hard. Here’s why:
I’ve hired ten full-time Rails developers into startups so far in 2007, but to do that I’ve had to interview hundreds and learned a lot of lessons. Read More
Ruby 1.9 is almost upon us! With an expected release date around this Christmas, it won’t be long until you can start to play with Ruby 1.9 and enjoy some of the much-hailed performance increases (not to mention features).
“But I want it now!” you say. Well, as an open source project with an active ruby-core community working on a public code repository, it’s totally possible to get yourself a copy of Ruby 1.9 and begin playing with it today. You can’t expect to run production code on it and you shouldn’t expect any code to be rock solid, but with the release date such a short time away, you might find it feels “close enough” now for you to really get knee-deep in the new features, and you know how great it’ll be to pull out some great new techniques later on when the rest of your co-workers are still upgrading.. Read More
Tim Bray presents “Ruby Survey Results,” the results of a survey of 1000 Ruby developers on their favorite development tools, primarily focusing on editors / IDEs. In the category of Rails-focused developers, 38% of the vote went to TextMate, with vi, NetBeans and Eclipse lagging far behind. With Ruby-focused developers, however, vi edged out TextMate by a single vote, with TextMate, Emacs and Netbeans as runners up. With all results tallied together, however, TextMate took a healthy lead on vi, and cements its position as the #1 preferred development tool of Ruby developers overall. Read More
RubyInject is an intriguing new tool that can “inject” a Ruby interpreter into any running OS X application. Why? Well, along with RubyCocoa it allows you to interact with an application “from the inside.” If you’re a RubyCocoa aficionado you can probably think of a few cute tricks to use this for already. If not, then just think about AppleScript on acid. All of this fun and games does require OS X 10.5 (Leopard), however. Read More
