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

By Peter Cooper / November 21, 2007

jRails – Seamlessly Redefines Rails Helpers to Use jQuery Instead of Prototype

jRails is an intriguing Rails plugin that makes it extremely easy to switch from using the Prototype JavaScript library that comes with Rails to the increasingly more popular jQuery. From most of the reports I’ve seen, jQuery is faster and I’ve seen several blog posts just in the last week that emphasize just how much easier and concise jQuery code is (it’s not hard to find these reports, if you’re interested). The only downside to jQuery is that all of Rails’ helpers are written to use Prototype.. but jRails solves that by redefining how they work so that they work with jQuery instead! Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 20, 2007

Nokiatablet

This isn’t really “news” but it’s Ruby related and struck me as rather odd. I was just browsing Amazon.co.uk, doing some Christmas shopping, and came across a Nokia Internet Tablet with GPS (not an affiliate link) for only £139.99. I looked at the provided pictures of the device and was struck by the one above. It’s a picture of a Ruby and you can just about make out “www.ruby-lang.org” written on the location bar of the device. This seems pretty weird on a mass market device, especially since they’ve gone to the trouble of putting a picture of a Ruby in the shot, rather than the real Ruby homepage. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 19, 2007

Wuby
Wuby, developed by Chris Matthieu, is a new light-weight Ruby Web application framework, much in a similar vein to Sinatra or Camping.
One of the differences of Wuby is that no third party applications or gems are required to run Wuby apps, and the Wuby library itself contains everything necessary to run an HTTP daemon and start serving requests. The wuby.org site itself is running on the Wuby system and certainly seems to serve up pages extremely quickly. No database connections are required (although MySQL and SQLite are easily usable), and data can be stored in a persistent hash for ultra simplicity. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 17, 2007

Aac2
Robert Dempsey of non-profit Rails advocacy group, Rails For All, writes in to remind everyone about the acts_as_conference Rails conference taking place in Florida in February 2008 and to let us know that registration is now open. Tickets cost $100 (plus $2.50 booking fee). Obie Fernandez and Dan Benjamin are the keynoter speakers, but there are many others. Too many to name individually here, although Charles Nutter (JRuby), Ezra Zygmuntowicz (Merb), and Evan Phoenix (Rubinius) are particular standouts. Anyway, if you fancy getting some winter sun while doing the Rails schmooze, hit it up. It doesn’t sound like you’re going to be bored at this one. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 17, 2007

Rd
Ryan Davis starting off the RejectConf proceedings (License: CC ASa)

Just learned via Michael Riley on Twitter that the videos from the 4th RejectConf held alongside RubyConf 2007 are available to watch online. There are plenty of good presentations to watch, such as Dr. Nic Williams’ introduction to Rubigen and Magic Controller, Tom Preston talking about GOD, and Eric Mills on rubedo – a Ruby powered jukebox. There are 20 different presentations you can watch (including Ryan Davis’ introduction) so there’s bound to be something you’ll find interesting. Being RubyConf’s RejectConf, the presentations are nearly all about Ruby-specific topics, rather than Rails. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 15, 2007

Proar

Pro Active Record “Databases with Ruby and Rails” (Amazon) is a new book by Kevin Marshall, Chad Pytel, and Jon Yurek, published by Apress. The book goes deep into the ActiveRecord ORM library, a key part of Rails that makes it easy to deal with information stored within a database in an object oriented way. There are already several reviews on Amazon.com, although Josh Susser has written something more indepth.

To celebrate the launch of the book, the guys over at ThoughtBot (where both Chad and Jon work) are running a contest with three prizes of signed copies of Pro Active Record. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 13, 2007

Interview with Evan Phoenix about Rubinius

Mike Moore, of the Rubiverse Podcast, has interviewed legendary Ruby developer Evan Phoenix about the Rubinius Ruby implementation project. If you like your Ruby talk deep down, dirty, and packed full of technical details, this is well worth a listen. The interview goes right into the inspiration behind Rubinius, the development process, and stories of discoveries made so far.

Make A Code Pasting Site In 15 Minutes With Sinatra & DataMapper

Nick Plante has written a great tutorial demonstrating how to build a code pasting site (like Pastie) in a very short period of time using Sinatra, a new lightweight Ruby Web framework, and DataMapper, a compelling new ActiveRecord alternative (which is going to be featured a lot more on Ruby Inside shortly). Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 13, 2007

Wxform1

David Mullet has put together a brief, but well formed, tutorial on getting started with the wxRuby GUI toolkit to develop graphical Windows applications using Ruby. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 10, 2007

Pmpres

Rails developer Peter Marklund recently presented a five day “Rails 101″ course in Sweden, and used an epic 341 slide presentation to work his way through all of the topics. Inspired by the vast number of Rails videos, screencasts, and educational resources coming online lately, Peter decided to make his slideshow available to all (direct links: PDF or Slideshare). Topics include everything you’d expect from a comprehensive Rails course (installation, Ruby, migrations, ActiveRecord, forms, views, Rails 2.0, deployment, etc). Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 9, 2007

Heroku

Martin Sadler of WorkingWithRails.com just pointed me towards Heroku, an exciting new development in the Rails world. Heroku is an online environment where you can develop and host Rails applications.. all from the browser. This is pretty exciting stuff and, on paper, makes rolling out, tweaking, and playing with Rails applications a snap. Rather than blather on about how this could become a game-changer in the Web applications industry, instead I’ll point you to Heroku’s own excellent set of screencasts and feature tours.

Adam Wiggins, one of the three partners behind Heroku, has some more “from the trenches” detail in this post on his personal blog. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 9, 2007

Reprise
Eivind Uggedal has written in with a note about a new blog system he’s built using the lightweight Sinatra framework. It’s about 100 lines long including the inline templates! An example of the finished software powers Eivind’s own blog. Sinatra is looking to be an absolutely excellent mini-framework for running up basic non-MVC applications, and you can learn more about it here. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 7, 2007

Shoesdemo
Will Larson has put together a great “from start to finish” tutorial on building a graphical application on OS X using Shoes, the cross platform GUI library by whytheluckystiff. It goes right from explaining what Shoes actually is, through to its installation, some basic examples, and then to building a basic graphics-focused application. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 6, 2007

Jrubyss

JRuby: An Introduction is a fresh new article by Chris Duckett that presents a practical, code-driven introduction to JRuby, a Java implementation of Ruby. It’s the perfect introduction for people who, perhaps, have an idea of what JRuby is, but who haven’t yet tried out any of the Java connectivity. The first page looks at interacting with basic Java libraries / classes, with the second moving on to building a basic Swing-powered GUI app using Java APIs from Ruby code.

Added: There’s also a screencast by Brian Chapados called Intro to JRuby that’s worth watching for a more practical, real-time look. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 6, 2007

RDDB is a Ruby document-oriented database system inspired by CouchDB and developed by Anthony Eden. If you’re familiar with CouchDB, the whole system should make sense from the start, but if not, read on. You can create a database and insert documents in a simple enough way:

# First create an database object
database = Rddb::Database.new

# Put some documents into it
database << {:name =’John’, :income =35000}
database << {:name =’Bob’, :income =40000}

To “query” the database, you define a “view” using a Ruby block, as such:

# Create a view that will return the names
database.create_view(‘names’) do |document, args|
document.name
end

# The result of querying will return an array of names
assert_equal ['John','Bob','Jim'], database.query(‘names’)

Views are defined as Ruby blocks that are then used to select the documents and the attributes in the documents that you wish to retrieve. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 4, 2007

Thomas Enebo of the JRuby team has announced the release of the first beta of JRuby 1.1. This is a significant release, focusing heavily on performance increases. The performance increases yielded so far are so significant that in most like-for-like tests, JRuby beats the regular Ruby interpreter (a.k.a. MRI) JRuby 1.1. On Rails-focused tests, JRuby also wins.. making JRuby the fastest way to run Rails applications at present. Charles Nutter talks about the improvements, along with a number of other interesting JRuby-related topics, in his latest blog post – a must read for Ruby implementation nuts. Read More

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