Derek Sivers, quite the Rails champion when he decided to rebuild his CD Baby e-commerce site using Rails two years ago, has now admitted defeat. After two years of wrestling with Rails while building the new site, Sivers along with coder Jeremy Kemper, decided to face up to reality. Kemper went off to 37signals and Sivers rebuilt the entire site in PHP in just two months. As such, Slashdot is jumping on the bandwagon by telling developers to “think again” about using Rails in future. Read More
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Ruby’s Unary Operators and How to Redefine Their Functionality
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The Split is Not Enough: Unicode Whitespace Shenigans for Rubyists
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The Mega Ruby News and Release Roundup for February 2012
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A Lagom Review of O’Reilly’s ‘Sinatra Up and Running’
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The Ruby Standard Library To Be Converted to Gems for Ruby 2.0?
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Screencast: Coding Conway’s Game of Life in Ruby the TDD Way with RSpec
Nakul Aggarwal and Ritesh Arora have put together a concise, to the point, Ruby on Rails Security Guide that looks at how to tackle security issues in your authentication system, models, controllers, views, and elsewhere. Lots of links, lots of tips, and a must-read for anyone who’s not feeling 100% confident in the security of their Rails app. Read More
(photo credit: dwortlehock)
RailsConf Europe 2007 is over and it’s time to wrap up. As before, there are oodles of pictures on Flickr with the “RailsConfEurope” tag (yah-boo to you miserable sods who don’t use Creative Commons licenses for your photos) and DHH points to all of the presentations given at the conference (covering areas as wide as Ferret, REST, Adobe Flex, Amazon S3 and JRuby). Continuing from his fine coverage of Monday, the first day of the conference, Robert Dempsey succinctly wraps up the Tuesday morning and afternoon sessions, as well as the Wednesday morning sessions, and then Wednesday in its entirety. Read More
NetBeans is an open-source IDE written in Java (somewhat like Eclipse, but not the same), and version 6.0 is the first with a Ruby-specific edition that focuses solidly on the things that Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers need. The NetBeans team have just released the first beta version.
NetBeans is a powerful and free. You can create Ruby and Rails projects, run Ruby files, configure interpreters (MRI and JRuby), install Gems graphically, run tests, run RSpecs, debug Ruby code, run Rails apps, and so on, all from the IDE. The Ruby edition is only a 19MB download and it’s available right now. Read More
Serving PDFs with Rails using Inkscape Satya X has written “Serving PDFs with Rails using Inkscape,” an article that goes into amazing detail about how to set up a system where customized PDFs can be created and served from a Rails application (or any Ruby app, with amendments). Ever wanted to set up your own Pragmatic Programmers’-esque PDF stamping system for selling e-books? Now you can do it for free. Ruby on Rails vs DJ AngoThe RailsEnvy guys are at it again with another Rails vs X “commercial.” This time it’s Ruby on Rails vs Django.. with stellar hip hop beats.Ruby On The iPhone?Giles Bowkett writes with news that “Ruby runs on the iPhone” and presents these two sites as evidence (see ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz on the second). Read More
(image credit: James Duncan Davidson)
The European variety of the popular RailsConf Rails Conference is currently in full swing in Berlin, Germany, and runs until the end of this Wednesday, September 19. But for those of us who prefer to watch Yanni concerts on DVD from the comfort of our couch rather than from the ear-pounding front row, some attendees have been uploading photos and blog posts about the event so far.
An announcement about the Reject Conf tonight (September 18) in Berlin. The Reject Conf in Portland was supposedly a total blast, so check it out. It’ll feature some of the talks that didn’t make the list for RailsConf proper. Read More
(image credit: energymech – a cool C-powered bot)
Autumn Leaves is a “full-featured framework on top of which IRC bots can be quickly and easily built,” developed by Tim Morgan. It provides everything you need to get an IRC bot up and running, with facilities for loading, daemonizing and logging bots out-of-the-box. Tim says Autumn Leaves has a “Rails-like approach” and presents some example code for building your first bot. Read More
StaticMatic is a new alternative to dynamic systems like Ruby on Rails for putting together regular, static Web sites. It uses the superb Haml templating language, and if you’re of the Haml mindset, StaticMatic makes putting together static Web sites a snap. It also allows you to quickly “preview” your sites using a stand alone daemon but also to “build” your site to HTML to upload elsewhere. Read More
Anvil is a new Ruby framework for developing GUI applications by Lance Carlson. It’s a framework around Wx::Ruby (WxWidgets is a popular cross-platform widget toolkit) and offers its own DSL to make developing GUI applications easy. The release blog post has more information, including a great example of the code required to make a basic Anvil app. Interestingly it supports an MVC style of development where the view and control elements of your applications can be separated cleanly.
The first Anvil-powered application is a Ruby based editor called Hamr. Lance is so far the main developer of the Anvil project but he’s keen to get other people involved. Read More
Welcome to the first “Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Warrant Separate Posts”! This is going to be a somewhat regular feature of all the reasonably interesting things I’m e-mailed about or discover that aren’t getting as much attention as they should, but which aren’t captivating enough to warrant an entire post on their own. So without further ado..thread-dump librarythread-dump is an interesting library that lets you to get a dump of thread activity when a Ruby process quits by Greg Fodor. In his own words:
It allows you to send a SIGQUIT to a ruby process to get a dump of the running threads to STDERR or a file. Read More
(credit: image source)
BloomFilter is a new Ruby library (available as a gem – gem install bloomfilter) by Bryan Duxbury that provides operations to create and query “bloom filters“, an extremely space-efficient “probablistic data structure” that makes it quick and easy to test set membership. This all sounds incredibly geeky and uninteresting until you discover how bloom filters can be used to make things like ultra-fast, low-overhead spell checkers, spam filters, stop word removers, and other tools that require checking two sets of data against each other. Bryan’s use for bloom filters (and BloomFilter) was to search a big list of 500 million hashes against a set of 40 million hashes. Read More
Ruby East 2007 is a small, one day Ruby conference being held at Penn State University in just two weeks’ time on September 28, 2007. The main speakers are David A. Black, Hal Fulton (of The Ruby Way fame), Amy Hoy, and Ezra Zygmuntowicz. Registration is limited to 300 places, so if you’re interested, get clicking! As an interesting bonus, the winners of the Rails Rumble, currently coming to a close, will be first announced at the conference.
(courtesy of Gregory Brown) Read More
Just over a month ago I mentioned the release of “Shoes”, a new Ruby library for creating “Web-like desktop apps” by Why The Lucky Stiff. Shoes provides a somewhat platform-independent way of creating desktop applications easily. Now that Shoes is several weeks old, it’s worth pointing to a few resources and tutorials that will come in useful if you decide to start building Shoes-powered apps:
Running with Shoes – A Mini GUI Toolkit by Juixe: A great walkthrough building a simple Shoes application.
Cut Holes in Shoes and Get A Mask by Why The Lucky Stiff: A demonstration of using masks to create fancy text graphics. Read More
The registration process for RubyConf 2007 is now open! The conference is due to be held at the Omni Charlotte Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina in the United States between November 2 – 4 (Friday through Sunday). The official site hasn’t been updated yet (as of Friday September 7) but the registration form is available here. Tickets are $250. Read More
Railsify.com is a new site, developed by Adam Cooke, that acts as a central resource for Rails plugins and related tools (Rake tasks, toolkits, etc). Adam has a blog post with more background and details.
This isn’t the first such site. Agile Web Development has had a plugins directory for a while now, but Railsify is impeccably presented, has its own domain, and has even become part of a nascent “network” of Rails sites along with RailsForum.com and RailsWork.com. Read More
