Charlie Savage has released the 0.5.x family of ruby-prof, a profiling library for Ruby. We last posted about ruby-prof over a year ago, but 0.5 is a major leap forward with improved or new-found support for:
Learn more in the release post. Read More
Capistrano is a deployment system written in Ruby by Jamis Buck. It has been the de facto standard for deploying Rails applications and automating remote tasks via SSH.
The recently released version 2.0 expands its usefulness not just for Rails developers, but for general automation tasks as well. New features include:
Practical Ruby For System Administration, a recently released Apress book authored by André Ben Hamou, will help you pick up practical tips on Ruby coding style, learn how to analyze and improve script performance, and make use of no-nonsense advice on scripting workflow, including testing and documentation.
In this book you’ll see why Ruby’s flexibility, superb feature set, and gentle learning curve make it a natural choice for system administration tasks, from the humblest server to the largest enterprise deployment.
André was kind enough to let Ruby Inside ask a few questions for this interview.
Ruby Inside: What is your background in the computer industry? Read More
Adhearsion is an open-source, telecommunications application framework that uses Ruby, coupled with Asterisk, the popular open source telephony platform. It lets you build telecommunications systems and scripts in a quick and powerful way:
Creator Jay Philips has written a chapter for O’Reilly forthcoming “Asterisk: The Future of Telephony” about Adhearsion, and O’Reilly have published an extended excerpt of it online. It covers the installation of Adhearsion, basic script writing, database integration, and how to put together “micromenus” that operate in a vendor-independent fashion.
Learn more about the framework at the official Adhearsion site, and enjoy twisting together your phone system with a little Ruby! Read More
god monitors your server processes and tasks to make sure they run smoothly, and performs maintenance tasks (such as restarting your application servers) as necessary. This Ruby application is written by Tom Preston-Werner and serves similar functionality to, and inspired by, a popular tool called monit.
Among the features god provides include:
Here’s a part of an example config file used to monitor mongrel instances: Read More
god.watch do |w|
w.name = “gravatar2-mongrel-#{port}”
w.interval = 30 # seconds
w.start = “mongrel_rails cluster::start –only #{port}
-C #{RAILS_ROOT}/config/mongrel_cluster.yml”
w.stop = “mongrel_rails cluster::stop –only #{port}
-C #{RAILS_ROOT}/config/mongrel_cluster.yml”
w.grace = 10 # seconds
…
Twitter4R is a Ruby library to access Twitter API functionality developed by Susan Potter. Twitter itself is sort of social network with a differentiation: it allows you to send to and receive updates from your friends instantly.
The recently released major upgrade Twitter4R 0.2.0 offers significant improvements:
Here’s a simplified example Twitter4R usage:
gem(‘twitter4r’, ‘>=0.2.0′)
require(‘twitter’)
client = Twitter::Client.new(:login => ‘mylogin’,
:password => ‘mypassword’)
new_message = client.message(:post,
‘I am addicted to Twitter’, ‘myfriendslogin’)
To install it:
gem install twitter4r
Note: As an alternative, Twitter gem, as covered previously at Ruby Inside, is also available. Read More
I’m proud to announce the tentative launch of.. JRuby Inside, the latest addition to the Ruby Inside media empire (if two sites counts as an ‘empire’!). JRuby Inside is like Ruby Inside, but for JRuby, the Ruby implementation that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.
Like Ruby Inside it has editorial direction. It’s not just a bunch of links submitted by thousands of people, as you’d find on fine sites like DZone, Digg, Reddit, or del.icio.us. It features links from lots of different sources, but I choose which ones make it to the RSS feed (so you don’t get overwhelmed with junk, repeat stories or spam), which to delete, and which I want to edit the titles of. Read More
Remember when we first announced Joyent Slingshot, the technology that lets you run Rails apps within a native Windows and OS X client, a few months ago? Well, both Slingshot and Joyent Connector have just been open sourced, and they’re yours to play with now. For those unfamiliar with Slingshot, here’s what Joyent have to say:
Joyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications like a standard desktop application, which work online and offline (with synchronization), have drag and drop, and interact with all the other desktop applications.
With Joyent Slingshot:
* Create a hybrid Web/desktop application
* Synchronize online and offline data
* Use the same code for online and offline application(s)
* Deploy and update your application easily
* Drag into and out of application
Joyent Connector, a suite of collaboration and communication applications for small businesses, has also been open sourced. Read More
Robert Dempsey, of Atlantic Dominion Solutions, has put together a comprehensive introduction to Amazon’s Web Services for Ruby developers. AWS has a lot to offer, from e-commerce services through to the EC2 “Elastic Compute Cloud” and the popular S3 “Simple Storage Service”. Robert looks at how Ruby can access AWS using RESTful techniques, demonstrates how to use S3 from Ruby, and provides a batch of links to further resources. Read More
Profligacy is a new library by *** ****, the mastermind behind Mongrel:
Profligacy is a JRuby library that makes building Swing Graphical User Interface much easier than with raw code. It’s not a builder as with many other projects, but instead a simple Ruby way to structure the UI for the 80% common cases you’ll encounter.
Profligacy features some clever magic, such as LEL, a “Layout Expression Language” that lets you build layouts from basic ASCII representations.
Check out the official homepage and look at a whole collection of examples *** has put together (as seen in the screenshot above). Read More
Ruby Inside has mentioned Haml, a couple of times before. It’s a template language for Rails developed by Hampton Catlin, and it acts as a high-level, highly semantic alternative to RHTML. It relies on indentation for structure (a la Python) and includes a CSS meta-language (Sass) to make it super easy to dynamically produce XHTML-compliant pages that are easy to tweak later on.
Hampton has just released Haml 1.7, a major revision that boosts Haml’s speed to merely 30% less than that of raw Erb (which RHTML templates rely on), which, supposedly, makes it 16 times faster than Markaby, another alternative page generation library. Read More
The Beauty of Ruby is a 54 minute presentation by Glenn Vanderburg that looks at Ruby’s idioms, syntax, and “subtle beauty” such as mixins, open classes, metaprogramming, the syntax of case, and the beauty of ===. Read More
Michel Barbosa is a bachelor student at the Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam in the Netherlands and has just completed his thesis: “Delivery of the Key Adoption Factors and Key Characteristics of Companies Using Ruby on Rails.” Or, in layman’s terms, he’s produced a document that goes into the hows and whys of how companies have migrated over to using Ruby on Rails.
There are lots of graphs, charts, and tables, so enjoy!
(first seen at Riding Rails) Read More
Oracle Corporation, the gigantic company behind the Oracle Database system, is looking for Ruby on Rails developers who “love to build Web 2.0 style applications.” Oracle has a small in-house team that’s “applying 2.0 style concepts” to Oracle’s apps. It seems like they’re focusing on JRuby based on an Oracle stack, so experience with those technologies is a major plus. Read More
The freely available Aptana IDE seems to be moving faster than ever. Aptana is a web developer’s IDE with extensive Ruby and Rails support through the RadRails plugin. Having announced support for AIR right after Adobe released a Beta, the latest Aptana IDE already supports development for the just-released Apple iPhone.
Among the features that Aptana IDE provides for iPhone developers include:
Check out the Aptana for iPhone development page for more information. Read More
