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

Interview with Francois Lamontagne, the “Ruby Fleebie”

By Peter Cooper / May 16, 2007

Frank

Francois Lamontagne is a Québecois Ruby and Rails developer whose blog, Ruby Fleebie, has recently become quite popular due to both having some great tutorial / reference-type posts, and Francois’ rather proactive methods of promoting it on DZone.
Ecstatik

Francois has also released Ecstatik, a Rails-powered Digg-like site that presents humorous links (to photos and videos, etc). In many regards it feels like a user-driven equivalent of Fark, although the focus is on funny links over community (for now).

I decided to ask Francois some questions about the Ruby Fleebie blog and how Ecstatik was developed and deployed. Read More

Ruport: Ruby’s Report Generation Toolset Hits 1.0

By Peter Cooper / May 15, 2007

Ruport

Gregory Brown has just announced the release of Ruport 1.0, a collection of tools that provide “reporting” functions within Ruby. A Rails plugin, acts_as_reportable, is also available to make report generation from Rails applications easy. Reporting tools work by taking your data, processing it using a report definition, then provide output in various formats (on-screen, to file – such as PDF, to print, etc).

Ruport2

Gregory has put together a short example and release notes for anyone who’s not familiar with the concept over at the O’Reilly Ruby blog, and there are also some presentations for your viewing pleasure.

(Thanks to Ruby Inside contributor Hendy Irawan for his additions to this post.) Read More

“Rails Refactoring” by Trotter Cashion

10 Comments

By Peter Cooper / May 15, 2007

Railsrefactoring

Rails Refactoring is an e-book written by Trotter Cashion (of MotionBox) and published by Addison-Wesley. Targeting developers who are tentatively dipping a toe into the world of REST, Rails Refactoring looks at how to turn your old-fashion unRESTian Rails code into the modern REST-capable equivalent. The first major section, for example, delves into respond_to and provides a ‘motive’, the ‘steps’ for implementation, and example code samples to back up the steps. Other refactorings, such as CRUD routing and ActiveResource are presented in a similar ‘motive’, ‘steps’ and ‘examples’ format.

Beyond basic refactoring, the e-book has several chapters covering controllers, routes, views, tests, authentication, and the consumption of external REST APIs all from a REST point of view. Read More

How to Easily Deploy a Self-Contained Rails App On A Tomcat Server

5 Comments

By Peter Cooper / May 14, 2007

Victor Igumnov has put together a simple walkthrough of how to package a Rails application into a single WAR file to run on a Tomcat server using JRuby, a pure Ruby PostgreSQL library (no ActiveRecord-JDBC needed!), and GoldSpike (JRuby addon that provides rake tasks to make WAR files). This is useful knowledge for anyone who might be forced into deploying Rails apps in an enterprise type system where Tomcat may be the only viable deployment option. Read More

Scrobbler: A Last.fm Library for Ruby

By Peter Cooper / May 14, 2007

Scrobbler

John Nunemaker has put together a pretty tight library for accessing Last.fm data called Scrobbler. gem install scrobbler will get you most of the way there, and then you can quickly find recent tracks for any user, tracks for particular albums, and all sorts of great data. This could be a useful library for anyone putting together some sort of social networking or profile app in Rails who wants to show a user’s recently listened tracks within their own system. Read More

Swiftiply: A step forward in Rails serving?

2 Comments

By Peter Cooper / May 14, 2007

A few days ago Kirk Haines announced the release of Swiftiply, an “agnostic clustering proxy for web applications that is specifically designed to support HTTP traffic from web frameworks.” In particular, it’s a fast, clustering proxy that uses untraditional methods to deliver a lot of dynamism, reliability and performance. Naturally, the first target for Swiftiply’s benefits is Rails, in the shape of a replacement to the mongrel_rails script (merb is also directly supported).

This all sounds like sales talk, but merb creator Ezra Zygmuntowicz has posted about his experiences with using Swiftiply to serve one of his Rails apps and has noticed a significant increase in daemon performance. Read More

Erlang / Ruby Bridge: It’s Erlectricity

1 Comment

By Peter Cooper / May 10, 2007

Erlectricity is a very early stage library in a “pre-release” stage that acts as an interoperability bridge between Ruby and Erlang processes. Scott Fleckenstein is the developer, and he is going to continue blogging about Erlectricity’s development, and Ruby / Erlang interoperability on his blog. While this topic isn’t quite mainstream yet, many Ruby developers have become interested in Erlang lately and Ruby / Erlang interoperability and co-operation is likely to become a big topic in the Ruby community towards the end of the year. Read More

ZK: Rich Web Applications Supporting Ruby Scripting

5 Comments

By Hendy Irawan / May 10, 2007

ZK is a popular open source Ajax framework written in Java. It simplifies rich web applications by treating the browser as a simple display server, which reduces the need to have lots of application logic. It’s Java, so why it’s in RubyInside?

The interesting part here is that recent versions of ZK (version 2.3.1 as of this writing) support more languages for its ZUML markup, in addition to Java: JavaScript, Groovy, and Ruby. ZUML is an XML-based markup language to create user interfaces very similar to the desktop GUI component/event driven model.

Being Java, ZK’s Ruby engine is powered by JRuby, which is already quite mature. Read More

Joyent Slingshot 1.0: Make Your Rails App Work Offline

2 Comments

By Hendy Irawan / May 10, 2007

Joyent Slingshot LogoJoyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications that work the same online and offline (with synchronization) and with drag into and out of the application just like a standard desktop application. Check its two-minutes tutorial to get a feel of how you can make it work.

Earlier this month, they finally released Slingshot to the public. They also celebrated it with a contest offering their $1250-worth Accelerator for the prize.

We’ve posted about Slingshot before it was officially released. In addition to stabilizing the overall framework, they also have made several enhancements, including the decision that they will open source the technology (planned for June). Read More

RailsBrain: Fast, AJAX-powered Rails documentation

9 Comments

By Peter Cooper / May 7, 2007

Railsbrain

Rails documentation sites are almost ten a penny, but today I was surprised by a new site called RailsBrain. RailsBrain takes the usual “list of methods down the left” approach, but couples it with some nifty AJAX and (so far) a very quick server to serve up the docs in record time.

Being in Europe, I usually notice a couple of seconds here and there when loading pages, but RailsBrain is scarily quick at delivering pages when I click on a method name. Furthermore, RailsBrain makes it a lot easier to find the method you need to documentation for with a “live search” type effect in the left hand box. Read More

ActiveScaffold: AJAX-powered Rails scaffolding redux

6 Comments

By Peter Cooper / May 5, 2007

Activescaffold-1

AjaxScaffold was an early attempt to implement Rails’ scaffolding features in an AJAXy way, providing a single-page interface for showing, editing, deleting, and sorting items from your Rails models. ActiveScaffold is the newest implementation of the concept, making AjaxScaffold obsolete. It includes RESTful API support, sorting, search, pagination, automatic handling of ActiveRecord associations, along with the features you were used to from AjaxScaffold. It’s also guaranteed to work on relatively new versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. Read More

Free Rails Workshop in Denver, May 17-18

By Peter Cooper / May 4, 2007

Learn on Rails has just let me know that due to a major booking pulling out, they are now making their Denver Ruby on Rails workshop free on May 17 and 18. All they ask is for a small $10 – $15 donation at the door to cover the cost of refreshments.

Here’s the info, straight from organizer Drew Blas:

We originally had a large group scheduled to attend this event, but the company canceled on us at the last minute. Because we must still pay for the hotel conference room, we have to decided to offer this workshop for FREE!!! Read More

Silverlight (and Ruby on the .NET CLR)

7 Comments

By Peter Cooper / May 3, 2007

Silverlight

At MIX07 a few days ago, Microsoft announced “Silverlight“, a new Flash-esque .NET-based platform for delivering “media experiences” and “rich interactive applications” on the Web. It’s interesting, and some people seem to think it’s going to revolutionize the Web, but that’s not why we’re interested in it at Ruby Inside.

The most interesting part of the Silverlight announcement is that it’s based on a subset of the CLR (Common Language Runtime) from Microsoft’s .NET platform. The .NET CLR has become a common target for programming language runtimes recently, but Microsoft has officially announced C#, Javascript, VB, Python and Ruby support for Silverlight’s CLR. Read More

“Introduction to Ruby” Videos for Beginners

3 Comments

By Peter Cooper / May 3, 2007

Begrubyvids

Ian Ozsvald wrote to tell me that ShowMeDo now features a new series of introductory Ruby videos by Chinmoy Gavini. There are currently five videos in the series and they start off with a basic walkthrough of irb and Ruby’s basic features, moving on to topics such as creating and using classes, deep copy versus shallow copy, regular expressions, marshaling, and CSV. Read More

April’s Ruby Related Jobs from the Ruby Inside Job Board

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By Peter Cooper / May 2, 2007

Jobbbbb

At the start of April, the Ruby Inside Job Board was launched. Since then, four companies have signed up and posted a job, although, oddly, none have taken up my invitation to have a blog post about their position placed on Ruby Inside. Therefore, I’m going to post a quick roundup of the past month’s jobs at the start of each month. Regular enough for you to possibly apply for a cool Ruby or Rails related job, but not so regular to piss you off! Without further ado, April’s jobs:

Senior Software Engineer with MeeVee (Burlingame, CA 94010) – MeeVee is an online, personalized TV guide. Read More

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