Bleakhouse is a new Rails plugin by Evan Weaver that helps you find memory leaks in your Rails applications. It does this by hammering ObjectSpace for information throughout the execution of your app and by producing pretty charts to show you what’s going on. It’s easy to install and get running, so if memory leaks or application stability have proven to be sore points for you, give it a try straight away. Read More
Only two weeks ago I linked to Courtenay’s “Sample Rails App”, a bare-bones Rails application featuring authentication, timezone support, and all sorts of other goodies. I’m compelled to give a small link to his newest branch, however, as it’s a sample app but with full SSL (HTTPS) support. This sort of thing isn’t the easiest thing to put together unless you’re experienced in deployment, so I’m sure it’ll come in useful to many. It comes with a lighttpd configuration file, all ready to go, along with a self-signed certificate. Read More
MyConfPlan is a new Rails and Hobo powered conference session scheduling site by Dr. Nic Williams. MyConfPlan’s biggest use at the moment is planning RailsConf schedules. Frustrated by the sheer unfriendliness of the official RailsConf Sessions schedule, Nic put together MyConfPlan to make it easy to plan your own choice of sessions to attend.
The sessions are laid out in a grid-like layout, with all sessions taking place at the same time on the same row. You can click on each session you want to visit in each row and you end up with an easy-to-follow conference attendance plan. Read More
I constantly get mails from various readers who are looking for Rails developers for their projects. As I don’t do this myself, I have to keep giving out a list of Rails developers I know and trust or have had good feedback about. I figured I should make a blog post with a list instead, so I could point people to it, and keep it updated as a resource for everyone to use. You can even leave “review” type comments if you’ve used any of these guys. The list is not very long, but here we go..
(Disclaimer: None of these companies has ever paid me a cent and none requested this post.. Read More
Why The Lucky Stiff is set to guarantee himself a place in the Programming Hall of Fame with his new project, Hackety Hack, an uber-simple programming environment for kids, beginners, and amateur coders. It attempts to resolve a problem brought up in an old article of why’s, “The Little Coder’s Predicament”, which lamented the ability for kids to quickly get coding on modern platforms, unlike in the Commodore 64 days.
Currently the system is in beta and only available for Windows, but OS X and Linux are to follow. Why’s ingenuity even goes as far as the installation program which makes it really easy for users to specify where they want their programs to be stored. Read More
Almost a year ago I posted about Radiant, a then ‘diamond in the rough’ Rails content management system that was under development by John W. Long. Since then Radiant has come along in leaps and bounds and a significant release, namely that of version 0.6, has been made today.
Radiant is an open-source CMS developed with Ruby on Rails which features a new extension system enabling users to create third party add-ons (which already include extensions to do backups, LDAP, virtual domains, vim editing, Flickr integration, page aggregation and more). It can be installed simply using RubyGems (gem install radiant) and getting an instance of the application up only takes a few lines at the command prompt. Read More
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Ruby is an online book (free to read!) by Dr. Bruno R. Preiss, an incredibly well qualified engineer and computer scientist. It covers all of the various data structures and algorithms that beginning Computer Science students have to learn, but from a Ruby perspective and using object oriented design patterns.
The book itself is now a few years old, but I’ve only just come across it and it still seems relevant although, rather sadly, the on-page code is in graphics only (a ZIP file containing the source is available) and feels like a line-by-line conversion from C++ rather than true Ruby code. Read More
Just an hour ago, Thomas Enebo announced the release of JRuby 0.9.9, a stabilization release in anticipation of JRuby 1.0. You can download it directly from the JRuby file directory.
Hundreds of issues have been resolved including 180 Jira issues and problems with YAML, marshalling and Java integration. Some major performance overhauls of core classes have also occurred. The result is an increase in performance of 40% compared to JRuby 0.9.8. More Ruby (and Rails) software now works on JRuby than ever before, including, finally, the Mephisto blogging system.
JRuby is rapidly becoming a big deal where Ruby is concerned. Read More
(photo credit: RBerteig)
A couple of months ago I posted about an acts_as_ferret tutorial, where Ferret is a Ruby port of Apache Lucene and acts_as_ferret provides almost automatic search features to any of your Rails models. It works great on a small scale but some people in the blogosphere pointed out that Ferret has a number of concurrency and stability issues (particularly on very large indexes).
Enter Solr. Solr is an open source ‘server’ based upon the actual Java version of Lucene which is well known for its stability. acts_as_solr therefore acts as a conduit between your Rails applications and a Solr/Lucene server meaning that you get full ‘enterprise quality’ search features based on proven software. Read More
Slideshare is like the YouTube or Scribd of presentations and slideshows and it features a few good Ruby and Rails related slideshows that are worth flicking through. This post links to some of the best:
Introduction to Active Record by Evan ‘Rabble’ Henshaw-Plath.
Unobtrusive Ajax With Rails by Dan Webb.
Diligent People, Lightweight People by Masayoshi Takahashi.
Higher Order Procedures in Ruby by Nathan Murray.
Rubyists Dream of Eclectic Java by Vishnu Gopal.
Building Your First Gem with Hoe by Jacob Harris.
The Top 10 Reasons The Ruby Programming Language Sucks by Yukihiro Matsumoto.
Ruby Insurgency by Andrew Hunt.
Want to see more? Read More
Scruby (not to be confused with the ScRUBYt! site scraping tool) is a Ruby application that works on UNIX-related operating systems and provides a shell where you can perform packet creation, sending and sniffing functions in a Ruby-esque fashion. It looks pretty powerful and the creator, Sylvain Sarmejeanne, has put together a very comprehensive page explaining how it all works. Read More
Dion Almaer has a go at implementing a basic Ruby scripting system for Web pages (or, as I call it, “RubyScript”). If you want to play with it, there’s a live demo available here. Despite the slowness of loading the JRuby Java applet behind the scenes, it’s works well once it’s up. Read More
The MOle is a Rails plugin developed by Fernand Galiana, Delynn Berry, and Ara Howard that allows you to monitor events occurring within your application in real time (without resorting to tailing logs). They’ve put together a YouTube! video that demonstrates how MOle works in real time. Read More
RailRoad is a Ruby application that generates model or controller diagrams for Ruby on Rails applications. It analyzes properties, inheritance, model associations, and so forth, and produces a graph description in the DOT language which can then be handled with third-party tools. The official site features several compelling examples, including model and controller maps of the Typo blogging system (as seen above). Read More
Ruby On Windows is a new(ish) blog by David Mullet that focuses on using Ruby on the Windows operating system. I don’t usually announce random blogs on Ruby Inside, but Ruby on Windows is covering a niche that has mostly been unrepresented in the Ruby blogosphere so far but for which there is quite a demand. Read More
