Image credited to Dave Thomas
Dave Thomas takes a stroll through the land of REST and looks at how the future of Rails applications could be in having the whole ‘backend’ REST accessible with a HTML presentation filter sitting in front of it for browser access. It’s a very cogent article, and I’m all for popularizing the term “RADAR” to refer to the types of applications Dave talks about. Let’s use it.
Update: Peter James came to some very similar conclusions back in March 2005. Cool! Read More
Ben Kittrell has written a guide to creating a Mac-esque Rails / Ruby development environment on Windows. As he says:
I like Windows and I love Vista. Mac’s certainly are beautiful; but as of yet “It just works” is not convincing enough for me. However, any Railer will tell you that the holy grail of Rails editors is TextMate, which of course is Mac only.
Ben covers the main bases: installing a Textmate-esque editor, installing Cygwin, putting on a better console application, and getting everything to work seamlessly on Windows. Read More
My book, “Beginning Ruby”, was released today and is ready to buy (and read!) immediately in print and e-book forms.
Beginning Ruby is a complete beginner’s guide to Ruby and ideal for both people who’ve not programmed before or those who’ve done a little programming but don’t understand the finer details (such as OOP, dynamic languages, or scripting). Beginning Ruby is a little like the Pickaxe but for meilleur casino en ligne français people who want more hand-holding and less reference materials (ideal for managers!). Actually, it’s even a bit cooler than the Pickaxe because the rather amazing foreword is by why the lucky stiff! Read More
CruiseControl.rb is a continuous integration tool written in, and for, Ruby. It makes it easy to set up automated builds of your software and to find out about tests that break on the fly. The official site has downloads, a 5 minute screencast, and a working demo of the tool.
Alongside this, Bill Eisenhauer – the developer of GeoKit, the Rails geocoding plugin – has written an article talking about CruiseControl.rb and showing how to set up custom tasks to use CruiseControl with Capistrano. Read More
Just over two months ago I posted about a new rapid Web application development framework for Rails called Hobo. The team have now let me know they’ve got a brand new, redesigned site, and that Hobo has a major, new release.
Hobo makes it really easy to get a basic Web application up and running in Rails. It’s a little like scaffolding but with a turbocharger under the hood. And if you want to get up and running in just a few minutes, they have a short tutorial along with three screencasts. Read More
Hampton Catlin, with a little inspiration from Nathan Weizenbaum, has come up with a few cute ways to create recursive lambdas (that is, anonymous functions that can call themselves). Read More
“Why Ruby On Rails?” was a presentation made by Gregg Pollack at the Orlando Ruby Users Group on March 15, and now you can watch it online. Gregg is a great presenter and moves through a lot of stuff really quickly. The first half of the presentation focuses on agility, agile development, and how agile development changes the way you need to interact with clients, and the second half gets into the technical Rails side of things. A good watch, and especially good to recommend to management types who, perhaps, aren’t too familiar with Rails and agility yet. Read More
Joyent Slingshot is a new technology developed by Joyent and Magnetk that provides a Windows and OS X client for specially designed Rails applications. The upside of this is not just that your application looks more like a desktop application, but you can also code it in such a way that your application will work both online and offline, syncing data as necessary.
The main downside at the moment is that Slingshot isn’t actually released yet, and a number of other compromises are raised and covered in the comments section of their blog post. Still, this is a technology to keep an eye on in future. Read More
Ever thought that parsing feeds was a complex task? Not in Ruby! Using the Feed Normalizer library (a wrapper for other feed processing libraries), Ilya Grigorik demonstrates how you can create a complete RSS / Atom feed aggregator in 26 lines of code, including renderer! Read More
I’ve stumbled across several great snippets of Ruby code on the Web in the past few weeks, and rather than bore you with a post on each one, here’s a whole collection at once:
1. RSS Twitter Bot – A short Ruby script that will read an RSS feed and republish it to your Twitter account. This could be useful for livestreaming or getting some sort of commercial presence on there.
2. Check if a number is prime in ONE line of Ruby – A rather mind-boggling technique to detect primes using a regular expression (!)
3. iTunes Database Parser – A short script that reads through your iTunes database and tells you what you like to listen to based on your listening habits. Read More
Back in September 2006, I posted about a new markup language for Rails templates called Haml. For those who missed it, Haml is a high-level, semantic language that makes it rather hard to make HTML markup errors. It relies heavily on indentation, a la Python, for its structure.
Hampton Catlin has now released a significant new version, Haml 1.5. Along with this comes a great new logo (above) and official Web site. A very easy to follow tutorial is also offered to whet your appetite.
Hampton says that a significant improvement in 1.5 is a feature called “Sass”, a new way to define CSS stylesheets in a logical way, along with constants, operations, nesting, and selectors. Read More
Ben Smith has just relaunched his Rails-powered online feed reader, Trawlr, after rewriting it using Rails 1.2. It’s significantly slicker than before, and includes a screencast to get you up to speed quickly.
I caught up with Ben and asked him a few questions about Trawlr’s redevelopment and new focus, along with how Trawlr is deployed and his plans for the future.
Ruby Inside: Trawlr’s interface is very clean and easy to use. It also seems quite unique and simple in an area where readers often use similar interfaces. What have been the inspirations behind Trawlr’s design?
Ben Smith: When I started work on trawlr I was aiming to get real-world experience developing my first Rails application and like most programmers I had a specific itch to scratch. Read More
Three weeks ago I mentioned Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer’s great page caching tutorial. In that short time, and mostly on the back of that article, they’ve gotten 1000 subscribers and thousands of page views. Their tutorials are good!
Not ones to rest on their laurels, they’ve now written and released the second part of their caching tutorial series, focusing on action and fragment caching. They don’t go into insane levels of detail, but cover action and fragment caching reasonably comprehensively and provide lots of illustrative code snippets. And for those developers using Edge Rails, they also take a quick look at ActiveRecord query caching. Read More
Railscasts is a new project by Ryan Bates providing regular, free screencasts on topics relating to Ruby on Rails. As opposed to Geoffrey Grosenbach’s wonderfully detailed Peepcode screencasts, Railscasts videos are very short and each is focused on a very small area. Current topics include layouts, with_scope, Symbol#to_proc, caching with instance variables, and dynamic find_by methods.
The screencasts are well produced and to the point, and feature the creepiest opening sequence of any Ruby-related screencast so far.
Note: Make sure to use the “Download” links on the Railscasts site rather than clicking on the video titles as that will result in an error. Read More
Evan Weaver had a basic problem to solve:
We need to compute whether a point lies within a polygon. And we need to do it a lot.
Due to MySQL’s lacking geometry features, Evan had to perform location searches using Ruby code to find points within certain polygons. Keen for a speed-up, Evan digs out some C code from 1987 and sets about using RubyInline to speed up the whole process. The end result? A 22x increase of speed.
Of particular interest to RubyInline newbies will be the way Evan had to adjust the C code for it to work directly on Ruby objects. Read More
