Akhil Bansal has created a cool bash script that will create a new Rails project, import it to an SVN repository, then remove and ignore log files, sessions, temporary files, and set up database.yml correctly. I was previously using a Rake task for this, but installing this script at the OS level might prove easier for me 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
For the past few months Peter Szinek has been giving me lots of tasty tidbits about his forthcoming ScRUBYt Web-scraping toolkit, and now it’s finally fully released to the public! Peter describes ScRUBYt as “WWW::Mechanize and Hpricot on Steroids” and this description is pretty bang on.
As well as providing a simple DSL for performing Web actions (clicking links, submitting forms, etc.), one of ScRUBYt’s most impressive features is that you can provide it with ‘example’ data from which it will extrapolate a search pattern and then find any other similar data within the same page. This is demonstrated perfectly by Peter’s basic example:
ebay_data = Scrubyt::Extractor.define do
fetch ‘http://www.ebay.com/’
fill_textfield ‘satitle’, ‘ipod’
submit
click_link ‘Apple iPod’
record do
item_name ‘APPLE NEW IPOD MINI 6GB MP3 PLAYER SILVER’
price ‘$71.99′
end
next_page ‘Next >’, :limit => 5
end
This code goes to ebay.com, looks for iPods, and then extracts all records using a dummy one as an example. Read More
Eric Kidd has put together a fun blog post where he looks into 13 ways of looking at Ruby’s symbols (:x, :test, etc). If your understanding of Ruby’s symbol class isn’t one of your strong points, check it out. Read More
Here’s the official announcement:
On Your Mark…Get Set…GO! Registration for RailsConf 2007 Is Now Open!
There are two good reasons to register now for RailsConf 2007. One, last year’s inaugural conference sold out in just a few days. Two, you’ll save $150 if you register before March 19. So don’t wait — register today.
Co-produced by O’Reilly Media and Ruby Central, RailsConf is the largest official conference dedicated to everything Rails. This year, it’s taking place May 17-20 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, and it promises to be the best conference yet.
DHH has a little more to say about it, but don’t hang around.. Read More
This month I’m the guest judge and challenge provider of On Ruby and Apress’s “Ruby Blogging Contest”. The challenge question is “How has Ruby blown or stretched your mind?” If you blog your answer to that, you could win three free books from Apress. There’s a bit more to it than that though, so check out the challenge in full and get thinking.
All you have to do is blog about how Ruby has blown or stretched your minds (the more citation of actual language features or constructs the better) and then post a link to your blog post in the comments section of this page. Read More
I was just about to go to bed but a Why release is too good to miss. Why The Lucky Stiff has announced the immediate release of Hpricot 0.5. For those who haven’t had the good fortune of getting down and dirty with Hpricot yet, it’s basically a killer HTML parsing library for Ruby. It lets you use magic like CSS notation and XPath to hack away at HTML documents (and XML generally, if you’re willing).
If you’re already a fan, just do this to get on to the new version: gem install hpricot –source http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/ Read More
Charles Nutter is asking for help in squashing Rails bugs with JRuby. It seems full support for Ruby on Rails with JRuby is only just over the horizon, with over 90% coverage of ActiveRecord and ActiveSupport so far. Charles provides instructions on how to set up Rails with JRuby and run your own tests.
Once JRuby supports Ruby on Rails 100%, a second deployment option for thousands of Rails applications suddenly becomes available, and with the impressive performance gains and optimizations becoming available in JRuby, significantly faster Web apps could soon result. Read More
Mark A. McBride has put together a great article about processing credit cards with Ruby on Rails using the Active Merchant plugin. Read More
Josh Susser is reporting on Mark Carey’s announcement that the “SDForum Ruby Conference” (informally known as the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference) is now requesting papers for the conference taking place between April 21-22, 2007. Interested parties can submit their proposals to proposals2007 [at] rubysf [dot] net. All proposals submitted before February 4, 2007 will be given consideration, and those submitted after then may not, so if you want a chance to give a presentation, you need to be quick! Read More
The unstoppable Geoffrey Grosenbach has just announced he’s running a one-day Ruby workshop in Salt Lake City on March 15, the day before the Mountain West Ruby Conference. The workshop will focus on Web application development with Rails 1.2. Read More
Derek (usernamed perraultd) shows us how to rewrite your Rails application’s database.yml file to manually prompt you for database authentication information when your Rails app starts. This might not be of much use in automated deployment environments, but it demonstrates the dynamism of the templating system (I didn’t even realize database.yml was processed in this way). Read More
Mosquito is a new, automatable, testing tool that uses RubyCocoa and OS X to perform Web operations and take screenshots of each point along the way. It’s a little like the Windows-only Watir. I can see the technology used by Mosquito also being useful for automating Web operations even without the testing focus. Read More
In case the title of this post is giving you deja-vu, we’ve looked at “How To Create A Ruby Extension In C” before at Ruby Inside. We’ve also looked at using RubyInline to make the process even faster by not having to write a specialized C extension.
Despite this, Wim Vander Schelden has written such a detailed and interesting guide called “Writing Your Own Ruby Extension With C” that it’s a must-read if this area interests you, especially since it goes far beyond what was covered in our previous articles. Read More
Ralf Wirdemann and Thomas Baustert (the authors of the first German Rails book, “Rapid Web Development mit Ruby on Rails”) have just released an online ‘add on’ for their book covering Rails’ REST capabilities. It’s thirty pages long, in PDF format, and looks to be a good read (if only I could read German).
(Thanks to Florian Goersdorf for the lead) Read More
It’s good to start seeing those Rails 1.2 guides coming out of the woodwork. Hopefully I’ll get able to do a roundup of them shortly, but for now Andre Lewis presents a quick, practical guide to nesting CRUD resources in Rails 1.2. Read More
