This Week’s Ruby News: RSpec 2.8.0 RC1, Minitest 2.8.0, and What’s New in Bundler 1.1?
After last week's bumper set of releases the Ruby world seems a lot quieter this week :-) (Even here. I've been hidden away teaching my Ruby Reloaded course!)
Headlines
RSpec 2.8.0 RC1 Released
The next significant release of RSpec is afoot and its first release candidate is now out. Key improvements come to configuration (and being able to override it from the command line) and running examples in random (and pseudo-random) order.
Ruby 1.9.3-p0 RubyInstaller for Windows Available
RubyInstaller is a popular route to installing Ruby for Windows users, and a new version based on the all-new Ruby 1.9.3-p0 is now out.
Articles and Tutorials
Besides Being Faster, What Else is New in Bundler 1.1?
Recently, Pat Shaughnessy did a great post explaining why the forthcoming Bundler 1.1 will be faster than 1.0. This time around, he looks at some new features, including bundle outdated, bundle clean, specifying install paths, and creating bundles that will work on machines that don't have Bundler installed.
The Current and Future Ruby Platform
Adam Keys shares his thoughts on the long-term future potential of Ruby as a platform and where it's likely and unlikely to go.
A Self Guided Rails 3.1 Tutorial in an App
An interesting app built by Peter Jones that aims to be a self guided Rails 3.1 tutorial. The README is extensive and explains how to get started. There are also some reader exercises designed to stretch your coding muscles.
Screencasts
Be a Minecraft Modman with Purugin
At RubyConf 2011, Thomas Enebo (of JRuby core team) gave a talk about Purugin, a plugin framework for building Minecraft modifications using Ruby.
RailsCasts on the Mercury Editor
Mercury allows you to edit a section of HTML directly in the browser with a WISYIWYG editor. In this week's Railscasts, Ryan Bates shows how to integrate Mercury into a Rails app.
Libraries and code
Likeable: Storing 'Liked' Objects with Redis
Likeable is a new open-source Ruby library built by Gowalla to store 'likes' on items. It works with ActiveRecord objects but can be used with any Ruby object that implements an #id method. If you have Redis ready and waiting, it looks pretty easy to get going.
Example Rails 3.1.1 App using Mongoid and OmniAuth 1.0
With OmniAuth 1.0 out just last week, it's great to see Daniel Kehoe has updated his popular Rails 3.1 example app to the latest and greatest. If you want to see how to bring Mongoid and OmniAuth together with Rails 3.1, this is a great place to start.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Ruby Developer [Cambridge, Massachusetts]
Every programmer at Litmus remembers the first time they searched for an answer to their programming problem, only to realize they were the first to try to take it on. These days, it's an almost daily occurrence around here. If that sounds exciting to you, then we'd like to talk to you.
Last but not least..
Gemnasium: Keep Up to Date With New Versions of Gems
Gemnasium is a new commercial service (yep, it costs money) that parses your Ruby projects' gem dependencies and notifies you when new versions are released. There's a 2 week trial if you want to get a feel for how it works.
