Cool

RailsForum.com has just announced the winners of their October Tutorial Contest. A lot of cool tutorials came out of the contest, so I wanted to link to them here.

1st place - HOWTO: Make a Rails Plugin From Scratch by Danger Stevens.

2nd place - Refactoring on Rails: Move to Model and Refactoring on Rails: Multiple Scopes in Controller by Ryan Bates.

3rd place - HOWTO: Send Instant Messages in Rails

Other entries
Image uploads and resizing for Rails models with mini-magick
XSS and when h() just ain't enough
Creating Two Models in One Form
Editing Multiple Models in One Form
Test Helper: Clean, Custom Assertion Messages
Debugging on Rails: Reading Stack Traces
Introduction to Form Helpers
Programming Best Practices
Advice to Rails Beginners: Follow Conventions
Handy RJS Tips
Using Autotest with Rails on Windows XP machines
Creating Many Models in One Form
Creating a Variable Number of Models in One Form
Getting Started With RESTful Rails
Rails Migration For Beginners

Rather than spend $3049 on TextMate, the thrifty Dr. Nic Williams decided to try and port all of TextMate's useful 'snippets' over to RadRails. He has succeeded.

Burnalytics is a new library just released by Alex MacCaw (the developer also behind the popular Juggernaut plugin for Rails) that makes it easy to retrieve statistics from both FeedBurner and Google Analytics. As well as making it easy to retrieve statistics from these two sources, it also makes it a one line operation to produce graphs from the data retrieved as demonstrated by the screenshot above.

Ruby genius Mauricio Fernandez has been playing with an attempt at processing Prolog using Ruby found on a Japanese coding site and has come up with tiny_prolog.rb.

I don't think the Ruby Jobs site at RubyNow gets enough link love from the community, and I want to put that right. If you haven't been there for a while, you'll be surprised. In just the last two weeks there are 30 new Ruby and Rails jobs available. That's even more than on the 37signals Jobs Board. Even better, if you're an employer you can post to the RubyNow jobs board for free, so check it out.

Ruby Search, a project by Simon Parker, is a special Web search tool that looks through the Rails class index, Rails methods, Ruby standard libraries, and Programming Ruby and presents the results in a simple sidebar to be viewed in a frame on the right. It seems to be a bit patchy from my tests, but it's still a cool tool. (Found via ozmm)

Merb is a micro-framework (developed by Ezra Zygmuntowicz) that ties in with Mongrel and erb and provides basic controller and view templating. It's an ideal way to put together quick and simple Web applications with Ruby that don't rely on any of the fancier features offered by Rails. It does have support for ActiveRecord, however. Merb allows you to create small systems that produce dynamic requests and can interact with databases but without the significant weight of the Rails framework. Where Ruby on Rails is a Big Mac, Merb is a McNugget.

Rb-AppScript is an event bridge between Ruby and OS X that allows you to get AppleScript-esque control in OS X. The Appscript creators claim Appscript is a 'serious alternative' to AppleScript and it certainly looks good. Check out this example:

Courtenay has come up with an ingenious solution to caching and precaching in Ruby on Rails with memcached. It caches data from database requests, as you'd expect, but you can also put together a special forking method that caches data in advance. Courtenay's suggestion for this is if a user does a search and you cache the initial page of search results, you could speculate the user might progress onto page two of the search, so you can get Rails to precache that data in advance so the next page load is blazing fast.

The eminent Dr. Nic Williams has put together a useful generator that makes it a lot easier to construct your own gems. It's an ideal script if you've never put a gem together before, or if you're sick of the repetition involved. Nic tells me that this tool might make its way into the core RubyGems distribution in the future, but it's worth playing with straight away.

Following on from his original interview with Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo of the JRuby team, Pat Eyler has interviewed the team again (read part 1 then part 2), with the addition of Ola Bini. Both parts are quite long and go into a lot of detail about JRuby and Ruby's existence under the Java umbrella.

BetaBrite is a Ruby LCD sign library developed by Aaron Patterson. Since few people have LCD signs to play with, Aaron has set up a test-bed installation that you can use via DRb. Ingenious! Next I expect a Ruby blinkenlights library and DRb hookup.
(First seen at why's)

Most init.d start-up scripts seem to be bash scripts, but you can write them with any language. Here's some template code I use to create my own Linux services. You can even add them to chkconfig to be started properly on startup, and they'll also work with RedHat / CentOS's service system straight off.

Eric Hodel has looked at a new feature provided by Ruby 1.8.5 called Process::setrlimit. It makes it easy to limit the memory usage of your Ruby processes.. ideal if you're experiencing memory leaks! Eric shows an example that's as simple as adding this to your application's environment.rb file: