Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book now available
Cool
acts_as_cached: Easy caching for ActiveRecord
acts_as_cached is a plugin by Chris Wanstrath, Tim Myrtle, and PJ Hyett that simply allows you to cache any Ruby object in memory (using memcached). Check out the documentation for the full instructions, but if you've got a working memcached server ready and waiting, it's as easy as installing a gem (memcached-client), a plugin (acts_as_cached), and adding 'acts_as_cached' to your model.
AJAX Scaffolding for Rails released as plugin
HAML: A new view template language for Rails
HAML is a new template language for Ruby on Rails developed by Hampton Catlin, a Canadian Rails developer. It's a high-level, heavily semantic language that breaks the mold of RHTML and makes it very hard to make markup errors. In a way similar to Python, HAML relies on indentation, which it uses to enforce DOM hierarchy.
JRuby Presentation in Video and Slides
Chronic: Natural date parsing for Ruby
Chronic is a natural language (English only, at present, I think) time and date parser written entirely in Ruby. It supports a staggering number of different ways of expressing the date and time. For example:
7 Tricks for ‘irb’ and ‘script/console’
Chris Wanstrath has put together a 'mix tape' of useful tips and tricks for irb and Rails' script/console. Some great bits and pieces in there, and people are leaving even more tricks and tips in the comments!
Sun acquires JRuby project, brings developers in-house
Charles Nutter, one of the developers of JRuby, a Ruby implemention running on the JVM, has announced that he and Thomas Enebo are becoming Sun Microsystems employees later this month with the responsibility of working on JRuby full-time!
Adobe Releases Ruby on Rails SDK
A Complete Guide to Using RubyInline for Optimization
Eric Hodel has put together a great guide to optimizing Ruby code with RubyInline and ruby-prof, a code profiler.
Get a temporary context with ‘self.dup.instance_eval’
def foo 'bar' end module M def foo 'baz' end end puts "should be 'bar': #{foo}" self.dup.instance_eval do extend(M) puts "should be 'baz': #{foo}" end puts "should be 'bar': #{foo}"
Garry Dolley worked out some interesting Ruby-fu to create a temporary execution context on the fly using self.dup.instance_eval. Any other tricks we could use this for?
Find Old / Deprecated Code in your Rails Apps with a Plugin
On the back of Kevin Clark's "Things You Shouldn't Be Doing in Rails", Geoffrey Grosenbach has created a plugin called 'deprecated' that, with a single rake task, will alert you to all of the old and deprecated code in your application. This is perfect for bringing those old applications up to date and will help you catch all of the changes necessary, such as using flash and session instead of @flash and @session, etc.
Using Rake as a File-Finding Library
FileList["**/*.rb"].egrep(Regexp.new(ARGV.first))
Jim Weirich has an interesting blog post about using Rake's 'FileList' class to find files on your hard drive. I've already started to use the example he gives here.. good find!
The Money Train: A Rails “E-Commerce Recipes” book
The ease of PHP with the power of Ruby
#!/usr/bin/ruby require 'rubyhp' __END__ <html> <body> <% cgi.params.each do |key, value| %> <%= key %>: <%= value %><br /> <% end %> <% if cgi.params.empty? %> Sorry, please enter some cgi parameters. How about "?foo=baz"? <% end %> </body> </html>
Christopher Cyll has put together a great little example of how to quickly create templated Web pages with Ruby without requiring any frameworks. It relies on CGI, but sometimes that's all you need, and it makes throwing together tiny Ruby-powered Web pages possible as easy as creating a simple PHP page.
Ruby on Rails Testing Cheat Sheet
Ariel: A Ruby Information Extraction Library
Alex Bradbury has developed Ariel, a library that uses predefined examples to work out how to extract information from other documents. It was a Google Summer of Code project and was mentioned by Austin Ziegler. More directly from Alex:
New Ruby Inside Chatroom – Come Visit!
Some readers have checked out the little publicized chatroom that's always been linked to from Ruby Inside, but it's been really flaky. Luckily, however, new Web 2.0 startup, Lingr, provide an absolutely amazing, fast, and easy to use chatroom and I've set it up for Ruby Inside right away.
Scruffy: A beautiful graphing toolkit for Ruby
AutoAdmin: Auto-generated admin interface in a Rails plugin
Queue ActionMailer e-mails with ar_mailer
ar_mailer is a system that automatically queues outgoing mails from Rails applications (using ActionMailer) by placing them into a special database table, to then be handled by a separate process, ar_sendmail. This could be particularly ideal for systems with mass mailing applications or simply as a method to speed up certain requests in your Rails applications since only a single database write is required rather than waiting for an e-mail to finish sending.
Build a “click heat map” system using Ruby and JavaScript
Beast: An open source Rails forum in under 500 lines of code
Win $100 By Blogging About Ruby or Rails This Week!
Feedalizer: Easy Webpage to RSS Conversion from Ruby
Quickly Produce A Graph of Your Rails Model Relationships
Beautify Your Ruby Code from TextMate
dzone: A Digg for Ruby stuff
Dynamically adding methods to classes through their objects
Lucas Carlson comes up with a cute trick to make Ruby feel a little more like a prototyped language by allowing you to define methods on a class in real-time through child objects, like so:
Parse XML quickly and easily with Hpricot
Following on from the Parsing XML with REXML using Expat post about using Expat to make REXML faster, Chris Wanstrath e-mailed me to let me know about his co-worker PJ's post, "Parse XML with Hpricot". Hpricot, covered previously in Fast HTML parsing in Ruby with Hpricot, is a fast HTML parser for Ruby written mostly in C by Ruby legend whytheluckystiff.