Cool

Each month I do a round-up of the new jobs on the Ruby Inside job board. June was a slim month with only two new jobs. Both are pretty good though!

Sake is a RubyGem by Chris Wanstrath which executes and manages system-wide Rake tasks. Whereas Rake is project-specific, Sake allows the developer to examine, install, run, and uninstall Rake files and tasks globally, much like the way Rubygems does this for Ruby libraries.

Paul Dowman has put together a feature-packed Ruby on Rails focused "appliance" for Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud - effectively an on-demand, flexible VPS service). Those who know what they're doing can try it out right away, using the AMI id: ami-4e907527.

Gregory Brown has put together a great four-page tutorial on how to build a database driven console application using Ruby and ActiveRecord (no Rails needed!). As well as delivering what the title suggests, Brown also looks at some neat Ruby techniques for structuring applications in general (such as using modules and module_function). The end result is an app called "EarGTD," a basic time / task management tool.

Geoffrey Grosenbach, author of the famous PeepCode screencasts, has written a tutorial about using Ryan Davis' hoe library to make releasing your own RubyGems a cakewalk. Geoffrey says that using Hoe turns a laborious, multi-step twenty minute process into only a few Rake tasks. Hoe takes the automation of Gem publishing seriously, and once you've set it up properly you can go as far as let it post announcements (to your blog and/or Rubyforge), build your docs, create an e-mail announcement, run testing packages against the library, as well as actually releasing and uploading the gem to Rubyforge ready for public consumption. CPAN, eat your heart out!

AIR has gone Public Beta, so does anybody use it? eBay does, Adobe has more, and who doesn't love twitter?

JRuby, a Java implementation of the Ruby interpreter, has reached version 1.0. A massive congratulations are due to the team. At the time of writing, the release has not been announced on the official site, but you can download the final build.
JRuby originally came into being in 2001 as a simple Java port of the Ruby 1.6 code, but has blossomed into a free-standing project that has chosen to innovate in its own way. In September 2006, Sun "acquired" the JRuby project by bringing its then two main developers on board, and since then work appears to have continued at a rapid pace. With the release of 1.0, the team claim that applications 'will just work' and that most compatibility bugs have been eradicated.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the XRuby team released XRuby 0.2.0. XRuby is Ruby-to-Java bytecode compiler, so you can compile Ruby source code directly to Java classes. The latest version fixes several issues and adds debugging support.

Rack, recently announced at version 0.2 by Christian Neukirchen, is a minimal, modular and adaptable interface for developing Ruby web applications. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses in the simplest way possible, it unifies and distills the API for web servers, web frameworks, and software in between (the so-called middleware) into a single method call.

Blink and you'd miss it, but Ruby Inside celebrates its first anniversary today. To commemorate it, I want to post about the history of the site, how it all came together, present some statistics, and give some blog-related tips for anyone else who wants to create a similar blog.

Classifier is a Ruby gem developed by Lucas Carlson and David Fayram II to allow Bayesian and other types of classifications, including Latent Semantic Indexing.

Andrzej Krzywda has put together a solid, 15 point tutorial on how to build a Rails application from the ground up using Test Driven Development (TDD) techniques. This is pure gold because so few of the books and "how to build a blog in 5 minutes" type articles bother to cover testing and Andrzej shows how to get into the habit from almost the first step.

Gibberish is a Rails plugin developed by Chris Wanstrath which provides a hassle-free text translation capability for your Rails applications. The first application to use it is the Beast forum system.