Elsewhere

RubyNode is an interesting Ruby library that spits out semantic representations of code much in the same way the inspect method does with data. Here's a demo:

mly from caboo.se looks at how to quickly protect certain controller actions from GET requests in Rails, and presents a couple of useful test helpers to make testing for POST vs GET compliance simple. His code lets you then do a simple test like so:

Above: Courtenay's team hard at work.

Derek Haynes laments:

Peter Szinek has announced he's going to write a series of articles on 'screen scraping' with Ruby (more accurately, extracting data from Web pages and other online sources) and has released the first article entitled "Data Extraction for Web 2.0: Screen scraping in Ruby/Rails". He covers four basic scraping techniques, first using regular expressions, then HTree and REXML, then RubyfulSoup, and finally WWW::Mechanize. If you need to process shaky HTML sources from Ruby, read on.

Aidan Finn, a freelance Ruby on Rails developer in Ireland, has developed a quick guide to creating your own generators in Rails. Code generators in Rails are useful when you have similar patterns between controller in various projects, but aren't ready to jump into creating a Rails Engine or plugin, or where such wouldn't be relevant.

O'Reilly has just released "RJS Template for Rails" by Cody Fauser, the god of RJS templates. RJS templates are used in Ruby to create a full AJAX experience. They let you adjust and add elements onto the current page without reloading by using nice, clean Ruby code, without getting down and dirty with JavaScript.

Idiomatic Ruby is an online presentation by Toby DiPasquale that goes through some of the more idiomatic features of Ruby, those that newcomers to Ruby might be confused by or overlook. It covers Modules and Mixins, Exceptions, Regular Expressions, Duck Typing, Iterators, method_missing, Continuations, Closures and Blocks, and is very concise and well put together.