Linux-Specific

How would you like to get a full Ruby on Rails stack up on Ubuntu with one command?

For better or worse, Ubuntu has become one of the most popular Linux variants on which to deploy Ruby and Rails apps. It was used for 84% of the 2010 Rails Rumble projects, for example. Back in 2009, I wrote a guide to installing a Ruby 1.8 stack on Ubuntu 8.10 so it was only a matter of time before I had to tackle 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) and Ruby 1.9.

When you want to inspect your objects in Ruby, Object#inspect, p, or awesome_print are all valuable. You're stuck with plain-text, though, and primarily designed to look at object data rather than object models. If you want to drill down into parent classes, see object and class relationships, etc, then, check out DrX, a visual object inspector for Ruby!

MagLev is a new(ish) Ruby implementation built by Gemstone Systems that focuses on providing an integrated object persistence layer and a distributed shared cache - a truly scalable Ruby implementation. Maglev has, however, had an air of vaporware about it, having been hyped up in early 2008 and only available to a small group of alpha testers till now. That changes today with the first public, alpha release!

RubyMine is a Ruby and Rails IDE (for Windows, OS X, and Linux) by JetBrains, the guys behind the popular Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA. We've previously posted about how much people seem to like RubyMine, and it looks like things will get even better, as they've just released the beta of RubyMine 2.0. Notably, RubyMine 2.0 will be free to existing 1.0 users as it falls within the year allowed for free updates!

Adam Sanderson has written an extremely useful RubyGems plugin called open_gem. It makes it really quick to inspect what's inside your gems, e.g.: gem open rails. You'll need to be running RubyGems 1.3.2 first.

Redcar is a programmer's text editor for GNOME, written in Ruby and Vala (a curious C# like language for use with GNOME), by Daniel B Lucraft.

Want to install Ruby, RubyGems, and a collection of common gems on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) in just a few minutes? Here's the skinny.

Phusion, the company responsible for Passenger - the Rails deployment system, has today announced DebGem, a "RubyGem to APT conversion service."

After tackling the difficult task of improving Rails deployment, Phusion - the creators of Passenger (mod_rails) recently announced the availability of daemon_controller - a library (rather than a stand-alone tool) for managing daemons. It lets you write applications that manage daemons in a robust manner (e.g. mongrel_cluster or UltraSphinx could be adapted to use this library).

Rubygame is a new library that provides ties between the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) and Ruby, so that you can do graphics and sound work from Ruby, ultimately to build games. It's stylized off of the popular pygame, the equivalent library for Python. Unfortunately it currently only works on Linux (and other Unix-like systems) but Windows and Mac users should be in luck soon.