Miscellaneous

It was with much excitement that Merbcamp started yesterday with a keynote from Ezra Zygmuntowicz, initial creator of the Merb Web application framework. Aside from covering Merb-related news, Ezra revealed a project called Nanite - a "self assembling cluster of Ruby daemons."

A week ago, Adam Nelson (a Virginia-based Ruby developer) complained about Ruby's "absolutely bullshit Ruby HTTP client situation." He was running into a nasty situation where Ruby's standard HTTP client library (net/http) was sending data in 1 kilobyte chunks, causing his CPU to redline. Due to net/http's popularity (particularly with other libraries), Adam saw this as a big issue.

Back in March 2008, Vidar Hokstad - a London based Norwegian developer - began to write a series of blog posts on writing a compiler in Ruby from the ground up. Early on, I took objection to some elements of his approach, but it still stands as a great series of posts. Vidar recently reached post 11, providing enough of a landmark to introduce the series as a whole (which is already scheduled to go up to at least 20 posts).

JS.Class is an attempt at making JavaScript more Ruby-like. More specifically, it's a library that makes object oriented development easier in JavaScript (in comparison to JS's prototype technique, at least) by implementing Ruby's core object, module, and class systems as well as some of Ruby's meta-programming techniques.

Garry Dolley has developed a Ruby module called "Immutable" (Github repository). It allows you to make your methods immutable. As Gary says, "provide it a list of methods you don’t want touched and it’ll make sure they can’t be redefined." Effectively, it's a smack-down against monkeypatching.

Rubyology is a Ruby-based podcast chaired by Chris Matthieu. Its focus is on interviewing interesting Ruby (and Rails) developers - finding out about their projects, what makes them tick, and extracting their insights into the Ruby and Rails worlds.

It's time to thank those great companies and individuals who help keep Ruby Inside going - and some parts of the Ruby world itself. We all need hosting, screencasts, and developers! Note: All blurbs and descriptions are written by me and not directly influenced or specified by the sponsors. As such, any opinions stated are mine and not necessarily shared by the sponsor!

What's Hot on Github is a monthly post highlighting new and/or interesting projects within the Ruby community that are hosted on Github. Github has become an extremely popular place for Ruby and Rails developers to congregate lately, so I wanted to list some of the new projects, and some of the updated ones, that I have found interesting and that are too small for their own blog post.

This week you may have heard about "Chrome," a new Web browser being developed by Google (if you haven't, read this online comic book that demonstrates its worthiness). Associated with Chrome is V8, a new open source JavaScript engine that's designed to execute JavaScript code at never-seen-before speeds.

Configatron is a new Ruby library that makes it easy to have persistently accessible configuration data available through your Ruby application. It bears some similarities to the Rails pluginSimpleConfig, but being distributed as a gem, is suitable for non-Rails applications. To install: gem install configatron

We first covered Mack in April, when I billed it as a "fast, best of the rest, Web app framework." Mack, a Ruby-based Web application framework, developed by a team led by Mark Bates, has continued to grow over the past several months and today announced a significant release, Mack 0.7.0.

Github is a great resource for finding new projects within the Ruby community. It has become an extremely popular place for Ruby and Rails developers to congregate lately, so I wanted to list some of the new projects, and some of the updated ones, that I have found interesting and that are too small for their own blog post. Let us know if you like this as we might turn it into a regular series on Ruby Inside!

NeverBlock is a Ruby (1.9) library developed by eSpace - an Egyptian Web 2.0 development team - that could make your life a whole lot easier if you have to deal with blocking IO operations that hold up all your Ruby threads.

(Photo credit: Kieran Huggins)

Trollop is a command-line argument processing library for Ruby. Developer William Morgan says Trollop is "designed to provide the maximal amount of GNU-style argument processing in the minimum number of lines of code." It makes a refreshing change to the more popular, but generally scary, cmdparse. The homepage features some examples of its usage.

(Credit: june29 - photo under CC 2.0 Attribution license)

(Remix of an original CC 2.0 licensed work by Joichi Ito.)

(Photo credit: slushpup - License: CC 2.0 Attribution)

Here's the regular update of the most interesting stories posted on RubyFlow (a community-driven Ruby news sister site to Ruby Inside) in the past couple of weeks: