Peter Armstrong has just released the initial version of his PDF-only book, Flexible Rails. It's available for $20, and anyone who buys the book now will get free PDF copies of every subsequent version of the first edition of the book. You can also order the book in 5 copy, 10 copy, and 30 copy editions for use in the workplace.
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!
Bob Silva presents a rundown of some new features due in Rails 1.2. These minor features are in addition to the full REST support and ActiveResource (supposedly not just yet), as previously covered by a multitude of blogs.
Josh Catone looks at the results of SitePoint's State of Web Development 2006 survey. Josh says:
Prolific PuneRuby blogger Satish Talim has just begun a course of free Ruby lessons. They're open to anyone who wants to get involved, and so far 43 people are signed up! The lessons have already begun, but you can still get in on the action. The syllabus is available to check out, and to register to receive the lessons you only have to e-mail Satish at satish.talim /at gmail.com. This might be an ideal chance to get those friends who keep asking you questions about Ruby off your back ;-)
It's not mentioned on the official Ruby homepage yet, but Matz has just announced the release of Ruby 1.8.5 on the Ruby mailing list. He claims there are no big changes from 1.8.4 and cites stability as the main benefit of upgrading. Unless you're having problems with 1.8.4, however, I'd wait a few weeks to see how it pans out, but if you're itching to try it out get it from http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz
The entries and the numbers associated with them were shown in the last post, so choosing a winner is as simple as using 'rand'. For the first prize $100 drawing:
These are all the valid entries into the first prize contest from which one random winner will be chosen:
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.
Evan Henshaw-Plath (more commonly known as rabble) is in the process of writing a book for O'Reilly about testing and debugging Ruby on Rails applications, and has just launched a companion blog, Testing Rails. The subject of the blog is exactly what the title says, and rabble hopes to post at least one in-depth tutorial relating to Rails and testing each week. The first is Building Tests from Logs - Test Driven Debugging.
I've joined forces with Obie Fernandez on the Ruby section at InfoQ, a prime news site for the enterprise software development community. The Ruby news at InfoQ has more of an enterprise feel to it than that here at RubyInside and is focused at team leaders, development managers, enterprise developers, etc, so there's less hacking, but more high-level Ruby stuff.
Scott Laird has announced the release of Typo 4.0, the first release of the original Rails powered blogging tool this year:
The contracts have finally all been signed and I'm (Peter Cooper) already several chapters into writing a new Ruby book, Beginning Ruby, for APress. The information will probably go live on their site sometime in the next few weeks, but you've heard it here first.
Streamlined is a framework that sits about Ruby on Rails and makes developing Rails applications even quicker than possible with scaffolding alone. It includes a ton of useful stuff like pre-built layouts, a REST layer around all the models, support for Atom, and its own DSL. As developer Justin Gehtland explains:
Above: Courtenay's team hard at work.
Mauricio Fernandez reports that the next minor version of Ruby, Ruby 1.8.5, is due for release in mid August to coincide with the Japanese holiday of Obon. Ruby releases are usually tied to holiday periods, most notably Christmas for 1.8.3 and 1.8.4.
