Robert Dempsey of non-profit Rails advocacy group, Rails For All, writes in to remind everyone about the acts_as_conference Rails conference taking place in Florida in February 2008 and to let us know that registration is now open. Tickets cost $100 (plus $2.50 booking fee). Obie Fernandez and Dan Benjamin are the keynoter speakers, but there are many others. Too many to name individually here, although Charles Nutter (JRuby), Ezra Zygmuntowicz (Merb), and Evan Phoenix (Rubinius) are particular standouts. Anyway, if you fancy getting some winter sun while doing the Rails schmooze, hit it up. It doesn't sound like you're going to be bored at this one.
Thomas Enebo of the JRuby team has announced the release of the first beta of JRuby 1.1. This is a significant release, focusing heavily on performance increases. The performance increases yielded so far are so significant that in most like-for-like tests, JRuby beats the regular Ruby interpreter (a.k.a. MRI) JRuby 1.1. On Rails-focused tests, JRuby also wins.. making JRuby the fastest way to run Rails applications at present. Charles Nutter talks about the improvements, along with a number of other interesting JRuby-related topics, in his latest blog post - a must read for Ruby implementation nuts.
Ruby on Rails Workshop and Training in New Brunswick, CanadaSpheric are hosting a Ruby on Rails training and workshop session called "Why Ruby On Rails?" in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada on October 9th - 11th.. next week! The training is with Ruby veteran, Bruce Tate, and costs $2400. The workshop, however, is free and Bruce Tate is involved directly with that too. It's a bit off the beaten path but if you're in eastern Canada (or even Maine!), check it out.The "UK's first" Ruby on Rails Focused VPS HostingFour months ago I posted "BrightBox: Finally a Rails-focused VPS in the UK?" and now BrightBox's project has come to fruition. BrightBox is a UK based VPS host (although they call them "Virtual Dedicated Servers") that focuses entirely on the deployment of Rails applications. With the installation of a single extra gem, your applications can be rolled out on their system within minutes. To see their different plans and quotas, visit their site.Sup: Ruby Powered Console E-mail ClientSup is a new e-mail client developed in Ruby by William Morgan. Its goal is "to become the email client of choice for nerds everywhere." The source is worth looking at merely to see how to develop a solid, console based app using ncurses with Ruby.Rails Rumble: 92 Web Apps Created in 48 HoursJosh Catone has written a great summary of the results of the recent Rails Rumble 48 hour Rails development contest. The overall winner was TastyPlanner, a recipe sharing site.
Derek Sivers, quite the Rails champion when he decided to rebuild his CD Baby e-commerce site using Rails two years ago, has now admitted defeat. After two years of wrestling with Rails while building the new site, Sivers along with coder Jeremy Kemper, decided to face up to reality. Kemper went off to 37signals and Sivers rebuilt the entire site in PHP in just two months. As such, Slashdot is jumping on the bandwagon by telling developers to "think again" about using Rails in future.
The registration process for RubyConf 2007 is now open! The conference is due to be held at the Omni Charlotte Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina in the United States between November 2 - 4 (Friday through Sunday). The official site hasn't been updated yet (as of Friday September 7) but the registration form is available here. Tickets are $250.
You might recall, a few short months ago, that Dr. Nic built and released a site called MyConfPlan. Its prime objective was to enable RailsConf 2007 visitors to easily plan their schedules, although it had support for other events too. Dr. Nic has now put the site up for sale on eBay, and is donating all of the proceeds to charity as part of his pledge to donate to charity for RailsConf Europe. The auction ends in the next couple of days and is already at $470 Australian dollars (about $42 $386 US Dollars).
Back in August 2006, Satish Talim began a course of free Ruby lessons. Over 100 people signed up and found them useful. The success of the program even led to Satish founding the RubyLearning.com site, a great Ruby resource for newcomers to the language. Satish has just let me know that he's decided to run the course again this year, so if you're a Ruby newbie, head over to Satish's latest blog post where he explains what the lessons are, what you'll get out of it, and how the system works. Lessons start from this coming Monday, 27th August.
Ruby Inside hasn't had any new items for the last several days as I've just bought a house, and have had to enjoy the various work that brings. So, to get things back on track with Ruby Inside, here's a roundup of some of the key news and articles I've seen over the past week instead: Why Releases His Shoes To The World Despite the finest Ruby blog in the land, Why's RedHanded, slipping into a coma earlier this year, Why continues to wow the Ruby community with his contributions. This time around, he's built a cross-platform toolkit for making "Web-like Desktop Apps" using Ruby called Shoes. Drool over this sample code:
(credit: yarrg) This morning, Pete Forde of Unspace prodded me to write about a new book, "Beginning Rails" by Jeffrey Allan Hardy and Cloves Carneiro Jr. (with Hampton Catlin). And, when I receive my copy from Apress, I will be reviewing it here. Of more immediate interest to me, however, was a note that David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby of Rails, had denied the authors the right to use the Rails logo on the front of their book:
Four months ago I posted "
