Tools

Rather than spend $3049 on TextMate, the thrifty Dr. Nic Williams decided to try and port all of TextMate's useful 'snippets' over to RadRails. He has succeeded.

Ruby Search, a project by Simon Parker, is a special Web search tool that looks through the Rails class index, Rails methods, Ruby standard libraries, and Programming Ruby and presents the results in a simple sidebar to be viewed in a frame on the right. It seems to be a bit patchy from my tests, but it's still a cool tool. (Found via ozmm)

The eminent Dr. Nic Williams has put together a useful generator that makes it a lot easier to construct your own gems. It's an ideal script if you've never put a gem together before, or if you're sick of the repetition involved. Nic tells me that this tool might make its way into the core RubyGems distribution in the future, but it's worth playing with straight away.

Some user mail from Nathan Murray:

acts_as_cached is a plugin by Chris Wanstrath, Tim Myrtle, and PJ Hyett that simply allows you to cache any Ruby object in memory (using memcached). Check out the documentation for the full instructions, but if you've got a working memcached server ready and waiting, it's as easy as installing a gem (memcached-client), a plugin (acts_as_cached), and adding 'acts_as_cached' to your model.

Ryan Daigle writes about resource_feeder, a new plugin for Ruby on Rails that makes the generation of RSS and Atom feeds easy. Like so:

Chronic is a natural language (English only, at present, I think) time and date parser written entirely in Ruby. It supports a staggering number of different ways of expressing the date and time. For example:

Alex Bradbury has developed Ariel, a library that uses predefined examples to work out how to extract information from other documents. It was a Google Summer of Code project and was mentioned by Austin Ziegler. More directly from Alex:

RubyForIIS is a package that helps you set up the bindings between Ruby, Rails, and Microsoft's IIS server system. Project founder, Boris Leenaars, says:

Scott Laird has announced the release of Typo 4.0, the first release of the original Rails powered blogging tool this year:

Active Merchant is a payment processing library for Rails developed by the geniuses behind Rails powered e-commerce system, Shopify. It's under active development with support for different payment processor gateways being added regularly. So far it supports:

Geoffrey Grosenbach introduces the RaPT Plugin Manager for Rails, the answer to the problem of slow plugin installation. Installable as a gem (gem install rapt), RaPT caches the locations of different plugins so that installation is quick and easy. Future plans include developing a central plugin repository, auto-announcement of self-developed plugins, and automatic plugin upgrading. If you want the files direct, check out the Rubyforge project site for RaPT.

Paul Battley has developed a Ruby to JavaScript converter. I'm trying to think what this is useful for, but this is an amazing results for just a few hours' work.

Railsbench, by Stefan Kaes, is a collection of scripts that makes benchmarking a Rails application quick and easy. Rather than benchmark over HTTP, Railsbench tests the 'raw' speed of your application directly, and won't include latencies involved with the network or between your HTTP daemon and Rails. If you love statistics, you'll love Railsbench. Here's some demonstration output: