As 2010 comes to a close, I've dug through Ruby Inside archives to remind myself how far the Ruby scene has progressed over the year. Over the past couple of years, it's been hinted that the pace of developments in the Ruby world is slowing down, but nothing could have been further from the truth in 2010 (well, except in September..)
MacRuby team lead and Apple employee Laurent Sansonetti has unveiled MacRuby 0.8, the latest release of the Ruby 1.9-compatible Mac-focused Ruby implementation. The main MacRuby site hasn't been updated at the time of writing but you can get MacRuby 0.8 now from the MacRuby files folder or direct at http://www.macruby.org/files/MacRuby 0.8.zip
Ruby screencasting supremo Geoffrey Grosenbach has unveiled PeepCode's new Meet Rails 3 series. There are two parts so far, clocking in at 75 and 92 minutes respectively - they're $12 each or "free" if you have a PeepCode Unlimited subscription.
James Golick, a prolific Canadian Rubyist, has declared war on Net:HTTP's default of not checking the validity of the certificate sent by an HTTP server when making HTTPS requests. His new always_verify_ssl_certificates gem forces Net::HTTP to verify SSL certificates and doesn't allow other libraries to override this setting.
TechCrunch reports that Salesforce.com is to acquire the popular Heroku Ruby app hosting service for approximately $212 million in cash. We first posted about Heroku back in November 2007 (18 months before it even went commercial) and since then they've gone from strength to strength. Congratulations to the team!
It's time for us to thank the companies who help keep Ruby Inside going by kindly sponsoring our work in return for a little community love. Luckily, they're all interesting in their own right and have some worthwhile products to check out - no CashForGold or dating sites here!
Many infrastructure companies have recently adopted a drip-feed pricing model - consider renting servers from Amazon EC2 or monitoring our servers with New Relic RPM. The cloud database industry is still in its infant stages but today Salesforce.com has kicked things up a notch in offering all of its enterprise-scale database technology in a new cloud database service, Database.com.
Automatic text summarization is the technique where a computer program summarizes a document. A text is put into the computer and a highlighted (summarized) text is returned. The Open Text Summarizer is an open source tool for summarizing texts. The program reads a text and decides which sentences are important and which are not.
Significant and serious improvements to the core Ruby language come along as infrequently as TextMate updates. Given that TextMate has had an update recently, an important new Ruby feature was sure to be just around the corner and it is: refinements! Shugo Maeda (who works with Matz and developer of mod_ruby) presented the idea at RubyConf 2010 last month.
JetBrains (of IntelliJ IDEA fame) has today released RubyMine 3.0, the latest version of its cross-platform Ruby and Rails IDE. It follows on almost 18 months to the day from RubyMine 1.0. Back then we noted that the public reception of RubyMine was strong and JetBrains have only made it better since then.
Ever used Dropbox? It's awesome. A cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, and even mobile) file syncing and backup service with 2GB for free (or 2.25GB if you sign up with this link). Well, if you'd like to roll out your own system on your own infrastructure, send some thanks to Ryan LeFevre, the creator of RubyDrop, an open source Dropbox clone based on Ruby and git.
In The Ruby Stdlib is a Ghetto, Mike Perham argues that Ruby's "standard library" (all the libraries that come by default with Ruby installs) is old and crufty and suggests some parts that should be removed.