Rather than use the send_file or send_data methods to send an entire, completed bulk of information back to the client, David N. Welton wanted to, effectively, print stuff to the client bit by bit. He worked out how to do it and presents his findings and sample code here.
Steve Yegge explains how to use Ruby to script your Windows applications. His first example demonstrates how to load Internet Explorer, get it to navigate to a certain Web page, and scrape the content in just five lines of code, like so:
I'm not a Windows user at all, but RForward struck me as perhaps being very interesting to those wanting to roll out Rails apps on Windows servers. It sounds like some of the new UNIX-side solutions to deploying Rails applications.. that is, proxying requests from one daemon to another rather than doing it all from one.
maiha from #caboose ran some benchmarks and produced this graph of 'requests per second' for a basic app under different dispatcher setups (Apache, lighttpd, Mongrel, etc.):
Chris Anderson looks at deploying Rails apps with Capistrano and Mongrel on Planet Argon. He provides a whole pile of recipe snippets, as well as some Capistrano recipes for Mongrel 'spinner' and 'restart' tasks.
The Charming Ruby Compiler is charming not just by name, but by nature. It's a thesis project at the Computer Science Department at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden to develop a proof of concept Ruby compiler that compiles to the C-- intermediate language. So far, they've only got the basics working, but it's an interesting project, if only to learn about C--, an interesting 'portable assembly language' that makes life easier for compiler developers. It seems a little like Parrot, and is funded by Microsoft Research and the National Science Foundation.
It's quick and easy (to do, not necessarily to parse!).
Lately I've been finding little known Ruby gems and trying them out. My latest find is EventMachine. EventMachine describes itself:
Ryan Daigle reports that the latest 'edge Rails' has a cool new feature that lets you specify find conditions more logically. For example:
Ruby Inline is an analog to Perl's Inline::C. Out of the box, it allows you to embed C/++ external module code in your ruby script directly. By writing simple builder classes, you can teach how to cope with new languages (fortran, perl, whatever).