In the UK there's a cliché that goes: "You wait hours for a bus, and then three come along at once!" So it went with these three Ruby date and time libraries. They all made an appearance on RubyFlow last week and are all useful in their own ways, depending on how you're working with dates and times.

When you want to inspect your objects in Ruby, Object#inspect, p, or awesome_print are all valuable. You're stuck with plain-text, though, and primarily designed to look at object data rather than object models. If you want to drill down into parent classes, see object and class relationships, etc, then, check out DrX, a visual object inspector for Ruby!

Nestful is a simple HTTP/REST client library for Ruby, developed by Alex MacCaw (of Juggernaut) fame. Nestful allows you to consume basic Web services easily, usually in a single line of code. It can deal with JSON, buffered downloads, and callbacks out of the box.

Cinch ^{(or GitHub repo)} is a new Ruby "microframework" for creating IRC bots. Effectively, Cinch is a library that both abstracts away all of the complexities of dealing with IRC servers and presents a DSL for rolling out your own functionality.

Coderpath is a weekly podcast by Ruby developers Miles Forrest and Curtis McHale where they typically interview a different Ruby developer and discuss some of their current work. Most of the episodes are in an interview format and guests so far include a handful of Ruby developers you'll know (such as DHH and Ryan Bates).

The latest installment of our series of roundup posts, covering some of our latest findings in the world of all things Ruby. These items wouldn't make it in as separate posts, but they should be of enough interest to Rubyists generally to make it a worthwhile browse for most readers.

Three years after Microsoft first announced it was dipping a toe into the Ruby implementation waters, IronRuby 1.0 has been released. IronRuby is Microsoft's attempt at bringing Ruby natively to the DLR that runs on top of .NET (and Mono), and with version 1.0, it has finally reached maturity with Jimmy Schementi calling it the "first stable version."

awesome_print is a Ruby tool that provides "pretty printing" support for your objects. It's a bit like p, pp or, if you prefer, puts obj.inspect, but with significantly improved, contextual, colored output. Its creator and maintainer is Michael Dvorkin of Fat Free CRM fame.

Hot on the heels of Sinatra 1.0 comes the official release of Padrino (or GitHub repo), a webapp framework that provides an extra layer of functionality on top of Sinatra (like helpers, generators, admin interface, and internationalization). Padrino is Sinatra 1.0 compatible.

With Microsoft's IronRuby and Silverlight, Ruby can become a first-class citizen in the browser on Windows, Linux and OS X.. think <script type="text/ruby"> - yes, it's possible! This walkthrough will get you started with using Ruby in the browser for HTML and vector-graphics-based applications. IronRuby enables Web developers to use Ruby to write client-side browser applications and even reuse code between the server and the client.

Supermodel is a new library by Alex Maccaw that uses the Rails 3.0 ActiveModel library to provide ActiveRecord-esque in-memory "database" storage in Ruby.

In November 2007, we casually mentioned a new Ruby webapp library called Sinatra. It took a year to capture the imagination of the Ruby community as a whole and we eventually covered it in more depth but today we're proud to (exclusively) announce that Sinatra has today reached its landmark 1.0 release!