Anemone is a free, multi-threaded Ruby web spider framework from Chris Kite, which is useful for collecting information about websites. With Anemone you can write tasks to generate some interesting statistics on a site just by giving it the URL.
Its only dependency is Nokogiri (an HTML and XML parser). Other than that, you just need to install the gem to get started using Anemone’s simple syntax which, among other things, allows you to tell it which pages to include (based on regular…
Integrity is a simple and lightweight Continuous Integration server written in Sinatra (a DSL for quickly creating web-applications in Ruby). When commits are pushed to a Git repository, Integrity builds, runs tests, and reports the build status to each team member. It supports a variety of notifiers including Email, IRC, and Twitter.
When it comes to developing large projects with multiple team members, it’s common nowadays to set up a Continuous Integration (CI) server. CI is a development practice where developers combine their…
MongoDB a is a high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database written in C++. It’s sort of a cross between scalable key/value stores and traditional functionality-rich relational databases.
MongoDB might be useful as a fast, simple, non-transactional data store for a web application, or as a caching mechanism. You don’t ever need to worry about migrations due to Mongo’s schema-less nature.
Getting started with MongoDB using Ruby is now fairly straightforward thanks to the Mongo Ruby driver. This provides access to the core Mongo…
The Interactive Ruby Shell (irb) and the Rails console are great for interacting and experimenting with your ruby application code, but sometimes it’s hard to visualize the output. Gabriel Horner has come to the rescue with Hirb: a ‘mini view framework’ for irb which is designed to improve the default output to make it more human-readable.
Hirb does this by formatting console output according to its type, and paging if there’s more than a screenful to display. For example, Hirb will automatically display…
The latest installment of the series of posts crammed with random Ruby links, articles, and resources to kick off your week!
17 High Quality Videos from GoGaRuCo
Earlier this month, the videos from the GoGaRuCo (Golden Gate Ruby Conference) conference that took place back in April went online. The talks are all available in MPEG 4 video and MP3 audio formats. Video and audio quality are really good overall (no annoying humming or reverb that often plague such undertakings).
This post is by Matt Sears of Littlelines.
Rdoc.info is simple web service that uses YARD (a documentation generation tool for Rubyists) to generate documentation for Ruby libraries hosted on Github. If you’re not familiar with YARD, it allows you to add metadata to Ruby documentation similar to other languages such as Java and Objective-C. Another cool thing about YARD is its extensibility and allowing you to plug in custom handlers and output.
Ilya Grigorik has written an interesting article called Profiling Ruby with Google’s Perftools about using a port of Google’s Perftools (perftools.rb) to build graphs showing the results of profiling sessions on your Ruby code. As with all of Ilya’s great posts, it’s punchy and to the point.
Ilya starts by explaining what Perftools is and shows how to use its regular profiling features from Ruby, which are impressive enough, but then moves on to showing how to generate graphic profiling charts that graphically…
Earlier this week, Rip quietly made its way into the world. It’s a “next generation” Ruby packaging system, clearly meant to both work around some of the problems with RubyGems and also introduce some fresh ideas of its own. If you want to immediately jump and learn more, check out the official About us page for a tour.
Rip comes from the Github and Sinatra stables with the primary contributors being Chris Wanstrath, Jeff Hodges, Tom Preston-Werner, John Barnette, Blake Mizerany, Ryan Tomayko…
It has always been a trend with Rubyists to take things that have poor interfaces and give them better ones. Javan Makhmali from Inkling Markets has lived up to this trend, and given us Whenever, a library that wraps cron’s syntax with a Ruby API (cron being a UNIX task scheduling tool).
Whenever can be tightly integrated with Rails (providing application specific commands such as “rake” and “runner” from the API – see an example here), but can also be run as a standalone program. Whenever outputs…
LA Ruby was a single track Ruby conference that took place in Los Angeles (Orange County really, but we’ll let them off..) at the start of April. The crack conference recording team Confreaks was in attendance and they’ve released 14 awesome videos from the event. Most of the videos are about 30 minutes long and you can watch them directly in your browser, download HD or SD MP4 files, or subscribe to the iTunes video podcast or Miro feed.
