To date, the main ways to send e-mails from Ruby have been Net::SMTP, TMail, and Rails’ ActionMailer (which uses TMail). Now, however, there’s a fourth option, the simply named “mail” by Mikel Lindsaar.

Mail is a new pure Ruby library designed to handle the generation, parsing, and sending of e-mail in a “Rubyesque” manner. Both the sending and receiving e-mails can be handled through the library and, where necessary, Mail proxies methods from libraries like Net::SMTP and Net::POP3. Ruby 1.9 support has been built in from day one so dealing with different text encodings in your e-mails is easier than ever (Mikel claims this is less than straightforward with TMail). Read More

A couple of weeks ago, popular micro-blogging service Twitter unveiled a beta “streaming API.” Twitter’s nature means they get hammered with polling requests so they’ve begun to experiment with the concept of streaming relevant data within a single HTTP request (in a Comet style). TweetStream (or GitHub repo) is a new Ruby library by Michael Bleigh to handle interacting with Twitter streams from Ruby.

TweetStream is available as a gem from both GitHub and Gemcutter (which, incidentally, got a fresh design today) and installation instructions are given in Michael’s blog post about TweetStream. Once you’re all installed, though, reading the live stream becomes as simple as:

require ‘tweetstream’

TweetStream::Client.new(TWITTER_USERNAME, TWITTER_PASSWORD).sample do |status|
puts “[#{status.user.screen_name}] #{status.text}”
end

Beyond basic functions, though, TweetStream also include daemonization features that allow you to create scripts that run in the background “out of the box.” You could add these features yourself with the daemons library, sure, but having this at hand to quickly throw together Twitter scripts is pretty cool. Read More