Peter Cooper Page 24 : Ruby Inside

TinyRB: A Young, Tiny Ruby VM for Us to Play With

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By Peter Cooper / February 13, 2009

Marc-André Cournoyer has proven that almost anything is possible by developing a small, functional, and surprisingly “unslow” Ruby VM called TinyRB. Some basic testing shows that it’s faster than 1.8 on a Fibonacci benchmark, though slightly slower than JRuby, Rubinius, and YARV (Ruby 1.9).

Coming in at just 1541 lines of code so far, TinyRB is not going to be replacing your usual Ruby interpreter anytime soon. While it supports most of the keywords and some base classes including Class, Object, Fixnum, Symbol, and String, there’s no support for Array, Module, Float, and a whole ton of essential stuff.

TinyRB, in its current state, is a playground for you to mess around in. Read More

CouchFoo: Like ActiveRecord, but for CouchDB

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By Peter Cooper / February 11, 2009

Apache CouchDB is a “distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API” that has received quite a bit of publicity in developer circles in the past year. It’s written in Erlang, so has all of the scalability and flexibility the Erlang environment brings to the table, but as a RESTful service, you can use it from pretty much anywhere.

George Palmer, a UK-based Rails developer, wanted to use CouchDB but found the existing libraries (such as RelaxDB, CouchREST, ActiveCouch and CouchPotato) lacking – not that they are, as such, but they didn’t fit George’s needs. Read More

23 Useful Ruby 1.9 Links and Resources

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By Peter Cooper / February 9, 2009

It’s approaching two weeks now since Ruby 1.9.1 was released, bringing with it not only a whole stack of extra performance and a new VM, but also a lot of compatibility issues. No pain, no gain!

Thankfully, the Ruby community in its typical way has got to blogging, writing scripts, and what not, resulting in a flurry of useful links and resources for those brave enough to test the Ruby 1.9.1 waters. So here come 23 useful Ruby 1.9.1 links and resources! If you have any others you wish to add, please leave a comment as people will be checking those out too. Read More

Access Ruby Docs from the OS X Dictionary and Spotlight

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By Peter Cooper / February 8, 2009

Priit Haamer is an Estonia-based Ruby developer who has put together a “Ruby dictionary for Mac OS X.” All you have to do is download the file he provides, unzip it into your ~/Library/Dictionaries folder (or create that folder and unzip it in there) and you’ll be able to use the built-in OS X “Dictionary” application to search for Ruby module names, classes, and methods.

It is also possible to have Spotlight bring up entries from this dictionary too by going in to Dictionary’s preferences and dragging the new Ruby dictionary to the top of the priority list. If you have turned off the Dictionary option in Spotlight, you’d need to turn that back on too. Read More

Thanks to Ruby Inside’s Sponsors for February 2009

By Peter Cooper / February 7, 2009

It’s time to thank those great companies and individuals who help keep Ruby Inside (and often other Ruby sites) going. Note: All descriptions and notes are written by Ruby Inside and are not directly influenced by the sponsors. As such, any opinions stated are those of Ruby Inside and not necessarily shared by the sponsor!

FiveRuns – Rails Application Monitoring Solutions

FiveRuns is a provider of Rails application (and server) monitoring services. FiveRuns works hard to be part of the community, whether by releasing a free Ruby and Rails stack or publishing a great set of interviews with Ruby developers on their blog. Read More

Is It Ruby 1.9: Report and Track How Compatible Ruby Libraries Are With 1.9

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By Peter Cooper / February 6, 2009

Ruby 1.9.1 was released last week but due to the significant changes between the 1.8 and 1.9 versions of MRI, not all libraries and gems work with it. The trouble is.. which do and which don’t? My advice last week was to just start playing and not to switch anything serious across until you could guarantee all of your preferred libraries worked.

Is It Ruby 1.9 – developed by Rails host Brightbox – helps with the process of tracking gem compatibility with Ruby 1.9. It’s a place for the Ruby community to both report and track compatibility for all public gems. Read More

Feedzirra – A New Ruby Feed Library “Built for Speed”

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By Peter Cooper / February 4, 2009

Feedzirra is an all-new Ruby feed parsing (it’s not a generator) library by Paul Dix. The choice of feed parsing libraries in Ruby has been reasonably limited so far, so Feedzirra is a most welcome addition to the Ruby ecosystem. Its focus is on pure speed – it uses Nokogiri (an ultra fast Ruby XML parser that depends on libxml) and curb (bindings for libcurl – to do the HTTP work) so compilation is required. Feedzirra was designed to be used to fetch thousands of feeds, process updates quickly, save on bandwidth (with conditional GETs, etc) and be dead simple to use. Read More

Ruby 1.9.1 Released – First Production Release of the Fastest Ruby Ever!

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By Peter Cooper / January 31, 2009

2012 update: Still not up to speed with Ruby 1.9? Check out the Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough for a 3 hour guide to the details :-)

Years of hard work reached a crescendo today as Yuki Sonoda announced the release of Ruby 1.9.1, the first stable release of the Ruby 1.9 series of MRI. In effect, 1.9.1 replaces 1.8.7 as the latest stable release of “Matz’s” Ruby interpreter although (as we’ll cover below) it’s not entirely that simple.

We’ll be doing a roundup of Ruby 1.9 related links and resources soon here on Ruby Inside, but if you want to get up to speed with what Ruby 1.9 is all about right now, I’d recommend checking out the Migrating to Ruby 1.9 presentation by Bruce Williams, Ruby 1.9: What to Expect by Sam Ruby, and James Edward Gray’s Getting Code Ready for Ruby 1.9. Read More

Why Using require ‘rubygems’ Is Wrong

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By Peter Cooper / January 30, 2009

Ryan Tomayko, currently known as one of the lead developers of Sinatra, was definitely not mincing his words yesterday when he posted Why “require ‘rubygems’” In Your Library/App/Tests Is Wrong:

You should never do this in a source file included with your library, app, or tests:

require ‘rubygems’

The system I use to manage my $LOAD_PATH is not your library/app/tests concern. Whether rubygems is used or not is an environment issue. Your library or app should have no say in the matter. Explicitly requiring rubygems is either not necessary or misguided.

But.. why?

When I use your library, deploy your app, or run your tests I may not want to use rubygems. Read More

Ruby + Graphviz == Automated Data Visualization

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By Peter Cooper / January 29, 2009

Mark McBride has written Automating Data Visualization with Ruby and Graphviz, a great introduction to using Ruby with the popular Graphviz tool to produce visualizations of data.

The article starts off with an example of the sort of data you might want to analyze then moves on to explaining GraphViz and its “DOT” notation. From there, Mark leaps straight into using the ruby-graphviz library and provides code to produce a graph for a sample data set.

Once you get in to Graphviz you might also want to check out RailRoad, a “Ruby on Rails diagrams generator” that produces model and controller relationship diagrams from your Rails applications. Read More

Rhodes: Develop Full iPhone, RIM, and Symbian Apps using Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / January 23, 2009

Rhodes – developed by Rhomobile – is an intriguing framework of Ruby interpreters that can be used to develop native applications for the iPhone, Windows Mobile, RIM (Blackberry) and Symbian smartphone platforms (with Android support to come). Last month, Werner Schuster (of InfoQ) wrote a basic roundup of how Rhodes works.

Essentially, Rhomobile has put together a set of technologies that each work on each mobile platform supported, including a Ruby interpreter, a synchronization library, an object mapper, and functions that enable developers to gain access to features like GPS, accelerometers, and contact storage. Rhodes is not yet at version 1.0 and while some developers are beginning to submit Rhodes-powered apps to the iPhone App Store – none have yet been accepted (although Rhomobile claim that there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be). Read More

Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts by Steve Pugh

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By Peter Cooper / January 20, 2009

Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts (or Amazon.com link – currently $19.77) is a new Ruby book by Steve Pugh that has just one goal: to share a bunch of “wicked, cool” Ruby scripts in various categories with readers. The publisher is No Starch and they offered to send me a copy for review.

First, No Starch Press is an independent technical book publisher (a rare entity nowadays) and if this book is any indicator, they have a real passion for producing books that are delightful to own. It’s so rare that you get nice paper in a book – here it’s thick and textured (and certified by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative). Read More

Two Upcoming Ruby Events: Euruko and MountainWest RubyConf

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By Peter Cooper / January 17, 2009

Euruko 2009 – The European Ruby Conference – May 9-10, Barcelona, Spain

Euruko is Europe’s annual Ruby conference. In 2008, it went down a storm in Prague, Czech Republic, with over 300 Rubyists attending, including Matz and the JRuby guys! Plans are now well underway for Euruko 2009, now scheduled for May 9-10, 2009 and being held in Barcelona, Spain. Matz is, again, confirmed as an attendee, so if you’re a European Ruby developer and fancy meeting Matz, this is the ideal chance.

Registration is not yet open but you can subscribe to the event’s feed (note to event organizers – please get some sort of pre-registration up before getting us to mention your event – you’re losing registrations!). Read More

Wikipedia Needs Rubyists to Flesh Out Mobile Vision

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By Peter Cooper / January 12, 2009

You might know Hampton Catlin as the Rubyist who invented the Haml markup system (as used in many Ruby web apps), Sass or make_resourceful. What you might not know, however, is that Hampton went on to develop a successful Wikipedia iPhone app (iPedia née iWik – listen to this podcast about its development) and was then hired by Wikipedia to lead the development of the mobile Wikipedia site (powered by Ruby!)

Hampton has been taking Ruby into Wikipedia in a big way and he needs the help of other Rubyists to keep the momentum going. I caught up with Hampton to find out what he’s doing at Wikipedia, what Wikipedia needs, and how Rubyists can get involved:

Ruby Inside: What are you responsible for at Wikipedia? Read More

5 Ruby / Rails Jobs for January 2009

By Peter Cooper / January 11, 2009

Looking for a job where you can work on Ruby and Rails apps? You’re in the right place! Recently we’ve had several Rails-focused positions added to the Ruby jobs board. Alternatively, if you’re a company looking to hire Ruby and Rails developers and you’re in the US, head over to the job board too – it costs $150 for 60 days of exposure, and your jobs get featured in a post like this too!

This month’s interesting opportunities:

Ruby / Ruby on Rails Programmers (Toronto, Canada): Hewitt Associates – a human resources outsourcing and consulting company – is looking for a Toronto, Ontario based Ruby and Rails developer who will develop and maintain new and existing business applications. Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper

Euruko 2009 – The European Ruby Conference – May 9-10, Barcelona, Spain