Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news.

Author Archives: Peter Cooper

By Peter Cooper / December 14, 2011

Sinatra Up and Running is a new book published by O’Reilly and written by Alan Harris and Konstantin Hasse that covers the popular Sinatra web application DSL in a brisk 103 pages, acting as a tutorial to newcomers and a handy reference for old hands.

TLDR: It’s a short, sweet, relatively cheap and very well written book about Sinatra. Recommended. Buy here.

An interesting quirk of Scandinavian society is the concept of Jante Law. It knocks down standing out and being individual, in favor of communal harmony. It’s typically used in a negative context to lament restrictions and lack of risk taking within Nordic society (DHH touched on this briefly in a recent Mixergy interview) but the flip side of the Jante coin is lagom: the idea and ideal of having just the right amount of something. Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 13, 2011

Ludum Dare is an online accelerated game development event that focuses on regular 48 hour competitions. Think Rails Rumble but for games! It’s been around since 2002 but has had a big publicity boost recently due to the participation of Notch, the creator of the mind-bogglingly popular indie game Minecraft.

The next Ludum Dare contest is taking place this coming weekend between December 16-19, 2011 and I want to encourage Rubyists to take part. The competition tends to be dominated by Java, Flash, Microsoft XNA developers, and HTML5 developers, so it’d be great to see more Ruby entries (of which there have only been a couple so far). Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 7, 2011

2011 is drawing to a close and I have been reminded of a post I made about a year ago: Ruby in 2010: A Retrospective of a Great Year for Ruby. 2010 was a stunning year with the release of Ruby 1.9.2, MacRuby 0.5, Sinatra 1.0, Rubinius 1.0, and DataMapper 1.0!

This year, MagLev, Capybara, Cucumber, RefineryCMS, OmniAuth and TorqueBox all hit their 1.0 milestones, but I’ve dug through the archives to see what else 2011 brought for the Ruby scene.

January

Rails Installer: Ruby and Rails on Windows in a Single, Easy Install – Wayne E Seguin, of RVM, released a super simple Rails, Git, SQLite, and Ruby installer for Windows. Read More

By Peter Cooper / December 3, 2011

Welcome to this week’s Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly – it’s bumper sized this week. And a big congratulations to David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails, as he got married recently!

Headlines

Sinatra: Up and Running (New Book from O’Reilly)
A new book from O’Reilly, written by Alan Harris and Konstantin Hasse, that takes a look at the popular Sinatra Ruby webapp library. It’s available in e-book and print formats.

awesome_print 1.0 Released
OK, it’s already at 1.0.1, but Michael Dvorkin’s awesome ‘pretty printer’ for Ruby objects has reached its 1.0 milestone. This is definitely one of my favorite Ruby projects. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 29, 2011

It’s a couple of days late but here are the main headlines from the last week of Ruby news. We have a couple of Rails releases, some event news, and the usual gaggle of great articles and jobs.

Headlines

Rails 3.1.3 Released (Very Quickly After 3.1.2)
This release mainly contains fixes for regressions that popped up in 3.1.2, including a downgrade to Sprockets. 3.1.2 itself was primarily a bug and security fix release and cleared up a XSS vulnerability in the translate helper.

Rails 3.0.11 Released (clears up aforementioned security vuln too)

Matz says ‘Autoload will be dead’ (in Ruby 3.0)
Matz says he should have removed ‘autoload’ from Ruby when he added threads to the language but he has now deprecated them. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 13, 2011

After last week’s bumper set of releases the Ruby world seems a lot quieter this week :-) (Even here. I’ve been hidden away teaching my Ruby Reloaded course!)

Headlines

RSpec 2.8.0 RC1 Released
The next significant release of RSpec is afoot and its first release candidate is now out. Key improvements come to configuration (and being able to override it from the command line) and running examples in random (and pseudo-random) order.

Ruby 1.9.3-p0 RubyInstaller for Windows Available
RubyInstaller is a popular route to installing Ruby for Windows users, and a new version based on the all-new Ruby 1.9.3-p0 is now out. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 7, 2011

The Ruby standard library (a.k.a. stdlib) is a collection of Ruby libraries that, at one time or another, have been considered useful enough to include with the MRI Ruby implementation by standard. Due to the popularity of these libraries, other Ruby implementations have then tended to re-implement or include the standard library too.

As part of the march toward Ruby 2.0, the state of Ruby’s ‘standard library’ has come up for discussion. A popular line of thinking (and IMHO, very likely to actually happen) is that the standard library should be ‘gemified’ for Ruby 2.0.

Why Gemify the Standard Library? Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 5, 2011

The rapid descent of the weather towards winter is getting people to stay in and code and long may it continue given the quality of this week’s releases: OmniAuth 1.0, MagLev 1.0, and Ruby 1.9.3, for starters!

Headlines

Ruby 1.9.3-p0 Released
The first production-ready release of Ruby 1.9.3 is finally here with patchlevel 0′s release this week. I’ve already covered what’s new on Ruby Inside (see the link below) but this is a nice step forward for MRI and worth checking out, especially if you want faster Rails loading times.

MagLev 1.0.0 Released
It’s been a couple of years in the making but MagLev 1.0.0 has released. Read More

By Peter Cooper / November 2, 2011

Recently, there have been many screencasts of people coding things in real time. Yesterday, Ryan Bigg released a video of him implementing Conway’s Game of Life from scratch by reading through the ‘rules’ and then using RSpec to take a test driven approach to fleshing out the functionality.

Ryan is a Ruby Hero and technical writer best known for being co-author of the recently released Rails 3 in Action (along with Yehuda Katz) which I’ll be reviewing soon for Ruby Inside. But Ryan’s also been getting into doing a little screencasting:

If you can’t see the video above, view it directly on Vimeo here. Read More

By Peter Cooper / October 27, 2011

This week brings us a new JRuby release, some Ruby 2.0 news (but you knew that already, right? ;-)) and a new BDD library that seems to have struck a chord with the people I’m following on Twitter. Also, my Ruby Reloaded course is now also over half booked out so if you’re curious, definitely check it out now.

Without further ado, here’s a round up of the top Ruby news and releases from the last week, courtesy of Ruby Weekly:

Headlines and Releases

JRuby 1.6.5 Released: Rounding out Ruby 1.9 Support
The primary goal of JRuby’s 1.6.x series is to round out the Ruby 1.9 support by fixing any reported incompatibilities. Read More

By Peter Cooper / October 24, 2011

Today, Yusuke Endoh posted to the ruby-core mailing list noting that matz has admitted him as a Ruby 2.0 “release manager” and as part of his work, he has come up with a tentative schedule for Ruby 2.0′s release. You can read the full post here.

The short version of the timeline?

  • August 2012: ‘Big feature’ freeze. Any proposals and specs for ‘major features’ should be wrapped up for late August 2012 otherwise they will be deferred.
  • October 2012: Feature freeze. A more conventional feature freeze.
  • February 2013: 2.0 Release. The final version of 2.0 would, hopefully, be released.

A release in February 2013 would have historical significance by being the 20th anniversary of Ruby’s creation. Read More

By Peter Cooper / October 20, 2011

Yesterday, Matz made a commit to the MRI Ruby repository bumping the trunk version from 1.9.4 to 2.0.0, marking the start of the work of implementing the long-discussed ideas for Ruby 2.0.

What is Ruby 2.0?

Ruby 2.0 is the next major version release of MRI Ruby, the de facto official Ruby implementation.

Ruby 1.9.3 is due out any time soon and Ruby 1.9.4 is under active development (it has moved to a separate branch now that trunk is 2.0.0). We recently learned that Ruby 2.0 would then follow Ruby 1.9.4.

Will Ruby 2.0 be a huge leap forward?

No. Read More

By Peter Cooper / October 18, 2011

In Rubyists Already Use Monadic Patterns, Dave Fayram made a passing reference to using ||= to set a variable’s value if its value were ‘Nothing’ (false or nil in Ruby). The resulting Reddit quickly picked up on his definition (which was fixed later) and argued about ||=’s true meaning which isn’t as obvious as many Rubyists think. This spread to Freenode’s awesome #ruby-lang IRC channel where I picked it up.

Abstract (or the TLDR Version)

A common misconception is that a ||= b is equivalent to a = a || b, but it behaves like a || a = b

In a = a || b, a is set to something by the statement on every run, whereas with a || a = b, a is only set if a is logically false (i.e. Read More

By Peter Cooper / October 17, 2011

Back in 2008 and 2009, Ruby Inside had a long line of “Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts” posts, aimed at sharing a collection of news and libraries in one hit. In the last year, I’ve shifted Ruby Inside to focusing on less frequent tutorials or investigative features and have been putting all of the news on Ruby Weekly, my weekly newsletter.

There are still many, though, who would prefer to read the news in their RSS readers or on the Web, so I’m going to be taking the things I find for Ruby Weekly each week, doing a little reformatting, and sharing them here on Ruby Inside too. Read More

By Peter Cooper / October 11, 2011

Ruby Inside wouldn’t be what it is without you but it’s time for me to thank the companies who also help to keep Ruby Inside going by sponsoring my work. Thanks!

I take care not to accept sponsors who have little of interest to the Ruby scene so hopefully you’ll find something useful below – it’s not a roster of faceless companies, these folks are doing great stuff.

Gauges – Simple, Sexy Real-time Analytics

Gauges is a tool for collecting and analyzing the Web traffic for all your sites in real-time using a fast, reliable, hosted system. You can even see overview data for all your sites on a single page. Read More