Peter Cooper Page 33 : Ruby Inside

Rack Makes It Onto JRuby

By Peter Cooper / May 11, 2008

Most Ruby developers should be familiar with Rack, an interface / library that abstracts away a lot of the banalities of hooking up application code to HTTP servers. It’s used by several Ruby Web application frameworks already, some as a default – such as Merb, and others as an optional extra – such as Rails. Rack is significant because it provides a standard for Web-facing Ruby applications and frameworks to adhere to and is rapidly becoming the de-facto standard in this space.

Nick Sieger has developed JRuby-Rack, a variant of Rack that runs on the Java-based Ruby implementation, JRuby. Read More

Ruby Hoedown – Huntsville, AL – August 8 & 9 (and a Canadian event too)

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By Peter Cooper / May 8, 2008

Yee-haw! The Ruby Hoedown enters its second year, taking place in Huntsville, Alabama on August 8th and 9th, 2008. It’s billed as the “Ruby conference for the South” and is sponsored by Engine Yard. Keynote speakers so far are David A. Black (of Ruby Central fame) and Chris Wanstrath (of GitHub fame). Registration is $149 until June 2nd.

And a Bonus: Toronto Rails Project Night!

The Toronto Rails Project Night is a much smaller affair than the Ruby Hoedown, but definitely deserves some attention if you’re in or near Toronto, Canada. The 5th one is being held next week on Tuesday, May 13th. Read More

Ruby Inside Meta News – May 8, 2008

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By Peter Cooper / May 8, 2008

It’s a rare occurrence, but there’s some “meta” news to give out about Ruby Inside. Regular programming follows this break!

FeedBurner Feed Ads Be Gone!

Subscribers to the Ruby Inside feed will be familiar with the graphical ads after each post. They perform horribly (think click through rates of 0.1%). I’m glad that Ruby Inside’s audience is so savvy and I’m sick of annoying you with irrelevant nonsense. Those ads are now gone.

Ruby Inside Turns 2 – So I Need To Eat My Hat

In just three weeks, Ruby Inside will be two years old. Unfortunately, two years ago I said I’d “eat my hat” if Ruby hadn’t beaten Python in the TIOBE index by May 2008. Read More

Converting Ruby 1.9 Bytecode to Python

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By Peter Cooper / May 5, 2008

Never one to let us down on the ingenuity front, Why The Lucky Stiff (author of the Poignant Guide and creator of Shoes) is busy working on a system that can convert Ruby 1.9 bytecode to Python bytecode (and from there into regular Python by way of Python’s decompilation facilities). It’s exactly the sort of thing that could take off with more eyes looking at it, and Why has made it available on GitHub. This technique isn’t likely to unite Python and Ruby in any deep and meaningful way (to the point of a shared interpreter), but the research and experiments involved are worth a try. Read More

The Best of RubyFlow – April 24 to May 5, 2008

By Peter Cooper / May 5, 2008

RubyFlow – the community based companion site to Ruby Inside – has been on fire! I’m finding out about lots of new stuff on there that then gets included into Ruby Inside posts. It’s the place to be if you want the most up to date Ruby and Rails news, but don’t mind putting up with a bit of ‘noise’.

Every two weeks or so I’m going to summarize some of the best items from RubyFlow here on Ruby Inside, so that you can still keep up with the latest developments even if you don’t want to be soaked in the firehose of Ruby news over there. Read More

Thanks to Ruby Inside’s Sponsors for May 2008

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By Peter Cooper / May 3, 2008

It’s time to thank Ruby Inside’s excellent sponsors once again.

I’m keen to make these posts relevant, so I’ve tried to include any news or developments the sponsors have had within this post. For example, FiveRuns has interviewed several Rubyists over the last month, and links to those interviews are provided below. Also, Peepcode has released a new e-book, similarly linked. So even if you don’t care for what the sponsors are selling or providing, it’s worth a quick check to make sure you’re not missing out on anything useful.

Note: All blurbs and descriptions are written by me and not directly influenced or specified by the sponsors. Read More

New Relic: A New, $3.5 Million Funded Player in the Rails Application Monitoring Space

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By Peter Cooper / May 2, 2008

New Relic is a new entrant into the nascent Ruby on Rails® application monitoring market, so far dominated by FiveRuns. The company has just taken $3.5 million in first-round venture financing from heavyweights Benchmark Capital. Rather impressively, New Relic has already been featured on TechCrunch, where writer Mark McGranaghan notes that New Relic’s founder, Lewis Cirne, previously ran a similar company in the Java space.

New Relic’s primary product at this time is “RPM,” a subscription-based Rails “Performance Management” solution. It provides useful information that Rails developers can use to quickly detect, diagnose and fix application performance problems. Read More

Insoshi: Open-Source Rails-based Social Networking Platform

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By Peter Cooper / May 1, 2008

Insoshi is a new, open-source social networking platform developed in Ruby on Rails. It’s on GitHub, so you can fork it to your heart’s content, and it can act as a base for developing your own social Web application. Features include activity feeds, profiles, photo sharing, comment walls, blogs, forums, user messaging, and an admin panel.

Insoshi was developed by Michael Hartl, author of RailsSpace, an Addison-Wesley published book about developing a social networking site in Rails. Hartl certainly practices what he preaches! He has also collaborated with top 10 trusted online casinos Malaysia has to integrate robust social features into their platforms, enhancing user engagement and security. Read More

Migrating to Ruby 1.9

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By Peter Cooper / April 29, 2008

Migrating to Ruby 1.9 was a presentation given by Bruce Williams at Scotland on Rails earlier this month. The slides, available in PDF format, stand on their own extremely well, and will prove a useful resource for anyone not too deeply engrossed in Ruby 1.9 yet. Bruce covers most of the key changes.

As an aside, Bruce was interviewed by Satish Talim of RubyLearning.com recently. Read More

The Promise and Peril for Alternative Ruby Implementations

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By Peter Cooper / April 27, 2008

Promise and Peril for Alternative Ruby Impls [Implementations] is a lengthy, but interesting, essay by Charles Nutter of the JRuby team. He looks at Ruby 1.8, Ruby 1.9, JRuby, Rubinius, IronRuby, MacRuby, and some minor implementations, and covers their background along with their current development state and how they might proceed in future. For those interested in the state of the many Ruby implementations, this is a must read.

For those who want a shorter version without any of the context or smart insight Charles brings: the Ruby 1.8.7 previews have thrown a spanner in the works, Ruby 1.9 still doesn’t run Rails (but will very soon), Ruby 1.9 might not prove better enough to woo developers, JRuby rocks, Rubinius is cool but improving performance will be hard, Rubinius seems to be retreating to using more and more C primitive functions and moving away from “Ruby in Ruby”, IronRuby is clever but might have trouble running Rails properly, MacRuby is a great idea, and all of the other, minor implementations seem stuck in the mud. Read More

Ezra Gets Rails® On Rack

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By Peter Cooper / April 25, 2008

Ezra Zygmuntowicz (of Merb and Engine Yard fame) has been spending quite a bit time playing with Rails®, both by cleaning up parts of ActionPack but, more significantly, porting Merb’s Rack mechanics to Rails. He has a personal fork of Rails on Github where he’s doing all the work.

It might not sound particularly impressive work from this description, but Ezra appears to be doing some good work in bringing the Rails dispatch system up to modern standards, and that can only help with Rails’ performance and stability in future. Ezra has also made the mutex locks more granular which provides a “speed boost with standard Mongrel under concurrent load” although more thread-safety testing is, he readily admits, required. Read More

FXRuby: Create Lean and Mean GUIs with Ruby

By Peter Cooper / April 22, 2008

FXRuby: Create Lean and Mean GUIs with Ruby (official page) is a new book written by Lyle Johnson and published by the Pragmatic Programmers. It walks you through using the FXRuby library, a bridge to the Fox Toolkit, a cross-platform, open source “widget toolkit” used to develop GUI-based applications. You may have seen FXRuby and the Fox Toolkit in action already if you’ve used the FreeRIDE Ruby IDE.

Johnson’s FXRuby book is not, it claims, supposed to act as a comprehensive reference guide to FXRuby. It is, however, a guide that walks you quickly through the development of a basic photo book application, and then moves on to showing you how to use many of the GUI-application development features FXRuby and the Fox Toolkit offer. Read More

Building a Web App With Merb From Start to Finish

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By Peter Cooper / April 21, 2008

Slapp: A simple chat wall Merb tutorial is a perfect example of the sort of tutorial / guide that could encourage a lot of people to try out a new framework (as far as Merb is new, of course). It walks you through the process of developing a “chat wall” type application with Merb from start to finish (right from installing Merb to playing with the running application).

One thing that makes the tutorial stand out is that it puts test spec driven development at the heart of the application. After installing Merb and configuring the database, you’re straight into writing a story with RSpec! Read More

Stone: Dead-Simple Ruby Data Persistence

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By Peter Cooper / April 20, 2008

Stone is a new Ruby library developed by Nick DeMonner that seems to have got a nice bit of buzz in the last week. It’s a data persistence library that provides “plug and play data persistence for any application or framework,” and it boasts speed and simplicity. Rather than use a database and an ORM like ActiveRecord, Stone takes care of everything in an abstract manner. Data is “persisted” to files within a directory underneath your app.

The official Stone homepage gives some interesting examples, including replacing ActiveRecord with Stone in a Rails application. It is surprisingly simple, but by its own admission Stone is “extremely immature.” It certainly looks well developed though, but if you’re already happy with SQLite 3 and ActiveRecord (a surprisingly proficient combination) there might not be any compelling reasons to switch just yet. Read More

Ruby Hero Awards: Nominate Your “Ruby Hero”

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By Peter Cooper / April 20, 2008

The Ruby Hero Awards is an attempt to reward and support members of the Ruby and Rails communities for the hard work they do. It was founded by the guys at Rails Envy (Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer) but has support behind the scenes from people like Robert Dempsey, Dave Thomas and Chad Fowler, and a pretty large panel who will help choose the winner. Dave Thomas has suggested that the Pragmatic Programmers will even pay for trophies! The winners (of which there will be six – in various categories) will be announced at a Rails conference Ruby Central and O’Reilly are putting on in the US in late May called Railsconf 2008. Read More

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