Peter Cooper Page 35 : Ruby Inside

Is Windows a First Class Platform for Ruby?

By Peter Cooper / March 26, 2008

Luis Lavena is the new maintainer of the popular Ruby “One-Click Installer” for Microsoft Windows. As part of this new role, Luis has set a milestone of cutting the dependency on pre-built packages. He wants to move development from Visual C++ 6 to MinGW, so that Windows-based Ruby developers will, at least, be able to take advantage of a Linux-esque build system for Ruby libraries in future. Back in January, Luis wrote Ruby for Windows, a post where he elaborated on these ideas and wrote candidly about the state of Ruby on Windows (inability to compile some gems without VC6, etc.)

Unfortunately, he didn’t get much of a reaction, and was led to write Is Windows a support platform for Ruby? Read More

HotRuby: A JavaScript & Flash Virtual Machine That Runs Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / March 26, 2008

HotRuby is a JavaScript and Flash powered virtual machine that can run Ruby code compiled to opcode by YARV.

You can write Ruby script within a Web page within <script type=”text/ruby”> .. </script> tags, and HotRuby will then extract it, send it to be compiled by a remote script, and then return it for the JavaScript and Flash powered virtual machine to display within the page. There are lots of demos, including a physics Flash application (as seen in the screenshot above), a very curious pinball game, and a benchmarking script (which shows HotRuby as being 78% faster than Ruby 1.9 on my machine?)

There’s also a live “do it yourself” coding environment if you want to give it a test by writing some code of your own. Read More

Building JSF Applications with JRuby and ActiveRecord-JDBC

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By Peter Cooper / March 20, 2008

JavaServer Faces (JSF) is a Java platform Web application framework developed by Sun. Unlike most Web frameworks, which are request-driven, JSF uses UI components on the front end (typically a Web browser, none the less) that interact over the network, triggering events that cause various actions within a back end application. Rogério Pereira Araújo has put together a solid two part (so far) tutorial that demonstrates how to create JSF applications using JRuby and the JDBC variant of ActiveRecord.

Part one covers declaring JRuby-powered beans within the application and setting up a simple class. Part two goes into defining models, interacting with a database, and presenting data using the UI components. Read More

Interesting Rails Tidbits #5

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By Peter Cooper / March 18, 2008

RailsCamp #3 – June 20-23 – Camp Kariong, Australia (near Sydney)

RailsCamp is an informal Rails camp (literally, you’re in bunk style accommodation) in Australia for Rails coders. The first two events have been popular and so a third has been announced, running between June 20th and June 23rd at Camp Kariong, about 1 hour north of Sydney, NSW. 38 people can be accommodated in bunks but there’s plenty of room for people to camp outdoors with their own equipment or to sleep on the floor. Sounds like a lot of good, cheap fun. Trust those fun-loving Aussies to get it right! Read More

Ruby as an AppleScript Replacement?

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By Peter Cooper / March 18, 2008

John Muchow has put together a three part (so far) set of blog posts that guides you through using Ruby as an alternative for AppleScript on OS X (part 1, part 2, part 3) using the rb-appscript library. It’s very slow moving so even if you’re a complete AppleScript / OS X newbie, you’ll be able to follow it.

Ruby > AppleScript

With all of the developments going on between OS X and Ruby lately, I’m becoming convinced that Ruby could become the de-facto OS X scripting language of choice within the next few years. I’m a programmer, but I find AppleScript hideous enough to avoid it wherever possible, and I’m not the only one. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #19

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By Peter Cooper / March 14, 2008

REST Client – Simple DSL / Ruby Library for Accessing REST Resources

Adam Wiggins of Heroku has made available rest-client, a new library that makes it ridiculously easy to interact with RESTful resources and APIs (over HTTP, naturally.)

Racket – Raw Packet Manipulation with Ruby

Racket is a new Ruby library that “crafts and analyzes” raw network packets. It’s all pretty low level stuff, but a collection of straight forward examples are provided to get you started.

RubyDoes.Net – A Blog for IronRuby Fans

RubyDoes.Net is, effectively, like a Ruby Inside but for the .Net / Microsoft side of things. Read More

Thanks To Ruby Inside’s Sponsors for March 2008

By Peter Cooper / March 13, 2008

February and March have proven to be bumper months for people becoming interested in sponsoring Ruby Inside. It’s thanks to these people and companies that Ruby Inside is continuing to grow, as their support ensures that I can spend more time on the site. I’m hoping that I can use the resources these companies provide to take Ruby Inside to even better places by the end of 2008 and focus on more mini interviews, picking up the latest gossip at Ruby conferences, and developing better ways to share the latest Ruby and Rails news.

I am insistent that Ruby Inside’s sponsors (and all advertising in general) provide services or products that are actually interesting to Ruby or Rails developers. Read More

RadRails 1.0: A Major Evolution of a Powerful, Cross Platform Ruby and Rails IDE

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By Peter Cooper / March 12, 2008

Long-time Rails developers will remember RadRails, a cross-platform, Eclipse-based Rails IDE that became quite popular in 2006, before being adopted by Aptana in 2007. After that, it kinda fell off the radar, but it turns out Aptana has been working hard on it all along and RadRails 1.0 has been released today (an introduction screencast is available for those who’d rather watch than read!)

RadRails is still a Rails-focused product, but with significant improvements that make it an easy-to-use, powerful regular Ruby development environment too. As a general Web developer tools / IDE company, Aptana has integrated RadRails into its Aptana Studio suite which, like the pre-Aptana versions of RadRails, is an open source, Eclipse-based IDE and toolkit, tailored specifically towards Web developers. Read More

Help Fund A Ruby Developer To Work On Open Source For 6 Months

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By Peter Cooper / March 11, 2008

Last week, Gregory Brown, of the O’Reilly Ruby blog and Ruby Reports, came up with the idea of devoting his time to working on Ruby-related open source projects, as a sort of “Ruby mendicant.” He figured if he could raise at least $500 for each week of work, he could devote 20-25 hours per week to the project. The contributors would then be able to suggest ideas, and potentially vote on the things Gregory would work on. His initial ideas included working on the PDF::Writer and Ruby Reports libraries (the former of which could really do with some serious time on it), amongst other things. Read More

Doodle: A New Way To Build and Define Ruby Classes

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By Peter Cooper / March 10, 2008

Doodle is an interesting new Ruby library that adds ActiveRecord-style conventions and relationship building functionality to the process of defining and instantiating (as above) Ruby classes.

Instead of manually building the accessors, setters, and relationships between classes, Doodle lets you define these on a single line, along with default values, initial values, and even validations.

Doodle is an interesting experiment although, personally, I think these sorts of constructs should be part of the base language. Hopefully Doodle will help to popularize this style. Read More

Events News: Matz at Euruko; Philly Emerging Tech; RubyFringe Sells Out Earlybirds

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By Peter Cooper / March 5, 2008

(Licensed under CC 2.0 Attribution. Credit: icanteachyouhowtodoit)

Philly Emerging Tech (March 26 & 27 – Philadelphia, United States of America)

Andrea O. K. Wright writes in with news about Philly Emerging Tech, a Philadelphia based conference taking place in March. Ruby-related attendees and presentations at the conference include Peter Armstrong (Rails on AIR: Best Practices for using Flex 3 and Adobe AIR with Ruby on Rails 2), Giles Bowkett (Code Generation: The Safety Scissors of Metaprogramming), David Chelimsky (Integration Testing with RSpec’s Story Runner), Obie Fernandez, Joe O’Brien (Be Careful, Your Java is Showing), and Chris Wanstrath (The Launch: Bringing a Rails Site to Life). Read More

Shoes News: Free Shoes Books and Applications For Everyone!

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By Peter Cooper / March 4, 2008

It seems that Why The Lucky Stiff’s cross-platform, GUI application development environment, Shoes, is going from strength to strength! In the last several months, lots of new Shoes applications have been developed, and in the last couple of weeks there have been some interesting developments, such as Nobody Knows Shoes entering the public domain, and “The Shoebox,” a Shoes application repository, going live.

Note: Six months ago, there was a compilation post on Ruby Inside with links to Shoes related tutorials which is still worth referring to.

Nobody Knows Shoes – The Official Shoes Manual – Goes Free!

Nobody Knows Shoes, the official guide to Shoes, was released in paperback form a few months ago, available to buy via Lulu.com where you can still pick up this gem for a mere $5.57. Read More

Ebb: C-Powered Web Server That Uses Rack – Faster than Mongrel and Thin

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By Peter Cooper / March 4, 2008

Ebb is a small, extremely high performance Web / HTTP server designed specifically for hosting applications built upon Web frameworks such as Rails and Merb (and, in future, apps on other non-Ruby frameworks.) The design is event based (similar to that used by Ruby daemons that use EventMachine) but Ebb itself is written in C and dispatches requests to Rack adapters. This is a real leapfrog over the popular Mongrel and Thin daemons which are primarily written in Ruby, and results in scary levels of performance.

Since the start of 2008, it seems as if the Ruby and Rails deployment sectors have been on fire! Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #18

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By Peter Cooper / March 1, 2008

MacRuby: Ruby Running On Top of Objective-C

Most Mac-based Ruby developers are already familiar with RubyCocoa, a bridge that enables regular Ruby apps to talk to OS X’s various frameworks. MacRuby, however, takes a rather different approach and is a port of Ruby 1.9 that runs directly on the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector. It’s still in its early stages, but for anyone interested in Ruby implementations, this is worth a look.

Try: Stop Using “@person ? @person.name : nil” And Start Using “@person.try(:name)”

try() is a ridiculously simple, but incredibly useful, bit of sugar Chris Wanstrath has come up with for making it easy to “try” and call methods on objects, but without Ruby getting upset if that method doesn’t exist. Read More

Waves: A New Rails-like Web Applications Framework

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By Peter Cooper / February 29, 2008

Ruby Waves is a new Web application framework for Ruby, developed by Dan Yoder. On the surface, this makes it seem “Rails-like” but Waves is billing itself as a “next-generation” framework, a cutting edge Rails-inspired framework, if you will. Dan says that Waves is “not a better Rails” but the realization of an evolution of the ideas behind frameworks like Rails. For example, Waves supports request lambdas (mapping a request to a block, rather than a URL pattern to a controller and action), just-in-time resources, nested layouts, and hot-patching. Waves is also thread-safe.

Dan has done a great job at documenting Waves, with a screencast, tutorial, and a bumper-packed official site all ready to go. Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper