Peter Cooper Page 39 : Ruby Inside

Halcyon – A Ruby and JSON Powered Web App Framework

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By Peter Cooper / January 3, 2008

Halcyon is a interesting new Web app framework by Matt Todd, written in Ruby. What makes Halcyon interesting is that while it’s very small and fast, as many of the Web app framework newcomers (such as Sinatra) are, its focus is entirely on using JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) for communications to and from the server. This could make Halcyon particularly well suited for providing the backend to simple “single page” AJAX driven applications. Another bonus is that Halcyon’s source code is full of comments and explanations and there’s documentation out the wazoo. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #12

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By Peter Cooper / December 30, 2007

RubyCamp 2008 in Vancouver, Canada – January 26, 2008

RubyCamp 2008 is a one-day “Ruby camp” in Vancouver, Canada, taking place on January 26, 2008. All are invited, Rubyists and Railers alike, and it runs from 9am to 5pm at “WorkSpace” in downtown Vancouver. There’s a lot more about it at the official RubyCamp site. Two “tracks” will be in flow, a traditional conference-style track with speakers giving talks, and a “Hackathon” track taking an un-conference approach where you can just show off your cool application, Ruby tricks, and stuff like that.

Solving Rails Performance Bottlenecks with RM-Manage

Solving Rails Performance Bottlenecks with RM-Manage is an article by enterprise Rails deployment company FiveRuns that looks at how to use their RM-Manage service to, unsurprisingly, deal with bottlenecks in your Rails applications. Read More

Engine Yard Has 5 Full-Timers Working on Rubinius

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By Peter Cooper / December 30, 2007

Why Rubinius Matters to Ruby’s Future is a short blog post by Reg Braithwaite that explains why the Rubinius “Ruby in Ruby” implementation project is important to Ruby’s future. In short, it’s because Rubinius lets you tweak and add new features to the language at a low level using the Ruby language itself (well, a subset, but who’s counting.. Captain Crunch?).

Ordinarily, such a short post, despite being good, wouldn’t get a post to itself on the Ruby Inside front page, but a comment from Ezra Zygmuntowicz, of Engine Yard, and a co-worker of Rubinius’ founder, Evan Phoenix, got me little tip-tappers all over-excited:

[...] we (engineyard.com) have hired a full time staff of 5 people to work solely on Rubinius. Read More

Ruby 1.9 Is Released!

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By Peter Cooper / December 28, 2007

Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. Matz) has announced the release of Ruby 1.9.0. Ruby 1.9 is a development release of Ruby, so don’t expect to switch all of your production applications over to it. Indeed, Ruby 1.8 is officially still the stable choice (pending further news), so tread with caution and don’t expect miracles. For the impatient, the main download is available straight away from ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.0-0.tar.gz

Following tradition, the new version of Ruby was released over the public holiday period (Ruby 1.8.4 was released on December 24, 2005, for example), and one of the biggest changes has been the move to a new virtual machine (YARV) that yields significant performance improvements over the 1.8.x versions. Read More

The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez

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By Peter Cooper / December 24, 2007

The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez (published by Addison Wesley) is a long awaited book billing itself as the “expert guide to building Ruby on Rails applications.” More precisely, the book dives into nearly every area of the Rails libraries and APIs and acts as a reference work for them. Coming in at about 850 pages, the book is physically very similar to The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton. There’s no denying that these two books look good next to each other on the bookshelf, and a lot of comparison can be made between the two.

One of the things I love about Fulton’s The Ruby Way is how the book is divided up into chapters covering discrete topics like strings, regular expressions, math, IO, threads, and so on, and then each chapter drills down into twenty or more sections each looking at a different aspect of that topic. Read More

Several Ruby Related Interviews

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By Peter Cooper / December 21, 2007

There have been a bunch of interview related links coming in over the past week, so it makes sense to put them all together to give you a nice pre-Christmas injection of interesting interviews to read. Enjoy!

Why Several Ruby Experts Are In Love With Ruby/Rails

Job search site OdinJobs interviewed several “Ruby experts” (and I only use quotes there because I’m in the list!) and asked them why they like Ruby and Rails and for tidbits of advice to newcomers to the Ruby community. The experts are Satish Talim, Alex Wayne, Alex Leverington, Abhay Kumar, Adam Williams, Alex Kane, Adam Keys, and Peter Cooper. Read More

Interesting Rails Tidbits #2

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By Peter Cooper / December 21, 2007

The Future of Web Services Presentation

Gregg Pollack of RailsEnvy gave a talk last week at the Orlando Ruby Users Group called “The Future of Web Services,” where he looked at what Web services are, what REST is, how REST solves Web service related problems, how Rails works with REST, and so forth. A live Rails coding demo is included and Gregg gives it his usual well-produced, charismatic all.

Learning Rails Podcast

Learning Rails is a new, professionally produced podcast by Michael Slater that takes listeners through the concepts behind Ruby on Rails development. The podcast is designed for people who are new to Ruby and Rails, rather than seasoned developers. Read More

RubyGems 1.0.0 Released

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By Peter Cooper / December 20, 2007

Eric Hodel has just announced the release of RubyGems 1.0.0. As you probably already know, RubyGems is the de-facto package / library manager for Ruby applications and libraries, and almost every Ruby developer will have a version installed. There aren’t many new features with this major version release, but lots of fixes, tweaks, and stability and usability enhancements. One key thing to note, however, is that require_gem is no longer supported, so if you have code that depends on that, you will have a little work to do before upgrading.

If you’re on RubyGems 0.8.5 or later, then you can upgrade easily with: gem update –system .. Read More

Winners of “Troubleshooting Ruby Processes” Announced

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By Peter Cooper / December 16, 2007

Two weeks ago we ran a contest where you could talk about the sort of Ruby books you’d like to see available and have a chance to win one of three copies of “Troubleshooting Ruby Processes” by Philippe Hanrigou. The three winners are CptOatmeal, Andrew Simard, and Raju Gandhi who will each receive a copy via e-mail from the publisher shortly. I’d like to thank everyone who commented.. there were 56 comments in all and tons of amazing book ideas. I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw the publishers announcing books along the lines of the suggestions soon!

Staying on the topic of Troubleshooting Ruby Processes, author Philippe Hanrigou was recently interviewed by Pat Eyler of On Ruby. Read More

RSpec 1.1 Released: Now Supports Rails 2.0

By Peter Cooper / December 16, 2007

The team behind RSpec, a Behavior-Driven Development based “testing” library, have announced the release of RSpec 1.1.0. This will be of particular interest to Rails 2.0 developers as support has now been added, along with interoperability with Test::Unit. RSpec 1.1 also includes a Rails tool called “RailsStory” that allows you write “user stories” that can be tested out on the fly. Read More

RubyRags: Ruby and Rails Powered Clothing

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By Peter Cooper / December 15, 2007

RubyRags is a new clothing company that specializes in shirts for Ruby and Ruby on Rails junkies. It’s rare I ever see anything commercial worth getting a whole post to itself here at Ruby Inside but there’s clearly some thought and sincerity behind this. The designs so far are really slick. I’d certainly love to see a WhyTheLuckyStiff designed one in the future though. Shirts are around the $20 mark, plus shipping, and there’s a 10% discount for Rails Core contributors. Read More

How To Develop Computer Games In Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / December 13, 2007

In the first of a series, Andrea Wright looks at how to create games using Ruby. The series isn’t a tutorial level set of articles, but instead a walk through some of the major libraries and technologies you can use along with some code examples. In this first edition, Andrea looks at Ruby/SDL, Rubygame (inspired heavily by PyGame, a significant Python game development library) and RUDL. Read More

Interesting Rails Tidbits #1

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By Peter Cooper / December 12, 2007

We’re taking a brief break from the regular “Interesting Ruby Tidbits” posts to focus on Rails™ only for a change. Rails has just made it to version 2.0 so there’s been plenty of action in the community. Here are some of the highlights:

The First Rails 2.0 Screencast

I can’t confirm the validity of its title, but The First Rails 2.0 Screencast is a screencast by Fabio Akita that walks through building a RESTful blog system in 30 minutes using Rails 2.0.

PeepCode Rails2 PDF (now in Spanish too!)

“Rails2” is a 58-page e-book (available in PDF format) by Ryan Daigle and published by Geoffrey Grosenbach’s Peepcode that demonstrates how to use Rails 2.0′s new features. Read More

Utility Belt: Pimp Your IRB

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By Peter Cooper / December 12, 2007

Utility Belt bills itself as “a grab-bag of tricks, tools, techniques, trifles, and toys for IRB,” the interactive Ruby shell. If you’re a keen IRB user, Utility Belt offers up a metric ton of features that will promote you to power user in no time including interaction with your favorite text editor, clipboard support, Pastie posting, Amazon S3 shortcuts, auto-indentation, and more. Utility Belt appears to be optimized somewhat for OS X but most of the features will work on other platforms too. Read More

Ruby on Rails 2.0 Released

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By Peter Cooper / December 8, 2007

After two successful release candidate releases, Ruby on Rails™, a popular Ruby-based Web application development framework in a similar vein to Merb or Nitro, has successfully made it to the final release of version 2.0. Previously called an “evolutionary rather than revolutionary” step, Rails™ 2.0 nonetheless packs a whole ton of new features that make it a worthwhile upgrade from 1.x. Unsurprisingly, David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails, has the best writeup in the official launch announcement.

Also bound to be of interest to Rails 2.0 users:

Rails 2 Upgrade Notes – Some notes from Ben Smith covering the process of upgrading an application from using Ruby 1.2.6 to Rails 2.0. Read More

Author Archives: Peter Cooper