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Author Archives: Ari Brown

By Ari Brown / August 21, 2009

jackSometimes taking an app down for debugging purposes is just not an option. Luckily a new tool called Hijack can provide a live IRB prompt for an existing Ruby process in the same way that Erlang provides hot swapping of code (changing the definition of a system while the system is still up and running).

Hijack (it’s still in a beta state, so be careful and don’t use it in production yet!) lets you to pry your way into a running Ruby process, where it drops you into a live IRB session running over DRB. Gone are the days of stopping live applications just to make a minor update! Read More

By Ari Brown / July 14, 2009

With people occasionally talking about “Code vs. Data”, it only makes sense that you should be able process over code as you would a string. Sexp Path is a code processing tool that allows you to search over and process Ruby code in the form of S-Expressions.

For those who don’t know, an S-Expression (or simply, a “sexp”) is an iterable way of representing code or data. Using Ryan Davis’ Parse Tree, you can parse Ruby files and process over them using Sexp Path. It’s a bit like like XPath or regular expressions for your code.

The foundation of Sexp Path is the query, formed with Q?{ … Read More