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Author Archives: Eldon Alameda

Merb 1.0 RC2 Now Available: Merb 1.0 Not Far Behind!

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By Eldon Alameda / October 24, 2008

merblogo.png Following on from the highly successful MerbCamp, the Merb Framework took another big step this week with the announcement of the availability of release candidate 2 for it’s upcoming 1.0 release (due within weeks now). No major changes and The Merbist blog lists mainly a focus on bug fixes and Windows compatibility:

The main focus for this release was to fix bugs and make the stack Windows compatible. We didn’t get any major bugs in RC1 but fixed a lot of small annoyances and problems with generated resources. We also made sure Merb itself would work properly with Windows (not using incompatible signals etc..) and we spent some time getting the Data Object sqlite3 drivers compiled on Windows. Read More

MacRuby 0.3 Released (Now With Interface Builder Support)

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By Eldon Alameda / September 15, 2008

apple_ruby-3.jpg MacRuby – a Mac OS X port of Ruby 1.9 designed to run directly on top of OS X’s frameworks – recently hit a new milestone with the release of MacRuby 0.3.

In addition to the expected bug fixes and performance increases (they claim that MacRuby should now be up to YARV levels) the release also features a number of exciting Cocoa-derived GUI building enhancements, such as Rich Kilmer’s HotCocoa – a new core library which simplifies Cocoa programming with simple Ruby idioms. Example:

require ‘hotcocoa’
include HotCocoa
application do |app|
window :size => [100, 50] do |win|
b = button :title => ‘Hello’
b.on_action { puts ‘World!’ }
win << b
end
end

Just as exciting is the fact that MacRuby 0.3 now supports Interface Builder! Read More

daemon_controller: Automatic Daemon Process Management

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By Eldon Alameda / August 27, 2008

After tackling the difficult task of improving Rails deployment, Phusion – the creators of Passenger (mod_rails) recently announced the availability of daemon_controller – a library (rather than a stand-alone tool) for managing daemons. It lets you write applications that manage daemons in a robust manner (e.g. mongrel_cluster or UltraSphinx could be adapted to use this library).

The primary motivation for using daemon_controller is to make it easier to have other applications (such as Rails apps) start daemons without encountering race conditions or parallel attempts. With a little work, daemon_controller makes it possible for your app to safely launch all the daemons that its functionality relies upon (UltraSphinx, BackgrounDRb, etc.). Read More

Apple and Ruby: The Ongoing Relationship

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By Eldon Alameda / August 21, 2008

apple_ruby-3.jpg While it was pretty momentous last year when Mac OS X (Leopard) was released with full support for Ruby and Rails included with the OS, it seems that the Ruby train is still rolling with Apple.

A recent InfoQ article highlights some ways that Apple is using Ruby that you might have missed – including:

  • The iPhone Configuration Web Utility – A tool written in Ruby on Rails for allowing enterprise customers to manage iPhones.
  • The SproutCore JavaScript framework – Which is designed for making desktop-like applications on the web and is used in Apple’s new MobileMe applications. SproutCore is installed as a gem, uses generators written in Ruby to create resources and it utilizes Merb to generate HTML artifacts.

    • Read More