Yesterday, Aaron Patterson (@tenderlove) and Mike Dalessio released Nokogiri (Github repository), a new HTML and XML parser for Ruby. It “parses and searches XML/HTML faster than Hpricot” (Hpricot being the current de facto Ruby HTML parser) and boasts XPath support, CSS3 selector support (a big deal, because CSS3 selectors are mega powerful) and the ability to be used as a “drop in” replacement for Hpricot.

On an Hpricot vs Nokogiri benchmark, Nokogiri clocked in at 7 times faster at initially loading an XML document,…

What’s Hot on Github is a monthly post highlighting interesting projects that are new or updated this month, within the Ruby community that are hosted on Github. Github has become an extremely popular place for Ruby and Rails developers to congregate lately, so I wanted to list some of the new projects, and some of the updated ones, that I have found interesting and that are too small for their own blog post.

This month’s picks:

• seinfield - Track your open-source contributions with Github.
• suprails -…

In an understated post on the official Ruby blog last night, Yugui (Yuki Sonoda) announced the release of Ruby 1.9.1-preview 1.

Why To Get Excited

A preview release? Why is this a big deal? A few reasons why Ruby 1.9.1 is significant, even as a preview release:

• Ruby 1.9.1 will be the first stable, production-ready release of the much anticipated Ruby 1.9 series.
• The Ruby 1.9 branch is the cornerstone of Ruby’s future. Much as PHP 5-style code is replacing PHP 4-style code, Ruby 1.9’s idioms…

When Ruby Inside started over two years ago, there were only a handful of sources for Ruby related news. The announcements on the ruby-talk mailing list (which Ruby Weekly News - now deceased - rounded up on the Web), del.icio.us, and a few popular Rubyists blogs (such as Why’s Redhanded). Now, however, there are lots of options, including Ruby Inside itself, Rails Inside, RubyFlow, Ruby Reddit, and Planet Ruby on Rails.

But what about the Ruby and Rails news for non-English speakers?…

Last week, Noel Rappin of Pathfinder Development wrote Elements of Ruby Style - an attempt at producing a Ruby “style guide.” After some initial feedback to this, he’s followed up with a response to some of the initial criticisms and suggestions.

Noel isn’t the first to try to develop a Ruby style guide. In an attempt to promote Ruby’s use within Google, Ian Macdonald wrote an extensive Ruby style guide back in 2006 (rather sadly, it appears his attempt did not work out).

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…

A brief aside to mention my latest project (in collaboration with Dan Grigsby) - Mobile Orchard.

Mobile Orchard is a new iPhone developer news site, in a similar vein to Ruby Inside. We’ve already:

• filmed a 5 minute walkthrough of Android for iPhone developers
• shown 9 places you can go to promote your iPhone apps
• launched our podcast with a 30 minute interview with Hampton Catlin, well known in the Ruby and Rails scene (he invented Haml, for example) but who’s also selling 1,000 copies…

Over a year ago we had a post about how to build OS X GUI applications with Ruby and RubyCocoa. Since then, however, MacRuby has arrived on the scene. Not just the regular version of Ruby with some bindings to Cocoa, MacRuby is as native to OS X as JRuby is native to the JVM.

It’s a significant development, then, that Apple has created a very in-depth tutorial called Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby. It’s very comprehensive. The tutorial introduces you to MacRuby, walks you through…

With only the performance of a scripting language, Ruby isn’t considered a particularly suitable choice for intense video work (direct transcoding, encoding, and the like.). Nonetheless, there are a handful of Ruby libraries and Ruby-based technologies you can use to work with video and movie files - primarily through interacting with faster tools or libraries.

RMov (Ruby Quicktime Library)

RMov is an awesome new Ruby library by Ryan Bates that wraps around Apple’s QuickTime API and allows you to open, edit, and export…

A week ago, in a story published by eWeek.com, Darryl K. Taft asked “Can Ruby and Rails Make Developers Shine in a Downturn?“

The general gist is that with a generally lower total cost of development, projects using Ruby and Rails will continue to increase, and even thrive in a recession, ensuring the success of Ruby and Rails developers. An analyst with Forrester, John Rymer, however, countered: