In Skinny Daemons, Dave Hrycyszyn presents a practical walkthrough of how he builds what he calls “skinny daemons” – small, HTTP based daemons to perform single tasks that are then packaged up into gems for easy installation (across multiple servers, for example). It’s a practical demonstration and holds your hand the whole way. Useful stuff.

An example of a skinny daemon is enigmamachine, a video processor Web service using ffmpeg to convert videos to profiles of your choice. Read More

Back in June, I did a comparison of Mongoid and MongoMapper, the two best known MongoDB libraries for Ruby. Now, Ben Myles has brought another to the fore: Mongomatic.

I haven’t given it a try myself yet, but Ben’s done a good job of presenting it, along with example code, so check it out if MongoDB is your bag.

If you want more MongoDB related news, check out coder.io’s #mongodb tag. Lots of great stuff there. Read More

Aaron Patterson (of Nokogiri fame) has written a post for the AT&T Interactive blog about writing a code coverage tool with Ruby 1.9:

It turns out that Ruby 1.9 already comes with support for code coverage monitoring. Aaron looks at how it works and improves how we interact with it a shade. Read More

Yesterday, Lyle Johnson of the FXRuby GUI toolkit project stood aside as the project’s maintainer, effectively retiring the project:

The undertone here is that the FOX Toolkit, upon which FXRuby operates, isn’t underseeing significant development and, perhaps, there is little more for FXRuby to be doing (at least, little in the way of exciting or interesting) and Lyle wants to shuffle the project off his plate.

Lyle cites Jamis Buck’s dropping of his Capistrano deployment system project as an inspiration, though Capistrano’s story turned out to be a happy one after being adopted, for the most part, by Lee Hambley. Read More

Avdi Grimm presents a concise guide to a matter that confuses the majority of Ruby developers from time to time. Read More

The Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example (a.k.a. railstutorial.org) by Michael Hartl has become a must read for developers learning how to build Rails apps. Michael has put together a great Rails 2.3 tutorial, releasing it all for free online chapter by chapter. Now, Michael’s going three steps further:

1 — A new, Rails 3.0 focused version. The free online book previously covered Rails 2.3 but Michael’s updated it to cover Rails 3.0 too. He’s also selling it as a DRM-free PDF for $39 (you get a PDF of the Rails 2.3 version too). As a gesture of goodwill to Ruby Inside’s readers, he’s made a coupon code that works till the end of August – it’s rubyinside01 and gets you 20% off (so a total of $31.20 in the end). Read More

This is very nice. I love these microframeworks. The Sinatra style is always good to ape. Read More

In Distributed Ruby – Exploiting Enterprise Software, Anthony riffs on using JRuby as a way for Rubyists to “exploit” robust, enterprise-grade libraries. This isn’t a new topic but his demonstration is particularly compelling (and worth scrolling down for).

Hazelcast is an “in memory data grid” that’s fail-safe (with regard to crashes) and that automatically scales across the number of nodes within the system. Anthony’s code works fine out of the box with JRuby 1.5.1 running under RVM (yep, I tested) and demonstrates what is a particularly powerful Java library I’d never heard of before. It’s excellent we have access to this from Ruby, and Anthony’s right – the JRuby team deserves credit for giving Rubyists opportunities to both “exploit” enterprise technologies and to deploy systems in enterprise environments without having to jump ship with Ruby. Read More

Over on the official Rails blog, DHH talks about today’s release of the first release candidate of the much awaited Rails 3.0.

Note: You might still find RI’s Rails 3.0 Beta: 36 Links and Resources to Get You Going useful too. Read More