It’s pretty rare I recommend new blogs to follow on Ruby Inside. Not because I don’t like them - I link to their posts all the time! - but because it’s hard to tell if a new blog is going to keep going and be worth your while.
Well, the Ruby community has a new blog in its midst that’s proving to be a must-read - Ruby Best Practices. It’s a must-subscribe (RSS feed) for Rubyists who want to get a good…
At the last regular London Ruby User Group meetup, James Coglan gave a talk on how to implement a Scheme interpreter in 15 minutes. He recorded a video of the coding in progress beforehand so he could focus on the narration so unfortunately the video (available in a higher resolution here from Vimeo) is without sound. There is, however, a ZIP file of HTML slides available to help you follow along.
Naturally, building an arbitrary interpreter from scratch without having a design in…
A handful of random Ruby links, articles, and resources to end off the week..
Is it JRuby? is a “fork” of Brightbox’s Is It Ruby 1.9 that focuses on JRuby. As with the Ruby 1.9 site, Is It JRuby lets you track gems, allowing you to mark them as either working or not working with JRuby (yet) or to track reports from others. Remember that since these sites are community driven, the reports should…
Back in April, we posted about the release of the beta of RubyMine 1.0, an IntelliJ IDEA based Ruby and Rails IDE. This month, the final RubyMine 1.0 was released for public consumption. It’s a great IDE - check out the free 30 day trial to get a feel for it.
RubyMine has a pretty crazy feature set. Just some of the biggest points to whet your appetite:
Did you miss the Scotland on Rails conference this year? No need to fret though, as Engine Yard are hosting videos of all the presentations made at this popular conference. With 27 presentations covering topics from deployment to testing, there is something here for everyone.
This is an awesome way to “catch up” with the spirit of what’s been going on at some of the recent conferences, especially as a few of the talks have been given elsewhere too (such as RailsConf). Enjoy!
The great thing about the Ruby language is that there’s always multiple ways of doing things. The same goes for reading the documentation of your installed gems. Here’s a few ways of viewing the RDoc documentation of your gems other than running the gem server command.
Gembox (source) is a Sinatra based web application by Aaron Quint for browsing your RDocs. Once installed, Gembox lets you quickly browse through your gems as well as their included files and gem specs.
Joe Damato has been on a roll lately, first with a 6 line EventMachine fix that yielded impressive results, then a configure.in fix to give 30% more performance, and now by getting a 2-10x performance boost with a fix to Ruby 1.8’s threading.
If you’re on Ruby 1.9, don’t worry, as Ruby 1.9’s threading is still faster even after this tweak, but if implementation optimization interests you, check this article out. Joe has…
The Ruby Toolbox gives Ruby developers a categorized overview of 100 or so different libraries ranked on how commonly used they are. It’s not perfect as it only pays attention to projects hosted on Github and the ranking system is based on the number of watchers and forks they have, but it’s enough to give you a basic overview of the activity within a certain area.
For example, in the Browser testing section, webrat picks up the #1 spot with 750 watchers and 147…
The Interactive Ruby Shell, more commonly known as IRB, is one of Ruby’s most popular features, especially with new developers. You can bash out a one-liner, try a method you’ve just learned about, or even build a small algorithm or two without going the whole way to writing a complete program.
I’ve not posted much about IRB before and it doesn’t tend to get a lot of love generally, so while I’ve been digging through some of the best content I…
New to Ruby 1.9 is the concept of fibers. Fibers are light-weight (green) threads with manual, cooperative scheduling, rather than the preemptive scheduling of Ruby 1.8’s threads. Since Ruby 1.9’s threads exist at the system level, fibers are, in a way, Ruby 1.9’s answer to Ruby 1.8’s green threads, but lacking the pre-emptive scheduling.
Now that Ruby 1.9 is becoming more important with each passing month, I’ve rounded up some of the best articles about Ruby 1.9’s fiber functionality so that you…
