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This Week’s Ruby News: Ruby 1.9.3p0, OmniAuth 1.0, MagLev 1.0 and More

By Peter Cooper / November 5, 2011

The rapid descent of the weather towards winter is getting people to stay in and code and long may it continue given the quality of this week’s releases: OmniAuth 1.0, MagLev 1.0, and Ruby 1.9.3, for starters!

Headlines

Ruby 1.9.3-p0 Released
The first production-ready release of Ruby 1.9.3 is finally here with patchlevel 0′s release this week. I’ve already covered what’s new on Ruby Inside (see the link below) but this is a nice step forward for MRI and worth checking out, especially if you want faster Rails loading times.

MagLev 1.0.0 Released
It’s been a couple of years in the making but MagLev 1.0.0 has released. Read More

Screencast: Coding Conway’s Game of Life in Ruby the TDD Way with RSpec

7 Comments

By Peter Cooper / November 2, 2011

Recently, there have been many screencasts of people coding things in real time. Yesterday, Ryan Bigg released a video of him implementing Conway’s Game of Life from scratch by reading through the ‘rules’ and then using RSpec to take a test driven approach to fleshing out the functionality.

Ryan is a Ruby Hero and technical writer best known for being co-author of the recently released Rails 3 in Action (along with Yehuda Katz) which I’ll be reviewing soon for Ruby Inside. But Ryan’s also been getting into doing a little screencasting:

If you can’t see the video above, view it directly on Vimeo here. Read More

This Week’s Top Ruby News: JRuby 1.6.5, A New Prag Prog Book, Fast Specs, Rails Style Guide and More

By Peter Cooper / October 27, 2011

This week brings us a new JRuby release, some Ruby 2.0 news (but you knew that already, right? ;-)) and a new BDD library that seems to have struck a chord with the people I’m following on Twitter. Also, my Ruby Reloaded course is now also over half booked out so if you’re curious, definitely check it out now.

Without further ado, here’s a round up of the top Ruby news and releases from the last week, courtesy of Ruby Weekly:

Headlines and Releases

JRuby 1.6.5 Released: Rounding out Ruby 1.9 Support
The primary goal of JRuby’s 1.6.x series is to round out the Ruby 1.9 support by fixing any reported incompatibilities. Read More

Ruby 2.0 Release Schedule Announced: Roll on 2013!

4 Comments

By Peter Cooper / October 24, 2011

Today, Yusuke Endoh posted to the ruby-core mailing list noting that matz has admitted him as a Ruby 2.0 “release manager” and as part of his work, he has come up with a tentative schedule for Ruby 2.0′s release. You can read the full post here.

The short version of the timeline?

  • August 2012: ‘Big feature’ freeze. Any proposals and specs for ‘major features’ should be wrapped up for late August 2012 otherwise they will be deferred.
  • October 2012: Feature freeze. A more conventional feature freeze.
  • February 2013: 2.0 Release. The final version of 2.0 would, hopefully, be released.

A release in February 2013 would have historical significance by being the 20th anniversary of Ruby’s creation. Read More

Ruby 2.0 Implementation Work Begins: What is Ruby 2.0 and What’s New?

11 Comments

By Peter Cooper / October 20, 2011

Yesterday, Matz made a commit to the MRI Ruby repository bumping the trunk version from 1.9.4 to 2.0.0, marking the start of the work of implementing the long-discussed ideas for Ruby 2.0.

What is Ruby 2.0?

Ruby 2.0 is the next major version release of MRI Ruby, the de facto official Ruby implementation.

Ruby 1.9.3 is due out any time soon and Ruby 1.9.4 is under active development (it has moved to a separate branch now that trunk is 2.0.0). We recently learned that Ruby 2.0 would then follow Ruby 1.9.4.

Will Ruby 2.0 be a huge leap forward?

No. Read More

What Ruby’s ||= (Double Pipe / Or Equals) Really Does

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By Peter Cooper / October 18, 2011

In Rubyists Already Use Monadic Patterns, Dave Fayram made a passing reference to using ||= to set a variable’s value if its value were ‘Nothing’ (false or nil in Ruby). The resulting Reddit quickly picked up on his definition (which was fixed later) and argued about ||=’s true meaning which isn’t as obvious as many Rubyists think. This spread to Freenode’s awesome #ruby-lang IRC channel where I picked it up.

Abstract (or the TLDR Version)

A common misconception is that a ||= b is equivalent to a = a || b, but it behaves like a || a = b

In a = a || b, a is set to something by the statement on every run, whereas with a || a = b, a is only set if a is logically false (i.e. Read More

The Last Week in Ruby: Rails 3.1.1, Sinatra Recipes, Spree Gets Funded and more

By Peter Cooper / October 17, 2011

Back in 2008 and 2009, Ruby Inside had a long line of “Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts” posts, aimed at sharing a collection of news and libraries in one hit. In the last year, I’ve shifted Ruby Inside to focusing on less frequent tutorials or investigative features and have been putting all of the news on Ruby Weekly, my weekly newsletter.

There are still many, though, who would prefer to read the news in their RSS readers or on the Web, so I’m going to be taking the things I find for Ruby Weekly each week, doing a little reformatting, and sharing them here on Ruby Inside too. Read More

Thanking Ruby Inside’s September 2011 Supporters

By Peter Cooper / October 11, 2011

Ruby Inside wouldn’t be what it is without you but it’s time for me to thank the companies who also help to keep Ruby Inside going by sponsoring my work. Thanks!

I take care not to accept sponsors who have little of interest to the Ruby scene so hopefully you’ll find something useful below – it’s not a roster of faceless companies, these folks are doing great stuff.

Gauges – Simple, Sexy Real-time Analytics

Gauges is a tool for collecting and analyzing the Web traffic for all your sites in real-time using a fast, reliable, hosted system. You can even see overview data for all your sites on a single page. Read More

Be Prepared for Ruby 1.9.3 and 1.9.4: What’s New and What’s Different

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By Peter Cooper / September 23, 2011

On August 1, 2011, Ruby 1.9.3 preview 1 was released. The final version isn’t yet out (as of September 23) but Ruby 1.9.3 is going to be the next, full production-level release of MRI Ruby. But what’s the deal with 1.9.3 (and its successors, Ruby 1.9.4 and 2.0)? Keep reading!

The Summary

Ruby 1.9.3 is a relatively minor improvement on the Ruby 1.9.2 we already know and love. In short:

  • a focus has been placed on performance with file loading, File and Pathname all significantly improved
  • Ruby 1.9.2 mostly fixed down the language specification for 1.9; 1.9.3 is mostly work on a ‘better implementation’
  • you can tune the garbage collector via environment variables (more on this in a post coming soon!)
  • Ruby’s license changes from dual Ruby + GPLv2 to dual Ruby + 2-clause BSD
  • improved GC performance with a lazy garbage collector
  • a ‘better strategy’ for the GIL / GVL
  • test/unit supports parallel testing
  • Random.rand tweaks (and rand() now accepts ranges)
  • io/console, a new library in the stdlib
  • 4 new encodings (so far) – cp950, cp951, UTF-16, and UTF-32
  • extra String methods
  • a number of tweaks to formatting strings
  • Module#private_constant and Module#public_constant
  • a smattering of other bits and pieces, but this is the TLDR overview!

    • Read More

The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough: The Ultimate Ruby 1.9 Primer for 1.8 Developers

5 Comments

By Peter Cooper / September 20, 2011

In a presentation about Ruby 1.9.3, Yuki Sonoda notes that Ruby 1.8 has “no future” and its “end of life” is being discussed pretty seriously. Ruby 1.8 is becoming history, but what’s the alternative? Why, Ruby 1.9! :-)

Even amongst the groups I’m involved with, I’ve seen a lot of resistance to Ruby 1.9. Sometimes it’s because of deployment or library concerns, but often there’s a hesitancy over what’s changed, what’s new, or what has been flat out removed from 1.9. So I’ve been working on something to help out.. because I think Ruby 1.9 is awesome and everyone should be taking it seriously ASAP. Read More

A MiniTest::Spec Tutorial: Elegant Spec-Style Testing That Comes With Ruby

12 Comments

By Peter Cooper / September 2, 2011

Despite RSpec‘s awesomeness, Test::Unit remains the most popular Ruby testing tool out there outside of Rails apps. I’ve recently been code walking through a lot of Ruby libraries for my Ruby Reloaded course and the typical arrangement is Test::Unit, sometimes coupled with Shoulda or Contest for some extra syntactic sweetness.

Part of the reason for Test::Unit’s enduring popularity is its presence in the Ruby standard library but, also, its general ‘lightness’ and speed. When you’re writing a large app, using a powerful full-featured system like RSpec has significant benefits (particularly stakeholder involvement in writing the specs). But when you’re working on a library that might spread far and wide and is aimed solely at developers, the pros of Test::Unit shine through. Read More

22 Ruby and Rails Jobs for August 2011 (With Even Some Junior Ones)

By Peter Cooper / August 27, 2011

jobs.pngIt seems the Ruby and Rails job scenes are on fire! I don’t remember running so many jobs across a single month before. 22 Ruby and Rails jobs are here and they’re spanning the world. US West Coast, East Coast, England, Scotland and Germany are all represented. It’s definitely not the common “San Francisco or nothing” roundup :-)

Also fresh this time around is the mention of “all levels” or “junior” roles. At least a few of the jobs listed here today are open to all skill levels or are explicitly junior in nature. I’ve had a lot of readers get in touch requesting more listings like these so I’m glad they’ve come along. Read More

rbenv: A Simple, New Ruby Version Management Tool

19 Comments

By Peter Cooper / August 16, 2011

rbenv is a new lightweight Ruby version management tool built by Sam Stephenson (of 37signals and Prototype.js fame).

The established leader in the Ruby version management scene is RVM but rbenv is an interesting alternative if you want or need something significantly lighter with fewer features. Think of it as a bit like Sinatra and Rails. It’s not about which is the best, it’s about which is better for you and your current requirements.

What’s the deal with rbenv?

Compared to RVM, rbenv is light. For example, it doesn’t include any mechanism to install Ruby implementations like RVM does. Its sole job is to manage multiple Ruby “environments” and it allows you to quickly switch between Ruby implementations either on a local directory or default ‘system-wide’ basis. Read More

Madison Ruby – A 2 Day Ruby Conference in Wisconsin With An Awesome Speaker Lineup

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By Zach Inglis / August 10, 2011

Between August 19—20, 2011, Madison, Wisconsin plays host to thirty-seven speakers and panelists to discuss Ruby, OSS, and community in the form of Madison Ruby Conference. Speakers include Jeff Casimir, Giles Bowkett, Bryan Liles, Sven Fuchs, Steve Klabnik, Brian Hogan, Jacqui Cox, Lori Olson, Gerred Dillon, Barry Hess, and Chad Pytel amongst others.

I sat down with Jim Remsik, the driving force behind the conference, to discuss what awaits attendees.

Zach Inglis (for Ruby Inside): Hi Jim. So why Madison?

Is there a large Ruby community in Madison?

What will surprise attendees the most about Madison Ruby?

Madison Ruby is during the weekend of August 19th-20th. Read More

Using Ripper to See How Ruby Is Parsing Your Code

6 Comments

By Peter Cooper / August 5, 2011

In the past couple of months I’ve seen situations arise where developers aren’t entirely sure how Ruby has chosen to interpret their code. Luckily, Ruby 1.9 comes with a built-in library called Ripper that can help solve the problem (there’s a 1.8 version too, see later). Here, I give the 30 second rundown on what to do.

A Mystery To Solve

I’ve seen this confusion appear twice in the last month (the second time was what inspired me to write this post):

Despite thinking that we should be seeing Hash appear, we don’t. We get a blank line and NilClass in response. Read More

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