Ruby Inside: The Ruby Blog

Two Upcoming Ruby Events: Euruko and MountainWest RubyConf

By Peter Cooper / January 17, 2009

Euruko 2009 – The European Ruby Conference – May 9-10, Barcelona, Spain

Euruko is Europe’s annual Ruby conference. In 2008, it went down a storm in Prague, Czech Republic, with over 300 Rubyists attending, including Matz and the JRuby guys! Plans are now well underway for Euruko 2009, now scheduled for May 9-10, 2009 and being held in Barcelona, Spain. Matz is, again, confirmed as an attendee, so if you’re a European Ruby developer and fancy meeting Matz, this is the ideal chance.

Registration is not yet open but you can subscribe to the event’s feed (note to event organizers – please get some sort of pre-registration up before getting us to mention your event – you’re losing registrations!). Read More

What’s Hot on Github – January 2009

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By Zach Inglis / January 14, 2009

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 over the last year, so I wanted to list some of the new projects, and some of the updated ones that I have found interesting.

This month’s picks:

http://github.com/wycats/rails/ – Yehuda’s branch of Rails is where all the exciting Rails 3 stuff happens.
http://github.com/collectiveidea/graticule/ – Graticule is a geocoding API for looking up address coordinates and performing distance calculations, supporting many popular APIs.

Wikipedia Needs Rubyists to Flesh Out Mobile Vision

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By Peter Cooper / January 12, 2009

You might know Hampton Catlin as the Rubyist who invented the Haml markup system (as used in many Ruby web apps), Sass or make_resourceful. What you might not know, however, is that Hampton went on to develop a successful Wikipedia iPhone app (iPedia née iWik – listen to this podcast about its development) and was then hired by Wikipedia to lead the development of the mobile Wikipedia site (powered by Ruby!)

Hampton has been taking Ruby into Wikipedia in a big way and he needs the help of other Rubyists to keep the momentum going. I caught up with Hampton to find out what he’s doing at Wikipedia, what Wikipedia needs, and how Rubyists can get involved:

Ruby Inside: What are you responsible for at Wikipedia? Read More

5 Ruby / Rails Jobs for January 2009

By Peter Cooper / January 11, 2009

Looking for a job where you can work on Ruby and Rails apps? You’re in the right place! Recently we’ve had several Rails-focused positions added to the Ruby jobs board. Alternatively, if you’re a company looking to hire Ruby and Rails developers and you’re in the US, head over to the job board too – it costs $150 for 60 days of exposure, and your jobs get featured in a post like this too!

This month’s interesting opportunities:

Ruby / Ruby on Rails Programmers (Toronto, Canada): Hewitt Associates – a human resources outsourcing and consulting company – is looking for a Toronto, Ontario based Ruby and Rails developer who will develop and maintain new and existing business applications. Read More

bdb: Improved Ruby Bindings for Berkeley DB

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By Peter Cooper / January 9, 2009

Berkeley DB is a high performance database system initially developed in the early 1990s. It’s not an SQL driven database engine – it just stores data in key/value pairs – but BDB is very fast, available to use on most operating systems, and is dual licensed for open source and commercial use. It has several benefits to just using a flat file or a PStore: transactions, fine-grained locking, replication, and hot backups, for starters.

While Ruby bindings already exist for BDB, Matt Bauer has just released some all new shiny ones that are fast and easy to use. You’ll need to have Berkeley DB installed as a library on your system before you get started, of course. Read More

DebGem – Ruby Libraries Packaged for Debian and Ubuntu

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By Peter Cooper / January 6, 2009

Phusion, the company responsible for Passenger – the Rails deployment system, has today announced DebGem, a “RubyGem to APT conversion service.”

Many Debian (and Ubuntu, which is compatible) sysadmins and users prefer to use the APT (as in apt-get) package management system for handling the installation of everything on their system. With its separate RubyGems packaging system, however, Ruby can cause a dilemma. While some Ruby stuff is available through the regular repositories, it can be out of date and unreliable. No longer.. DebGem provides an APT repository with Debian and Ubuntu packages for “virtually all gems” available on RubyForge and Github. Read More

SourceClassifier: Identifying Programming Languages Quickly

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By Peter Cooper / January 5, 2009

If you’re developing a snippets or pastie-type system or another form of CMS where source code might be stored, it’d be incredibly useful to automatically detect what language a provided source is in so that you can style it appropriately.

Chris Lowis’ SourceClassifier (or Github repo) library does just that, using a Bayesian classifier trained on source code from the Alioth Shootouts. Out of the box it has support for C, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python and Ruby, but you can train it to recognize others (CSS and HTML seem like notable omissions to me). Read More

How to Sanitize HTML and CSS in Ruby

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By Peter Cooper / January 1, 2009

If you’ve developed an application that displays user-supplied text in a Web browser, it’s always possible that the user has entered some crazy HTML (or even CSS) that will break your site’s layout. While it’s easy to remove all HTML from a piece of text, you might want them to use certain subsets of HTML to format their content, so you need to sanitize the user supplied HTML and CSS. Luckily, two Ruby libraries have been released in the last couple of days to sanitize HTML and CSS respectively.

HTML

Sanitize (or Github repo) by Ryan Grove is a new HTML sanitization library for Ruby. Read More

Top Ruby Presenter of 2008 – Giles Bowkett

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By Peter Cooper / December 31, 2008

Note: This post is a part of Ruby Inside’s Top 10 in 2008 series. To learn more or see the other awards, read this introductory post.

Giles Bowkett – Controversy, Excitement, and Awesomeness in 2008

Giles simply had to feature in Ruby Inside’s Top 10 of 2008 and since there’s no Top Crazy Mofo category, he instead scores for this excellent presentation at RubyFringe (yes, it’s all there to watch online, thanks to InfoQ!) Despite nominatively being about his “semi-autonomous Ruby musical instrument” Archaeopteryx, the presentation is really about building up an ecosystem around your passions – something most of us can relate to. Read More

Ruby 1.9.1 Release Candidate 1 Released

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By Peter Cooper / December 30, 2008

Yuki Sonoda has just announced the release of Ruby 1.9.1 Release Candidate 1 on the ruby-talk mailing list:

This is a release candidate of Ruby 1.9.1, which will be the first stable version of Ruby 1.9 series. Try it early and have a experience of modern, faster, with clearer syntax, multilingualized and much improved Ruby world.

We have fixed 72 bugs and implemented some features. If you encounter a bug or a problem, please let us know it via the official issue tracking system.

If you’re a Ruby developer, particularly if you have any libraries out in the field, getting up to speed with Ruby 1.9 is becoming a necessity. Read More

7 Ruby Articles to Read Over The Holiday Season

By Peter Cooper / December 27, 2008

So here we are right in the down period between Christmas and the start of the New Year. Few big releases or new developments come out at this time of the year, so it’s a good time to either enjoy time offline or.. to get reading some insightful articles we wouldn’t normally have time for! Luckily a few Rubyists have been busy spending the end of December putting together some rather good articles.. so get reading:

Understanding Ruby Blocks, Procs, and Lambdas by Robert Sosinski. Robert presents a comprehensive walkthrough of Ruby blocks, Proc objects, and lambdas with lots of code examples. Read More

Ruby Developer? You’ve Got 24 Hours to Apply for a $11,000 Prize!

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By Peter Cooper / December 23, 2008

The Government of Fukuoka Japan, together with the Fukuoka Ruby Award Selection Committee, is running the 2009 Fukuoka Ruby Award Competition. In short, they’re trying to raise public awareness of the growing software industry in Japan but also Ruby in general.

With a deadline of Christmas Day, you only have just over 24 hours to apply! Two types of award are offered:

Award Type A is for a business model or system developed using Ruby.

Award Type B is for activities that contribute to the promotion, growth and expansion of the Ruby language.

The top prize is 1 million yen (approximately $11,114 at current rates) but three “outstanding performance award”s of 100,000 yen (approximately $1111) are also up for grabs. Read More

CloudKit: RESTful JSON Storage Rack Appliance

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By Peter Cooper / December 23, 2008

Apologies for the buzzword collision in the title, but Cloudkit really is a RESTful JSON-powered storage appliance that uses Rack! Think of it as a schema-less, HTTP accessible database of sorts – like CouchDB without some of the more advanced features. It’s all written in Ruby and makes it ridiculously easy to set up a fully discoverable, RESTful, JSON API.

In the Release: CloudKit 0.9 blog post, developer Jon Crosby demonstrates how easy it is to get Cloudkit up and running. Just two lines in a config.ru file and you’re ready to roll with the basic featureset. If you want to add OpenID and OAuth support, just change a word and it’s all running. Read More

Top Ruby Blogger of 2008 – John Nunemaker

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By Peter Cooper / December 21, 2008

Note: This post is a part of Ruby Inside’s Top 10 in 2008 series. To learn more or see the other awards, read this introductory post.

John Nunemaker – Consistently Good Ruby Blogging in 2008!

Rather than unethically considering ourselves or one of our sister blogs (!!), we set out to look for the best independent Ruby blogger of 2008. It wasn’t a hard search. While there are a lot of good blogs out there, few have been as consistently good as John Nunemaker’s RailsTips. John (@jnunemaker on Twitter) is always looking out for new things and ways to make life simpler for Ruby and Rails developers, and while many have fallen back to just putting code on Github or Twittering in 2008, John has consistently blogged about his new projects and those of others. Read More

Sinatra: 29 Links and Resources For A Quicker, Easier Way to Build Webapps

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By Peter Cooper / December 18, 2008

Sinatra, a Ruby “micro framework” for developing Web applications, is hot stuff! Despite being over a year since we first mentioned Sinatra (as used on a 100 line blogging app called Reprise), only now does Sinatra seem to have reached critical mass – it’s on the cusp of becoming really popular. This is a good time, then, to check it out and see where it could fit into your own projects (with the new Rails Metal functionality (in edge/2.3 only) you can ever run a Sinatra app as a lightweight companion integrated with your Rails apps!)

Sinatra’s official homepage provides an incredible number of alluring examples. Read More