Oracle Corporation, the gigantic company behind the Oracle Database system, is looking for Ruby on Rails developers who “love to build Web 2.0 style applications.” Oracle has a small in-house team that’s “applying 2.0 style concepts” to Oracle’s apps. It seems like they’re focusing on JRuby based on an Oracle stack, so experience with those technologies is a major plus. Read More
The freely available Aptana IDE seems to be moving faster than ever. Aptana is a web developer’s IDE with extensive Ruby and Rails support through the RadRails plugin. Having announced support for AIR right after Adobe released a Beta, the latest Aptana IDE already supports development for the just-released Apple iPhone.
Among the features that Aptana IDE provides for iPhone developers include:
Check out the Aptana for iPhone development page for more information. Read More
Each month I do a round-up of the new jobs on the Ruby Inside job board. June was a slim month with only two new jobs. Both are pretty good though!
Telecoms in Tampa – $80,000 per year
The latest vacancy is for a Ruby Programmer at a Tampa, Florida based company that specializes in telecommunications. You’ll be expected to analyze business requirements, write design specs, and program in Ruby, as well as develop Rails applications. The interesting part about the job is that it requires Asterisk (open source VOIP software) knowledge, so there’s clearly some telecoms development involved there. Read More
One of the best Ruby resources out there (if not the best) is RubyForge. It’s a home for Ruby-related open source projects and acts as a default home for the hundreds of RubyGems we all use and love.
A small team, made up of Jason Perry, K. Adam Christensen, Scott Becker, and James Seaman, however, think that it might be time for a RailsForge to come onto the scene. They’ve set up a community survey at RailsForge.com that anyone can fill out, and they’re looking for your opinions:
At first glance, there’s a resistance to drawing a line between Ruby and Rails—that’s certainly not what we aim to do. Read More
Liverail.net has a comprehensive tutorial covering how to build a Facebook platform application using Ruby on Rails from start to finish.
The guys over at Thoughtbot also wrote a post two weeks ago looking at some of what they’ve learned while porting an application to the Facebook platform. Read More
Ryan Bates, creator of Railscasts – a free Rails screencast site, has created a great screencast about how to contribute code and documentation to Ruby on Rails, from actually checking out Rails, preparing the test environment, making your changes and building a patch, through to submitting the patch and basking in the glow of having contributed to the project.
Not only all that, but he’s also launched a contest. All you have to do is submit a good Rails documentation patch to the Ruby on Rails development site and drop the link to an e-mail address provided for the contest, and on July 27, 2007 eight random winners will receive prizes (which include a Nintendo DS, Railcast t-shirts, Pragmatic Programmer books, a Peepcode subscription, and an iPod Shuffle). Read More
OCaml (short for Objective Caml) is an object oriented implementation of Caml, a derivative of ML. Like Ruby, it’s an open source language, but it provides extremely high performance (at least 50% that of compiled C code, in general) and features static typing. You can learn more, and look at code examples, at OCaml’s Wikipedia entry.
Mauricio Fernandez of Eigenclass has put together rocaml (readme), a bridge between Ruby and OCaml that lets you write Ruby extensions in OCaml. It handles the type conversions for you and creates boilerplate code that registers Ruby methods and wraps the calls to your OCaml code. Read More
Sake is a RubyGem by Chris Wanstrath which executes and manages system-wide Rake tasks. Whereas Rake is project-specific, Sake allows the developer to examine, install, run, and uninstall Rake files and tasks globally, much like the way Rubygems does this for Ruby libraries.
Sake files are for the most part just regular Rake files:
namespace :db do
desc “Returns the current schema version”
task :version => :environment do
puts “Current version: ” +
ActiveRecord::Migrator.current_version.to_s
end
end
desc “Show specs when testing”
task :spec do
ENV['TESTOPTS'] = ‘–runner=s’
Rake::Task[:test].invoke
end
Installing a task is easy:
$ sake -i err.rake spec
# Installing task `spec’
$ sake -T
sake spec # Show specs when testing
You can combine Sake global tasks and project-specific Rake tasks, as Sake picks them up automatically. Read More
John Lam, a Foocamp attendee, reports that Steve Yegge gave a presentation called “Google Rails Clone” that looks into a JavaScript clone of Rails developed at Google. I can’t find any other references yet, and John only mentions the basics, but if this is all true, it could eventually become a big deal.. especially if Google open sources it and JavaScript does become the “next big language”.
It does sound rather unlikely that Yegge ported the entirety of Rails to JavaScript entirely by himself (although he is a coding god, and one of my own computer science heroes) but I’m guessing more news will leak out of the big G in the near future.. Read More
Paul Dowman has put together a feature-packed Ruby on Rails focused “appliance” for Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud – effectively an on-demand, flexible VPS service). Those who know what they’re doing can try it out right away, using the AMI id: ami-4e907527.
The image is built upon Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty), Rails 1.2.3, Ruby 1.8.5, MySQL 5, and includes the EC2 command line tools along with automatic backup of MySQL databases to S3 every ten minutes. Applications are served up using Mongrel clusters behind Apache 2.2. Paul’s blog post includes more details and a guide of how to use it. Read More
This is a call for help and opinions! One of our finest needs your input..
Jeremy McAnally (a.k.a. Mr. Neighborly), author of the fine Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book, is busy working on his Google Summer Of Code project, dcov, a Ruby documentation analyzer. Some aspects of developing dcov are easy (such as reporting or basic coverage analysis), but Jeremy’s having problems when trying to work out how to analyze the quality of documentation.. so he’s looking for input:
The first part of the analysis is quantity: is something documented? Right now, this works famously: it can give you a precise precentage of your functional unit documentation coverage. Read More
Gregory Brown has put together a great four-page tutorial on how to build a database driven console application using Ruby and ActiveRecord (no Rails needed!). As well as delivering what the title suggests, Brown also looks at some neat Ruby techniques for structuring applications in general (such as using modules and module_function). The end result is an app called “EarGTD,” a basic time / task management tool. Read More
Kevin Clark revels that Powerset – a “natural language” based search engine, seen by some as a future “Google killer” – is going to launch with a Ruby powered front end. In itself, this isn’t particularly amazing, although if Powerset realizes its Google-killing goals, having a major search engine powered by Ruby will be kudos indeed.
Of more interest is that Powerset is using a mixture of Rails, Merb, and Camping apps throughout the company, and that Powerset is “not worried about scaling.” Clark quotes Blaine Cook of Twitter:
Rails and Ruby haven’t been stumbling blocks, compared to any other language or framework. Read More
Registration is now open for the Lone Star Ruby Conf taking place in Austin, Texas on September 7 and 8 (Friday and Saturday) of this year. If you book before August 10, you’ll get in for the early bird rate of $200. There’s a wide range of speakers from Rick Olson (Mephisto) and P J Hyett through to Charles Oliver Nutter (JRuby) and *** **** (Mongrel) so if you can get to Texas in September, check it out. Read More
Practical Ruby Gems is a new book written by David Berube and published by Apress that looks at the practical uses of a collection of Ruby gems. Tim Hunter, who also reviewed my Beginning Ruby (which is doing a good job of tanking in the Amazon rankings, but I’m in it for the long haul!), has written a lengthy review for Slashdot. Here’s a direct affiliate-free link to the book on Amazon.com. I was expecting to review a copy myself, but I’m more than happy to trust Tim based on his previous reviews of Ruby books. Read More
