Given the audience that Ruby Inside has, I think there’s a potential for us to make some big changes in the Ruby world. I propose accepting some advertising and sponsorship on Ruby Inside, and in return I will publicly disclose the amounts and give all of the money back (minus any forced costs, such as tax) to the Ruby community as donation to Ruby-related projects, offered as bounties, and/or pay for even better articles and tutorials. Rest assured, it will not be money that will sit in a big pot waiting for decisions to be made. The choice of where the money will go will be influenced by Ruby Inside readers, naturally. Read More
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Ruby’s Unary Operators and How to Redefine Their Functionality
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The Split is Not Enough: Unicode Whitespace Shenigans for Rubyists
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The Mega Ruby News and Release Roundup for February 2012
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A Lagom Review of O’Reilly’s ‘Sinatra Up and Running’
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The Ruby Standard Library To Be Converted to Gems for Ruby 2.0?
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Screencast: Coding Conway’s Game of Life in Ruby the TDD Way with RSpec
Dhaka is a set of tools written in Ruby by Mushfeq Khan that can generate tokenizers, parsers, and evaluators of context-free grammars (my own shabby contribution in this field was posted to RubyInside recently!). Dhaka’s ultimate goal is to make a pure Ruby, flexible parser generator. From the official site:
Dhaka provides DSLs specialized for specifying grammars, tokenizers and evaluation rules. It can take a grammar and generate a finite-state automaton for parsing it. The generated parser can then be ‘compiled’ to ruby source-code so that it need not be generated again. Dhaka also supports exporting generated parsers to the GraphViz dot format for visualizing states and actions. Read More
DevPals is a brand-new ‘questions and answers’ site for programmers. As well as covering Ruby, it also covers Java, .Net, and PHP. Developer Pat Toner asked if I’d link to it in the Ruby Inside sidebar, and I said it’d also be good to do a mini interview. I was intrigued as to why Ruby was included alongside the other admittedly more popular languages at the expense of, say, JavaScript, Python, or VB. Read More
Exactly one year ago David Heinemeier Hansson and the rest of the Rails core team (smaller back then!) unveiled Rails 1.0, the first ‘production quality’ release of Ruby on Rails. Alongside the release came an entirely new Rails Web site, the same as the one we’re familiar with now. The next day, December 14, DHH followed up with some brief insight and wondered: “I can’t wait to see where this will all go in 2006.” Read More
Ilya Grigorik has put together a great article explaining how he has used Ruby, along with the Scruffy graphing library, to develop a basic visual database explorer.
Last night I wrote a quick database explorer for one of my projects (screenshot above). I had a database of lead stories for BBC, Yahoo News and NY Times over a period spanning Sept. 2004 to Aug. 2005 and I wanted to juxtapose and visualize different queries. The concept is simple, given two words (ex: war / peace), I wanted to see some aggregate calculations over the available document corpus.
At first, I wanted to write about a great Ruby graphing library (Scruffy) I found, but later realized that I could nail three different concepts at once: writing a simple threaded web-server, interfacing with a database, and generating live graphs (SVG/XML). Read More
The JRuby team has just announced the release of JRuby 0.9.2 (download). Despite being a minor point release, a lot of things have been tweaked and added. Direct from the team:
This release has some great improvements:
Extensions openssl and readline now working
Code for a new graphical irb console
Partial support for iconv and bigdecimal extensions
RSpec now supported
Improved Rails support
Fixed all known block and scoping bugs
Enhanced parser performance
More compiler and performance work
Refactored variable scoping logic
127 Jira issues resolved since 0.9.1
Congratulations to the JRuby team for their continuing efforts! Read More
After reading this interesting post about using Ruby and a microcontroller for homebrew electronics projects, I discovered Ruby/SerialPort. It’s a Ruby library that works on Windows, Linux, BSD, OS X, and other POSIX operating systems. It’s reasonably old, but as demonstrated in the first link, works on OS X pretty well even now in 2006. There’s some code demonstrating its use here.
Using Ruby/SerialPort and Arduino, an open-source physical computing platform (basically a microcontroller with a standardized serial interface, it seems), it’s pretty easy to connect Ruby to electronics circuits. Tied up with a nice LED display or mini text display, this could become a cute tool for building desktop display devices for showing RSS, weather, etc. Read More
Another month, another step up the TIOBE Programming Community Index! Just last month we reported that Ruby had moved from 13th to 12th, and now it’s up one more, to 11. The TIOBE Programming Community Index isn’t the most official chart in the world, but is one of the most objective. Ruby has moved up from 27th in September 2004, to 11th now.
For those who are not familiar with the index:
The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. Read More
There was no “Troll of the Month” feature in November, because I couldn’t find any. December has started off strong, though, with two articles: Why Django Kicks Ruby on Rails’ Collective Ass and Constructive Reasons to use Django Instead of Rails. While the first is definitely the most inflammatory, both make bizarre arguments (amongst some good ones, admittedly) and seem to be nothing but “let’s bitch about Rails to make Django look better”-fests.
One key argument is, essentially: ‘Django is better because Python is better’. This seems as wise as ‘God must exist because the Bible says so’. Just because somebody thinks Python ‘is’ better doesn’t mean that it is. Read More
Doodlekit is a cute looking Rails-powered Web application developed by Doodlebit. It’s a complete Web design and hosting system in one, aimed at small businesses and families. Features include a WYSIWYG editor, a photo album (with all resizing and tagging), blog system (with WYSIWYG editor, again), discussion forums, and contact form. The system is entirely hosted by Doodlekit, but you can create entire, powerful Web sites through their control panel, and even host them on your own domain name. Plans range from $9 to $45 per month.
I decided to give developer Ben Kittrell a quick interview to get a bit of background on Doodlekit, its development, and his opinions on Rails:
Ruby Inside: Hi Ben. Read More
Evan Weaver has leaped to the rescue with a hotfix (installable as a gem) for the cgi.rb DoS vulnerabilities. This hotfix is ideal for those who don’t want to install Ruby or patch again. Evan’s site has been having some DNS issues (related to the EveryDNS outages) so I hope he doesn’t mind me repeating part of his post here:
I’ve constructed a hotfix for the cgi.rb vulnerability of yesterday. First, make sure you have the Hoe gem installed. Then:
sudo gem install cgi_multipart_eof_fix –source blog.evanweaver.com
Run the included test to verify the flaw is corrected. To apply the fix, you must require the gem in every affected application, as follows:
require ‘rubygems’
require ‘cgi_multipart_eof_fix’
If you only use mongrel_rails for application hosting, you may install mongrel like so:
sudo gem install mongrel –source=http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/releases
Then mongrel will require the fix for you, provided you have installed version 2.0.0 of this gem. Read More
Sean O’Neil wrote to me with exciting news:
G3DRuby is a Ruby extension for the G3D library, which lets you do quick 3D prototyping using advanced OpenGL API features like vertex arrays, framebuffer objects, and OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) shaders. Version 0.1 does not support all G3D classes, but a few of G3D’s C++ demos have been ported to Ruby and tested in both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu 6.10). The source code for G3D and G3DRuby are available under the BSD license.
Along with the 3D graphics features, G3D also provides some binary file handling (textures, MD2 files, BSP trees), collection detection, physics, and a few other things that would be useful for making some fairly decent cross-platform 3D demos/games like 비트코인 카지노 entirely in Ruby. Read More
Walter Korman has released the first version of a Yahoo! Video library for Ruby. All it takes is a gem install yahoo-video and some simple code like this:
require ‘rubygems’
require ‘yahoo-video’
# your application id for use with the yahoo search services. you can
# get one at http://api.search.yahoo.com/webservices/register_application.
APP_ID = YOUR_APP_ID_HERE
query = ARGV[0]
print “Running a video search for ‘#{query}’…\\n”
client = YahooVideo::Client.new APP_ID
request = YahooVideo::SearchRequest.new :query => query
response = client.search request
As Walter points out, this gives Ruby the distinct honor of supporting the trifecta of video search services: Yahoo! Video, Google Video, and YouTube. Read More
The official Ruby language homepage is reporting that another DoS vulnerability has been found in Ruby’s CGI library (cgi.rb). The solution is to upgrade to the newly released Ruby 1.8.5-p2 (warning: direct link to .tar.gz file). Specifically:
A specific HTTP request for any web application using cgi.rb causes CPU consumption on the machine on which the web application is running. Many such requests result in a denial of service.
I just came across this excellent article that provides links supporting many of the benefits of Ruby on Rails. If you need to justify your use of Ruby on Rails to employers, co-workers, or even yourself, check it out. Links about performance, scalability, philosophy and evangelism are all included. Read More
