The Rails 3 Way is the much awaited, Rails 3-focused followup to The Rails Way, a popular Rails book (and, dare I say, bible) by Obie Fernandez. It features forewords by David Heinemeier Hansson and Yehuda Katz and checks in at a desk-thumping 759 pages of full-on Rails 3 goodness (despite the book sites claiming 850 pages). I’ve given it the once-over.

My General Conclusion

The Rails 3 Way is an interesting book representing a large amount of effort digging into Rails 3. It shares insights and technical knowledge you’d struggle to patch together from blog posts and documentation. It’s a very opinionated book and will not be to everyone’s taste. Read More

Been missing esteemed rapper and author Coolio (real name Tony Arcieri) recently? He’s been busy studying Ruby and building Cool.io (or GitHub repo), a Node.js and Sinatra inspired “event framework” for Ruby powered by libev. Think EventMachine but with a cuter, Sinatra-style API. cool.io isn’t exactly new, though, it’s a rewrite-meets-rebrand of Rev (which started life back in 2007).

You can install cool.io with gem install cool.io (it just feels weird to have a period in a gem name, no?) and be up and running quickly with cool.io’s default example script:

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘cool.io’

ADDR = ’127.0.0.1′
PORT = 4321

cool.io.server ADDR, PORT do
on_connect do
puts “#{remote_addr}:#{remote_port} connected”
end

on_close do
puts “#{remote_addr}:#{remote_port} disconnected”
end

on_read do |data|
write data
end
end

puts “Echo server listening on #{ADDR}:#{PORT}”
cool.io.run

This program listens on localhost at port 4321, accepts connections, and echos data back to them. Read More

It’s time for us to thank the companies who help keep Ruby Inside going by kindly sponsoring our work in return for a little community love. Luckily, they’re all interesting in their own right and have some worthwhile products to check out – no CashForGold or dating sites here!

New Relic — On-demand Application Management

New Relic is a Java and Ruby application performance and reliability monitoring and management service that started life as a Rails-only service (and it’s still great for that!). It’s truly enterprise-grade software but with the flexibility and accessibility of annual, monthly, or “on demand” pricing, catering to nearly all types of customer. Read More

Summarize is a new Ruby library that provides bindings to the C-based Open Text Summarizer library. It’s an ideal way to get a “summary” of a document and esteemed Rubyist Jeremy McAnally used it in his RailsRumble-winning app TLDR.it.

Once installed (gem install summarize – if you’re lucky and have the dependencies), Summarize is easy to use since it adds a summarize method to the String class:

your_string.summarize(:ratio =25)

In this case, Summarize returns a summary approximately 25% of the length of the original string in your_string. Read More