Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news.

This Week in Ruby: JRuby 1.7.0, Passenger 4.0b1, Ruby 2.0 Feature Freeze

By Peter Cooper / October 25, 2012

Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the Ruby e-mail newsletter.

Highlights include: a massive release for JRuby, a promising beta for Phusion Passenger 4.0, the announcement of a 'feature freeze' for Ruby 2.0, the Rails Rumble 2012 results, and just what did the Rails Rumble winners use to power their apps?

Featured

Ruby 2.0.0 'Feature Freeze' Announced
Right on schedule, the core Ruby team have announced a 'feature freeze' for the forthcoming Ruby 2.0. All this means for now is that no features not already approved by matz will make it into 2.0.0.

Working with TCP Sockets: Jesse Storimer's New Ruby E-Book
Jesse Storimer ('Working with Unix Processes') has released his latest book, Working with TCP Sockets. If you want to learn more about socket programming from a Ruby POV, check it out.

The 2012 Rails Rumble Results
A superb Rumble with 500 teams taking part and findthin.gs, a TV series and movie search tool, took the lead with the judges, with 'Deploy Button' being the public's favorite.

Reading

Yehuda Katz: My Problem With Turbolinks
Rails 4.0's 'Turbolinks' feature has been.. a little controversial. Yehuda explains what they are, as well as why he's not entirely happy with them. And as a Rubyist who's also very deep into JavaScript, his opinion counts for a lot.

Rails Rumble Winners, A Gem and Technology Teardown
The folks at Dwellable looked at the Gemfiles of the ten Rails Rumble winners and put together some interesting stats of what gems and technologies they used. Winning technologies included jQuery, CoffeeScript, Bootstrap, Sass, RSpec, Sidekiq and Haml.

Eating The (Ruby) 1.9 Elephant
The New Relic engineering team on the trials, tribulations, and eventual success in switching their app over to Ruby 1.9.

Version Your Ruby Objects with Aversion
Include the Aversion module into your objects and whenever the state of that object changes, Aversion remembers the change and keeps track of the history. Clever idea though beware of memory use if you go over the top with it.

Try mruby Today
mruby is a smaller, embeddable Ruby implementation that Matz is currently working on. This post by Richard Schneeman digs into what it's about and how to give it a go for yourself. Aimed at an introductory level.

Create a Custom Slider With RubyMotion
A complete walkthrough of customizing a UISlider to get your own custom look and feel for a control within an iOS app built on RubyMotion.

Hybrid Concurrency Patterns: Threads and Events in Harmony with Celluloid
Describing a slide deck with 'Ruby developers need to stop using EventMachine. It's the wrong direction' is a sure-fire way to get attention :-)

Growing a Rails Application: How We Made Deploy Fast Again
The developers at PagerDuty brought their deploy time down from 10 minutes to 50 seconds. How? You gotta read for that.

Watching and Listening

Aaron Patterson on 'Rails 4 and the Future of Web'
Earlier this month at Aloha Ruby Conference 2012, Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson gave a keynote on a myriad topic of topics including threading, Rack, locking, and cats and how they relate to Rails 4.

Cache Digests (RailsCasts)
Episode 387 of RailsCasts is here(!) and Ryan Bates looks at the cache_digests gem which automatically adds a digest to fragment cache keys based on the template (so if a template changes the cache auto-expires).

The Ruby Rogues Discuss Service-Oriented Design with Paul Dix
Service-oriented design is the idea of taking a complex application with many parts and splitting them out into more modular parts that communicate with each other. Paul Dix chats to the Rogues about the concept.

Libraries and Code

GitLab 3 Released: An Open Source GitHub-Clone-In-A-Box, Sorta
GitLab is an open source Rails app that provides an interface for git repository hosting and management. Version 3 includes an in-page file editor. It takes a lot of inspiration from GitHub, though that's not a bad thing.

RubyInstaller 1.9.3-p286 Released
In the last issue, we mentioned the new MRI 1.9.3-p286, released to patch up a couple of security vulnerabilities. Now, the Windows-based RubyInstaller distribution is also up to date (there's also a build of 1.8.7-p371 if you're still on 1.8.)

Gamebox: A Game Template for Building and Distributing Gosu Games
Generate a game and get it up and running quickly. Could be very handy for contests like Ludum Dare! It's not new but somehow I hadn't seen this before.

FIFO: Queueing Library Using Amazon's Simple Queue Service
FIFO is a Ruby queueing library built on top of Amazon SQS. Like DelayedJob it encapsulates the pattern of executing tasks in the background but doesn't rely on a database.

LiterateRandomizer: A Random Sentence and Paragraph Generation Library
Rubber tree and watched him. Vulgarized the larger than the faithful presence! Go slowly protruded round the beginning of shoulders.

Jobs

Rails Software Engineer at Sleepy Giant (Newport Beach, LA, Chicago)
Sleepy Giant is a game company based in Newport Beach. We are looking for Rails developers to join our talented team. You will work on high-profile, high-scale game services and franchise development projects, including green-field systems engineering.

Last but not least..

gSchool: An Intensive 6 Month Web Development Training Program
An intensive 6 month program to learn Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 from scratch so you can build your own webapps. Run by esteemed Rubyist, Jeff Casimir.

Comments

  1. Brian says:

    A lot of great reading this week. Thanks for putting this together, Peter.

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