This Week in Ruby: What to Expect in Rails 4.0 talk, EventMachine tutorial, and StrongParameters hit Edge Rails
Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly.
Featured
Yehuda Katz Needs Your Input on the Tokaido (a.k.a. rails.app) UI
5 months ago, Yehuda Katz raised $51k to work on Tokaido, an app designed to make setting up a Rails environment on OS X easy. He now has some mockups of the app's user interface and needs your input.
Tddium Looking for Beta Testers of its New JRuby CI Service
Tddium is a cloud-based continuous integration service for Ruby apps and they're expanding into CI for JRuby. Got a JRuby app and want to get into the beta program? Check it out.
Reading
How Ruby Borrowed a Decades Old Idea From Lisp
Pat Shaughnessy shares another excerpt from his Ruby Under a Microscope book that digs deep into the world of blocks, lambdas, procs, and bindings and how they relate to closures.
raise 'hell': Better Programming Through Error Messages
Exceptions suck, but they don't have to. Learn how to program better with error messages, and see how improved messages will lead to a better experience in Rails 4.0.
Ruby's EventMachine: Event-based Programming (Part 1)
Not up to speed with EventMachine yet? No worries, Phil Whelan kicks off a series of blog posts introducing us to the popular event-processing library (which, incidentally, hit version 1.0 just this month.)
An Experiment in Static Compilation of Ruby: FastRuby
Charles Nutter (of JRuby fame) shows off an experiment in doing static compilation of Ruby to Java. Short and sweet and leans on JRuby's parser and AST walker.
8 (New) Steps for Fixing Other People's Code
Many moons ago, Dr Nic wrote a popular article about contributing to open source projects. Alex Grant builds on Dr Nic's work with a more up to date set of guidelines.
Refactoring: Replace Conditional with Polymorphism
From Joe Ferris of Thoughtbot.
Learning Chef
Some things Mathias Lafeldt has picked up while learning to use the Ruby-based infrastructure automation framework.
Watching and Listening
Simulating the World with Ruby
Brian Liles (remember TATFT?) digs into creating simulations in Ruby, covering concurrency issues, domain modelling, testing, and more.
Ruby's Symbol#to_proc: A Walkthrough
A 15 minute extract from my Ruby Reloaded course that digs into what Symbol#to_proc is, where it came from, how it works, and how to make your own version from scratch.
What to Expect in Rails 4.0
Prem Sichanugrist shows off some of the new features and changes in the forthcoming new version of Rails.
Libraries and Code
minitest-reporters: Reporters for MiniTest
A new way to create customizable MiniTest output formats. I've tried it. It works. It's awesome.
oEmbed Ruby Library
oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The 'oembed' gem helps you lean on oEmbed's functionality in Ruby.
Ongoing ActiveRecord Optimizations: Freeze Columns Before Using Them As Hash Keys
An interesting (and ongoing) pull request on the Rails GitHub repository where freezing column names before using them as hash keys seems to result in memory and performance improvements.
Sinatra-Like Routes in Rails Controllers
Jose Valim demonstrates how simple it is to tinker with Rails controllers to support Sinatra-style routes.
Jobs
Back-end Software Engineer at Geckoboard (London, UK)
We're looking for a Rails engineer to help architect, build, test and improve a young, fast moving and market defining web application with all the challenges that come with that. 2+ years’ experience with a dynamically-typed, object-oriented language.
Last but not least..
Dumper: Cloud Database Backup Service for Rails
A (paid) service that hooks into your Rails app and provides cloud-based backup. Has a free trial though.
September 20, 2012 at 7:52 pm
You should leave a link to this page in the outgoing email, so we all know where to go to leave "second hand" comments about the various articles linked to :)
-roger-