The Ruby and Rails community linklog
Made a library? Written a blog post? Found a useful tutorial? Share it with the Ruby community here or just enjoy what everyone else has found!
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mod_rails is released
Phusion Passenger (aka. mod_rails) is released after extensive beta testing this weekend. Targeting ease of deployment with apache, but even performance is on par with Mongrel.
An Overview of Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support
A review of the new time zone support in Rails 2.1 over at the mad.ly blog. (Via the Riding Rails blog.)
Twitter library and command line tool
Twitter (Ruby library) is a Ruby library and command line client for the Twitter status / micromessaging social network. It’s not the first Ruby Twitter library but it certainly looks clean and well written.
RDoc 2.0.0 Released
RDoc 2.0.0 has been released, a significant release of the most popular Ruby documentation generator. The biggest improvement seems to be a new implementation of ri that yields some major performance increases.
Produce publication-quality charts and graphs in Ruby
Tioga is a Ruby library that produces “publication quality” charts and graphs. It outputs PDF and uses LaTeX for the text processing. The example results look like standard science paper fare.
Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) Now Available
Phusion Passenger, a.k.a. mod_rails, beta now available for download. Quote: “… makes deployment of applications built on the revolutionary Ruby on Rails web framework a breeze.”
Great article / walkthrough for Ruport: Ruby Reports
Gregory Brown and Michael Milner have written a great article / walkthrough of Ruport, the Ruby report generation library, for O’Reilly. It seems a pretty solid introduction for those not quite ready to buy the Ruport book.
Interactive rails schema browser now also available on github
The interactive Rails schema browser is now also available on GitHub.
Fix for Rails Apps in a subdirectory bug
Here’s a handy capistrano-based workaround for the Rails bug effecting Rails apps that run in a subdirectory.
Automatically Creating, Loading, and Migrating your Database (with Magic!)
Have you ever wondered why your app can’t automatically create and maintain its database for you? Is this TOO crazy!?
How to open Gems in TextMate on OS X
Graham Ashton explains how to make opening source code for specific Ruby Gems in TextMate a snap. This could come in handy, I’m always inspecting the source and have had to learn the path off by heart!
Rice - Easily wrap extensions in C++
If you are writing binding C++ libraries to Ruby - check out Rice. It makes accessing C++ libraries from Ruby dead simple through clever use of C++ templating. It is similar to Boost.Python and provides an object-oriented interface to most of the Ruby C API.
Using AJAX to load Rails partials
Here a pattern is discussed to using AJAX to load Rails partials asynchronously. This is a handy way to make your app feel more responsive by rendering slower-loading page fragments in parallel.
Rapid RoR Server Deployment
Check out the Elastic Server On-Demand. It builds Elastic Servers(tm) which are are application stacks which can be dynamically constructed from component libraries and delivered in many virtualization-ready formats (VMware, Xen, Parallels, EC2 AMI). [more inside]
Google App Engine support for Ruby
Vote for Google App Engine to support Ruby! Go and give a star to “Please add Ruby support!” Note that it is the number of stars that determines the items position in the list. Do NOT add “+1” comments (it will send an email to everyone!)
Extend modules instead of defining methods on a metaclass
Jay Fields gives a good reason to Extend modules instead of defining methods on a metaclass: redefining behavior gets weird if you use an instance’s metaclass.
Proof of concept schema browser
I have created a proof of concept a plugin to visualize the tables in your rails application. It uses the tables as reported by the database and relations as defined by belongs_to associations. Comments welcome.
Rails or Merb?
Matt Aimonetti compares Rails to Merb on the Rails on the Run blog. Turns out Merb’s 69% faster!
New version of Thinking Sphinx is out
Pat Allan has released a rewrite of his fantastic Thinking Sphinx plugin, a concise and easy-to-use Ruby library that connects ActiveRecord to the Sphinx search daemon, managing configuration and searching.
Yet another look at Ruby symbols
Here is a detailed look at the mysterious Ruby Symbols.
Free Online Rails Course
The first batch of the Free Online Ruby on Rails Course starts off this Saturday, 12th April 2008. 100s of participants have already registered.
Sharpen up your Ruby knowledge
Some nice little Rubyisms to remember.
Sequel 1.4.0 Released
Version 1.4.0 of popular database toolkit Sequel has been released. It now supports eager loading with cascading to any depth and has a smattering of bugfixes.
Timezones in Rails 2.1
A comprehensive look at timezone support in Rails 2.1. Good place to start to get your app prepared for 2.1 (coming in the next week or two) if you need to deal with time zones.