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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5 Simple Ways To Keep Up With The Rails Community
I’ve written a post on 5 Simple Ways To Keep Up With The Rails Community
New edition of Agile Web Development with Rails in beta
Dave Thomas, of the Pragmatic Programmers, has announced the availability of the beta of Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition. It’s significant because it finally brings the book up to Rails 2.x standards. The beta is available as a PDF for $24.
A Look at Ruby Debugger Options
A Look at Ruby Debuggers by Werner Schuster takes a look at the various debugger options available to Ruby developers (options for MRI, JRuby, Rubinius and Iron Ruby are included).
How to use ActiveRecord fixtures with Namespaced::Models
It’s not obvious how to use ActiveRecord fixture helpers with Namespaced::Models, so here’s the simplest possible way - just a one liner.
Ruby XML Parsing Benchmarks
I recently benchmarked Hpricot and REXML for XML parsing and found REXML much faster. (Update: Actually, turns out Hpricot is faster.)
Ruby's achilles heel
Most folks point to Ruby’s MRI implementation as Ruby’s greatest weakness. Luckily this is fixable and fixes are in the works. The bad news is that the true weakness about the language will be much harder to solve. Ruby’s docs are horrid, and in this post I provide a small but telling (and scary) example. As a Ruby fan, I fear the state of the documentation the most.
Fail Early
It is well-known that the Ruby-based MySQL driver included with Rails is not suitable for use in production. We can write a short initializer that detects this condition and aborts the application start if the production server is misconfigured.
Javascript in Ruby & Ruby in Javascript
Johnson connects Ruby with Spidermonkey. Check out the blog post.
Recurring billing starter kit
If you’ve been inspired by DHH’s Startup School presentation to charge for your software, check out the just-released SaaS Rails Kit, which will give you a head start on building a subscription-based app. Don’t waste your time on writing mundane recurring billing and account management code.
Up to date RubyCocoa / XCode Tutorial
Bowled Over By RubyCocoa is an up to date, well illustrated tutorial covering how to develop an OS X application (with specs!) using RubyCocoa and XCode.
RubyFlow Now On Twitter - @rubyflow
Are you a Twitter user? If so, check out RubyFlow on Twitter and follow.
Screencast for video upload/transcode/push to s3 in under 100 lines.
A screencast for a rails app that uploads a video, transcodes to flash, saves on s3, and http streams it back. Uses ActiveMQ, ActiveMessaging, and RVideo.
Active Shipping released
James MacAulay released Active Shipping, another extraction from Shopify
Rails OpenID Server Application
Masquerade is a Rails powered OpenID server application, made available under the MIT license. Developer Dennis Blöte has written a blog post with more information.
PHP to Ruby documentation
The guys behind Rails for PHP Developers have an interesting new feature. On PHP.net, you can just go http://php.net/fopen and you see the documentation for the fopen function.. well, now you can do the same with http://railsforphp.com/fopen or http://railsforphp.com/array, etc., and it gives you the Ruby / Rails equivalent! Here’s the homepage for the reference.
JRuby 1.1.1 Released
JRuby 1.1.1 has been released. It fixes some compatibility issues and introduces some minor performance enhancements.
RAD: Ruby Arduino Development
RAD is a framework for programming the Arduino physcial computing platform using Ruby. RAD converts Ruby scripts written using a set of Rails-like conventions and helpers into C source code which can be compiled and run on the Arduino microcontroller. It also provides a set of Rake tasks for automating the compilation and upload process.
Useful git commands and quirks
Not specifically ruby related, but some nice git tricks and a good reference for many ruby people who are now messing around with git.
Notes on <a href="http://www.igvita.com/2008/04/22/mysql-conf-memcached-internals/">memcached intern
Notes on memcached internals from MySQL Conf ‘08.
Fix for Rails STI not taking :type attributes into account
Building the right class with STI in Rails - A fix for Rails’ STI not taking :type attribute into account when creating new instances
Sketch Programming: A Precursor to Test Driven Development
Sketch Programming: A Precursor to Test Driven Development is an outline of a method of application development I use to help create the specifications that make good test driven development possible. Read it for my thoughts on “back-of-the-envelope” programming techniques.
Benchmarking mod_rails against mongrel
I benchmarked mod_rails and mongrel on a low end machine.
What's Up In Ruby? - Ruby search site
WhatsUpInRuby.com is a new Ruby / Rails search site developed by Atlantic Dominion Solutions. Rather than being a Google driven affair, it appears to be custom made and heavily focused on Ruby-only news sources.
bio-graphics library by Jan Aerts
The bio-graphics library allows for drawing overviews of genomic regions. It allows creating simple images that display features on a linear map, including the position of sub-domains in a protein sequence.
Looking for 1001 Ways to Promote my Free Ruby eBook
I am looking for ways to promote my Free Ruby eBook. I have come up with some ideas. Some zany, impractical and okay maybe a bit stupid.. but some are simple, fun and easy to do. Will you help me come up with even more? Any idea is acceptable… this is just a fun brainstorming session - to spread the free Ruby eBook as far and as wide as it can go!