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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How Mendicant University Works
I’ve written a blog post explaining how things work at Mendicant University, in the hopes that it will answer some of the frequently asked questions about the program. It’s a free online school for software developers that I’ve been running since June 2010, and it is awesome. If you’d like to join us, admissions are now open for our January 2012 core software development skills course. Please spread the word if you like what we’ve been up to!
Web-VPN: Secure Proxies with SPDY & Chrome
Is it possible to securely route SSL sessions via an HTTP Proxy? A look at the existing HTTP specification, and what the SPDY spec and Google Chrome team bring to the table - hint, the answer is yes. As of January 2012, over 50% of all internet sessions will be SPDY capable, and Web-VPN is one of the many great features it brings.
New bash-completion for "gem"
Based on gem version 1.8.10, and based roughly on the widespread git-completion.bash, here is rubygems-completion.bash for your convenience. The existing completion scripts were having problems with recent versions of gem, and had some annoying quirks. This version should be fast, and much easier to maintain as gem evolves.
Delayed_job web interface inspired by resque
I just launched delayed_job_web, a ruby plugin to give delayed_job a web interface similar to resque. This gem allows you to: easily view jobs enqueued, working, pending, and failed. Queue any single job. or all pending jobs, to run immediately. Remove a failed job, or easily remove all failed jobs. Watch delayed_job operation with live ajax polling.
Avoiding stack overflow in Ruby with trampolines
A blog post by Chris Mowforth showing how you can avoid SystemStackError while using recursion in ruby.
Twitter feed for conferences
I’ve set up a feed for retweeting ruby conferences. [more inside]
Command Line Reporter 1.1 Released
The latest version of Command Line Reporter has new features including horizontal rules, vertical spacing, headers and footers. See the post from the other day for more details on formatting capabilities. The gem is available on rubygems.org with source on <a href=https://github.com/wbailey/command_line_reporter”>github</a>
Gitdocs: Open-source Dropbox using Ruby + Git
A couple days ago, we wondered if we could create a Dropbox clone in Ruby using just a simple git repository. We wanted to use this for many documents including shared task tracking, file sharing, storing code snippets, et al with our development team. We also added the ability to view the entire repository in your browser so you can use gitdocs as a wiki. Our blog post details the reasons we ended up building this and how to get started using this for your team.
The New and Improved Gemnasium
Gemnasium.com keeps track of your gem dependencies for you and keeps you up to date on the latest versions. In addition to a bunch of new features, it’s now free!
Do you ponder what to name things in your code?
Evan Light is questioning you - do you ponder what to name things in your code? Please do post your comments on the blog post.
Run grep across git diffs
I often need to see when methods are defined, removed, etc, so I made this: [more inside]
My thoughts about Ruby ORMs
I’ve put together some of my thoughts about current state of Ruby ORMs, mentioning ActiveRecord, DataMapper and Sequel. Take a look if you’re interested in ORM development efforts: The State of Ruby ORM
Dynamic Database Application Developers Benefit from Lua, Ruby and ITTIA DB SQL
Application developers for embedded systems and intelligent devices can now benefit from Ruby and Lua – two easy-to-use languages – as the latest offering from ITTIA DB SQL.Dynamic scripting languages make it easy to customize the application behavior because code is parsed and executed at runtime, and are often used with web servers.
Writing simple Ruby client/servers using Protobufs
Miso is excited to welcome Joshua Hull to our engineering team! In his first blog post, he discusses one of the open source projects we have been working on to allow lightweight services to communicate using Google’s excellent Protobuf. As a result of using protobufs for inter-service communication, we have released Protoplasm to simplify using them in Ruby. Be sure to check out his blog post for more information.
Two articles on using Redis for autocomplete
Last week I wrote a tutorial called Finding your soulmate: autocomplete with Redis in Rails 3.1 and this morning I posted a follow up article discussing Two ways of using Redis to build a NoSQL autocomplete search index.
Announcing faye-websocket, and standards-compliant WebSocket library
As promised after the release of Faye 0.7, its WebSocket code is now available on its own, providing a robust, general purpose WebSocket implementation that’s easy to integrate into Rack apps.
Ruby Blocks as Dynamic Callbacks
In this article, I will demonstrate how we can pass multiple blocks to a method and with some metaprogramming, we can achieve a dynamic callback mechanism with just a few lines of code.
Method chaining and lazy evaluation
Method chaining has been all the rage lately and every database wrapper or aything else that’s uses queries seems to be doing it. But, how does it work? Let’s figure it out!
Precompiling Rails Assets for Development
I just wrote a blog post about speeding up Rails development by precompiling the assets in development environment.
Command Line Reporter 1.0 Released
I am releasing the first version of Command Line Reporter. It allows you to control the output of your ruby scripts using formatters just like RSpec does displaying the results of your tests. The result is cleaner code that is not polluted with unreadable puts and print statements with hard to track whitespace. The gem is available on rubygems.org with source on <a href=https://github.com/wbailey/command_line_reporter”>github</a>
Starting a Series on Geospatial Rails
I’m starting up a series of articles on doing geospatial programming in Ruby and Rails, using RGeo and related libraries. The first two articles are now up: Geo-Rails part 1: A Call to Revolution and Geo-Rails part 2: Setting Up a Geospatial Rails App.
Example Capybara Acceptance / Integration Test
I finally figured out how to setup an acceptance test with Capybara so I wrote some notes down on how to do it. Its actually not too hard, and IMHO totally worth it.
I just launched JSONBuilder 3.0 with a much friendlier DSL
I just launched version 3 of my gem JSONBuilder and was hoping to get some user feedback, especially from those who have used JSONBuilder in the past.