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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Faster controller specs with sorcery
I just published faster controller specs with sorcery. Check it out if you’re using RSpec and sorcery in your Rails apps.
Keep your peanut butter out of my chocolate.
The view layer in web app frameworks is broken, and here’s why.
Why Every Ruby Developer Should Learn Smalltalk
No matter what kind of programming you are doing these days you probably heard a lot about Smalltalk. And there is a reason for that. Its influence on what we are doing and using right now is hard to overestimate. Refactoring, XP, TDD, many VM technologies came from the Smalltalk community. more
tconsole: Testing console for Rails
I just launched tconsole, a testing console for Rails with mintiest. It speeds up test performance by preloading your Rails environment (similar to how Spork does), but also helps out with testing workflow by providing a pretty simple syntax for testing single test files or even specific tests. [more inside]
Typed Fields in Ruby
One of a few things I missed when I switched from ActiveRecord to ActiveModel is all type conversions AR takes care of. You just pass a bunch of strings and it knows what to do with them. TypedFields gem does similar kind if stuff but without tying it to ActiveRecord. More
ClientSideValidations 3.2.0 is going modular
An explanation of the plan going forward with the soon to be released 3.2.0 version of ClientSideValidations.
systemd socket activation and Ruby
Example of using systemd socket activation in your ruby server.
Backing up with Backup
It seems many Rubyists aren’t familiar with the Backup gem - so I’ve written up a blog post about how I’ve used it and patched it.
Slop version 3 first release candidate (Simple Lightweight Option Parsing)
I have just pushed Slop version 3.0.0-pre1. Slop is a simple to use command line option parser (yep, another one!). It’s lightweight and has an easy to remember API. The v3 branch can be found at slop/v3. Although the README needs some work, I would love some feedback on the API changes and design/usability.
docs_on_kindle turns web documentation into Kindle ebooks
is a Ruby framework for turning web documentation into attractively formatted and easy-to-navigate Kindle ebooks. The first ebook to come out of this project is for the documentation for Heroku. You can download it at the github page. Contributors are needed to write Kindle ebook recipes for the documentation of other services, APIs, and tools.
Rails & Spine.JS Series
I have just published the first 3 parts of a ongoing series of my experiences using Rails and Spine.JS for a complete rewrite of a personal project: Using The CoffeeScript Source, Jasmine Testing Part 1, and Jasmine Testing Part 2
Pipeline style processing with Stages
We just launched a gem to let us do data processing with little modular reusable code snippets, and decided to share. Code and much more info in the stages github repo.
generator for simple, searchable, shareable, modular command-line cheatsheets
cheatorious: “Being victorious through a means so amazing it cannot possibly be achieved without cheating.” (Urban Dictionary) [more inside]
A command-line password manager in Ruby
I’ve refactored my pws gem and now it’s fun to use :)
Bugs Bunny: Broadcast AMQP messages within a Unicorn served Sinatra app
I have just created a small demo app called Bugs Bunny: a Unicorn served Sinatra application which uses Bunny (a Ruby AMQP 0.9.1 client) to broadcast messages to every Unicorn worker. It requires an AMQP message server, such as RabbitMQ, in order to publish and receive messages. Clone the repository and run it yourself at Github.
Everything you need to compete in the Heroku Neo4j Challenge
Check out the third part of Neo4j on Heroku and you’ll have be ready to enter the contest (and win some prizes).
Easy iOS Style Checkboxes in Rails 3.1
I stumbled across a newish gem, ios-checkboxes, which makes it incredibly easy to include stylish checkboxes in your projects! Rock on, dnagir and tdreyno.
Building a Modern Web Stack for the Real-time Web
WebSockets, SPDY, SSL, and persistent connections are in, except that our infrastructure can’t support most of these use cases. To enable the modern, real-time web, we need to drag our ‘back office’ architectures into this century.
Seeing double: how Ruby shares string values
I just posted a follow up to my “23 chars” article from two weeks ago: Seeing double: how Ruby shares string values.
Could using DCI degrade performance? Benchmarking DCI in Ruby
I just wrote an article benchmarking DCI in the Ruby world. I’ve addressed possible concerns about the performance implications of using the DCI (Data-Context-Interaction) architecture.
TaskJuggler 3.1.0 has been released
Are you looking for a to-do list manager with text based input like emacs org-mode that can scale all the way up to a full project management suite if you need to? Then have a look at TaskJuggler! This release features new account reports, comprehensive leave management and the ability to use TaskJuggler as a to-do list manager. In addition to these highlights, we also have a long list of medium to small improvements that can be found in the change log. TaskJuggler is written in Ruby and is hosted on github.
Two simple Vim plugins for Hash syntax conversion & Rails navigation
ruby_bashrockets.vim converts Ruby 1.8-style hashes to 1.9-style hashes and back. [more inside]