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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Free Webbynode stickers for everyone!
We’re giving out free stickers! Want some? Grab them while they’re hot blog.webbynode.com/2011/04/get-your-webbynode-stickers </a>
The art of product backlog prioritization
As a fan of agile development, and as a member of a 2 person team building a rails web app, I’m sharing my two cents on product backlog prioritization. The blog post is targeted to small teams who like lightweight and iterative processes. Also, many thanks to the ruby and the rails community and all your advice and gems. Launching Sandglaz wouldn’t have been such a success without you.
Appraiser = a simple command line utility for Gemfile
appraiser colorfully displays ./Gemfile contents. screenshot is here.
Gmail Notifr: a RubyCocoa Project Rewritten in MacRuby
RubyCocoa is dead, so Gmail Notifr has been rewritten in MacRuby, checkout it out on github.
Reading obfuscated code
I studied the Almost Sinatra source (eight line sinatra clone) and figured out what tricks it was using.
Redmine plugins development hints
I posted some hints that could be usefull for any redmine developer: Redmine Plugin Development - Part1: Generation, Enumerations, Hooks Redmine Plugin Development - Part2: Journal, Customization of Redmine Menu and Core.
Let's share our Ruby toolboxes
We just published a big list of gems, plugins and APIs that we use in our work. Hoping more other companies and individuals will share theirs too.
filepath: 'which' for open files
Tired of mashing tab at the command line or dragging file handles from your favourite text editor so you can reference files in the terminal? It annoyed me sufficiently enough today so I hacked together filepath, which’s little brother. Instead of spec sp[tab]/mo[tab]/it[tab]e[tab][tab][tabtabtabtabtabtab], you can now do spec `filepath` Assuming you just tabbed to your terminal from your editor</code> or spec `filepath textmate` if you want to be more explicit.
Prettify MatchData
pretty_match_data is a tiny tool to prettify MatchData. Screenshot is here.
Replace sed/awk/grep/wc/... with pure & readable Ruby
Be a instant-commandline-ninja without learning new tools, e.g. number of files by date: ls -al | pru ‘split(“ “)[5]’ ‘grouped.map{|d, f| “#{d} : #{f.size}” }’ try Pipeable-Ruby (pru).
Asynchronous Processing with Actors and girl_friday
I’ve posted an introduction to using Actors for safe and easy concurrency with Ruby and then created a gem, girl_friday, which uses Actors to provide a next generation message queueing system. If you’re thinking of using delayed_job or Resque for your next project, take a look at girl_friday too!
Easy and DRY API responses in Ruby
The gem acts_as_api provides a simple interface to determine the representation of your model data, that should be rendered in your API responses. It’s been around for some months, time to update the documentation: Gem Getting Started Page Wiki
Friendly error messages in Rails forms
This tip suggests a way for making Rails form error views more user friendly.
Intuition & Data-Driven Machine Learning
Machine learning is hard, right? It doesn’t have to be. Focus on developing intuitive insights, get more data, and get started! A video and Ruby code examples from a talk at GoGaRuco 2010.
Test after_commit hooks with transactional fixtures
Rails 3 has built-in after commit hooks: awesome! Those hooks don’t fire during tests/specs when transactional fixtures are enabled: non-awesome! It’s pretty easy to monkey-patch it to work the way you’d expect: awesome!
Meta Tools Gem Released
I’ve created the gem “meta_tools”. Blog post: Link, Gem: Link, Git: Link
"Rails Best Practices" Review
Over the weekend I had a chance to play around a bit with Rails Best Practices, so I thought I’d share my review.
Barney 0.8.1 hits the shelves!
Barney is a library for sharing data between processes in a easy and natural way. I posted it here a while back, but the API has changed and matured a lot since then, so I thought I’d repost. The GitHub repository has a few samples, and links to the API docs.
Securing Resque::Server in Rails 3
A really simple way to secure Resque::Server in a rails 3 app.
Why you should stop doing Class-Oriented Programming
Do Object-Oriented instead. Here’s why
Crafty, a simple library to build HTML
Unsatisfied with the existing libraries that allow you to build HTML with Ruby, I just launched Crafty. Crafty is different, because it gives you a set of helper modules that you can use to build HTML in any Ruby class. Consider Crafty a friendly, framework-agnostic alternative to clunky Rails helpers such as content_tag. It is also faster than most alternatives. Crafty is not a templating language, but it helps to create builder classes, similar in nature to Rails FormBuilder. Learn more.
Routes: rake routes 10x faster with search feature
- a simple gem to parse your rails routes 10 times faster with the possibility to search in them like this “routes events show” to display all the routes containing the words events and show.
Writing Rails Engines #1: The basics
Engines in Rails 3 are an awesome way to organize features that you want to reuse in other apps. Here’s how to get started.
Agnostic roles in Rails using metaprogramming
Just posted an article on building agnostic roles in rails using some metaprogramming, check it out!
test_xml released - Testing your XML has never been easier!
We released test_xml to help you testing XML with Test::Unit, MiniTest, RSpec and Cucumber. Here’s an overview of the assertions and matchers making your life simpler.