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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Project, streamlined project workflows
I created Project to help reduce the repetitive nature of common daily tasks. By registering projects against workflows you can quickly create a set of commands that will be run against each project. Check out the Github page here or grab the gem from Rubygems.
Gallerby: gallery generator
I wanted to have a simple static gallery to share pictures with my family. So, this sunday, I released gallerby (demo).
A new database-backed HTTP caching library for OpenURI
open_uri_db_cache extends OpenURI to cache content in a database. This allows you to pull things like RSS feeds faster and be nicer to other servers. Uses ActiveRecord for storage. Honors things like ETag and If-Modified-Since headers.
Code coverage on 1.9 using simplecov
Check out simplecov, a library for code coverage on Ruby 1.9 that sits on top of the built-in Coverage lib and gives you filtering, grouping and merging across test suites (i.e. code coverage for both cucumber and unit tests).
Discussion with a Java switcher
Here is a summary of the many discussions I had with a Java developer who switched to Ruby. Topics addressed: Threads / Concurrency; Rails is slow; Object allocation / Garbage Collection; Tools; ActiveRecord; Tools; What can we do?
Ask for best practices on rails-bestpractices.com
http://rails-bestpractices.com added a new feature, asking for best practices, it allows users to ask for a best practice about any rails-related work, such as “How to detect N+1 queries?” and “How to upload a large file with progress bar?”. Then everyone can post your answer with your own best practice solution to the questions. Check it here.
Map of Upcoming Ruby Conferences
Conference is a top search term here at Rubyflow. This post shows how to create a map of ‘em. Ruby is used to scrape the a list from the web (Hpricot) and geocode it (using Google). A map is then created by calling R from Ruby through Rserve.
'validate_block', a gem to make ActiveRecord validations a little less bad
validate_block is a Ruby gem designed to make the ‘validates_*’ declarations in ActiveRecord modules a little less repetitive, DRYer a bit more scope-able.
Notes on Behavior Driven Development (BDD)
Check out this review on the RSpec Book’s chapter about BDD. Learn why and how to apply the concepts on BDD in your daily work!
Limiting Red: Smarter test builds through metrics
Applying some of the ideas of Kent Becks JunitMax tool to Cucumber.
Example of creating a simple DSL alone.
My investigations about ruby-tricks that allow us to create domain-specific language.
Managing Windows from Ruby or...
How I learned to stop worrying and manage Windows from Linux.
Cinch version 1.0 released!
We’ve just released version 1.0 of the Cinch IRC Bot Building Framework, which boasts some awesome new features! Check out the blog post for more information.
How To Clean A Campfire Room Of Uploads
Playing around with Tinder/HTTParty to clean up your campfire uploads. Useful if you only care about your textual transcripts and reaching your file limit.
ZSH completion scripts for RVM and Bundler
For the why day, I just hacked two ZSH completion scripts for Bundler and RVM.
Advice on using Ruby, RVM, Passenger, Rails, Bundler in development
Jeremy Lecour wrote a nice and useful article on how to use ruby, rvm, passenger, rails and bundler while you develop.
pixelglass.es: pixelated class hierarchy
In celebration of _why day pixelglass.es is getting a home on the internet today in an attempt to explore a new way of visualizing class diagrams, and eventually, documentation.
Do you know the official Ruby interpreter "goruby"?
If you don’t know what to do on whyday, do not play code golf! It is frustrating! And it is addictive! And you don’t create something useful by golfing! But it is also fun! And I am not the only one who wants to squeeze code even more. The original Ruby 1.9 interpreter comes with pretty crazy version of itself: a version for code golfing!
The instance_eval method is probably the...
The instance_eval method is probably the coolest thing about ruby. Good use of instance_eval is what makes a framework a good framework in my opinion. Learn how to use it for your next gem. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Networked Drawing Canvas in DRb (with Android client!)
I made this screencast to show off how powerful DRb is, and how easy it is to get started. We create a simple drawing canvas in Tk, then use DRb to network-enable it and draw to it from a 4-line client. We finish with a Ruby client that runs on Android via the Ruboto environment. And along the way, we cover a little basic security to help keep you safe (this is a network app, after all).
auto_html 1.3.0 Released
auto_html 1.3.0 is out. Highlights: * Rails 3 support * no need for explicit call to auto_html_prepare for preview * no need for DB column for cache (ie. _html) * correctly handle blank and nil values when applying auto_html * youtube filter supports html5 * filter added: youtube_js_api
Attribute Normalizer 0.3.0 Relased
v0.3.0 of the attribute_normalizer gem. [more inside]
Rubygems should be smarter than they are.
Convention over Configuration - Tips for Simpler Gems [more inside]
Ruby port of NLTK punkt sentence segmenter
Just finished the ruby port of NLTK punkt sentence segmenter for natural language processing systems. Check it out source and documentation at
Multi-core, Threads & Message Passing
It’s not a question of whether threads, events or message-passing is a better model - the hardware trends require that we use all of the above. Either the VM (like Ruby) has to abstract it all for us, or we need to build frameworks to match the capabilities of the hardware.