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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state_machine 0.9.0
state_machine 0.9.0, an FSM library, has been released. Highlights include: MongoMapper 0.5.5+ / ActiveModel 3.0 support and around_transition callbacks.
Page Objects in Cucumber with Gizmo
We recently launched Gizmo, our implementation of the page object pattern for cucumber testing. It essentially DRYs up your cucumber steps by allowing you to abstract all your page element selectors used for actions and assertions into modules. It’s still very new but quite usable. Check it out: Rubygems where you can find out about installing it. Github where you see setup details and examples of usage. Feedback is welcome here.
Full stack Rails testing with holygrail
A presentation on holygrail, given via Skype screen-sharing to 757.rb, by Evan Light of We Are Titans. Watch it here.
Isy – HTML with Erector
I posted another article about Isy framework and its HTML generating with Erector. Please read and comment to shape this new framework. [more inside]
CanCan 1.1 Released
The CanCan authorization library for Rails has been updated to 1.1. It adds several new features including defining abilities through a hash of conditions and fetch database records based on permissions. Check it out!
Ruby Brew: A custom coffee created for Great Lakes Ruby Bash
We’ve served up over 200 cups of Ruby Brew, a custom designed and roasted coffee for Great Lakes Ruby Bash. Ruby Brew was designed and roasted by Roos Roast, an Ann Arbor, Michigan based coffee micro-roaster.
What are the IRB extensions that you use on a daily basis?
For DietRB, I’m looking for input from users on what IRB extensions they use on a daily basis, so I can start investigating what is really used and what I should support. [more inside]
Simple API Versioning in Rails
There’s a way to build versioned web services using only core features of Rails, and it’s much simpler than you might think.
Rails Coach #16: The DRY Principle
One of the basic principles behind Ruby on Rails is the DRY principle. I’ve done a brief discussion in this podcast episode.
Welcome to the Troposphere
Great writeup by @ananelson on using Tropo with Ruby: Welcome to the Troposphere. She does a great job of giving multiple use cases of some real apps you would want to develop.
Non-blocking ActiveRecord & Rails
The mysql gem is one of the worst offenders when it comes to performance of Rails. A look under the covers of the driver architecture & available alternatives.. Followed by a demo of an async ActiveRecord driver! (MySQLConf presentation)
Ruby Midwest Conference Speakers Announced
Check out the complete Ruby Midwest speaker lineup posted on the conference website. Register now ($75) to hear Yehuda Katz and Chris Wanstrath deliver the best keynotes this 2 day, single track, 20+ speaker conference has ever heard!
Beetle: A Ruby Gem for High Availability AMQP Messaging
The Rails team at XING just released Beetle, a ruby gem that helps building highly available messaging systems using RabbitMQ and Redis.
Prawn 1.0 is just around the bend.
The first draft roadmap for Prawn 1.0 has been announced. We will allow two weeks (until 4/29) for open discussion before locking down the plan and executing. If you do PDF generation in Ruby, please come and participate in the discussion! I have officially retired PDF::Writer today, so you’ll want to get involved in this process as Prawn is the way forward.
Contributing to Rails
A few tips for someone interested in contribute to Rails Core: Contributing to Rails.
View Inheritance in Rails Cells revealed!
A great feature in Rails Cells is view inheritance, which helps keeping your views clean and DRY. It needed some publicity so I wrote a small article about it.
Hosted Continuous Integration with Rake support
Mike CI, providers of a hosted service for Continuous Integration, have this week released support for Ruby/Rake. They offer a 14-day no-obligation trial with prices starting at $10/mth.
Rails Style Partials in Sinatra
We love Sinatra, as well as using it in its own right, we sometimes use it to let designers create haml and sass. The other day the question of “How do I create a partial using sinatra?” arose.
Ruby Plus Brand and Website for Sale
The website RubyPlus is now available for sale. It has over 12,000 members. You can market jobs, screencasts, training and other products to the members via newsletters, banner ads etc. Members are high income software professionals who spend money on educational products. You can enhance the site to include job and resume posting. You can monetize the site by charging for job postings.I am selling this site in order to fund the growth of my company Zepho Inc. British Accent Training iPad app is a featured app on the app store under Education category and I am overwhelmed with too much work.
Automated Heroku Backups
I think this is a good technique for automatic nightly PostgreSQL database backups from Heroku to Amazon S3. Feedback would be great!
A fast and easy to use URL shortener with Sinatra? Check out Firefly
Firefly is a simple URL shortener app for personal use. It’s fast, it’s easy to setup - and is written in Sinatra! Read more about Firefly at github or checkout the 0.4 release post at http://aj.gs/k.
ArrrrCamp announces talks
ArrrrCamp, the Ruby, Rails, Radiant & Rum conference in Ghent, Belgium, just announced their speaker and talks list.
Thoughts on Radiant, plugins, and integration
I’ve posted 2 articles about Radiant CMS integration with Rails projects and loading plugins. [more inside]
My pair programming review
I’ve paired the last 2 weeks, and really enjoyed it.My pair programming review, if you’ve ever paired or are planning to, feel free to add more information in comments.
Serializing (And Deserializing) Objects With Ruby
Serialization is one of those things you can easily do without until all of a sudden you really need it one day. Once you do look into it, it seems to be useful all the time. Let’s have a look at the serialization options we have available to us in Ruby.