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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HTML5 form helpers for Rails
I’ve added HTML5 form helpers to my gem of Rails patches, giving you, for example, email_field_tag and email_field, which are already very helpful for the iPhone, Safari, and Opera.
Attribute Normalizer now a gem: Looking for roadmap feedback
I just released a gem version of the attribute normalizer active record plugin over on gemcutter. I’m now looking for your feedback on the roadmap to the 0.2 release of the gem before I dig in working on it. Please leave your feedback on the latest release annoucement. Or email me at the address found in the source notes.
Rails Package Management
Released a tool that will act as Rails::Initializer’s config.gem and extract plugins and gems to vendor/ like “rake gems:unpack”. It’s portable configuration where you can copy it and paste to another Rails application. You can paste your .rpkg file to gist/pastie/pastebin and download it and merge it with rpkg merge Just good for people who don’t want to type: sudo gem install [plugin/gem] to run Rails application. Read this post about Rails Package Management.
LocalNewsRadar : A rails plugin which gathers local news/tweets like a spider for an AR Model
Found This: LocalNewsRadar Looks like its based on Outside.in api with ability to hook various other open apis.
New Screencast: Essential CSS for Every Web Developer
Want to know the basics of CSS? Watch this screencast and learn everything you should know as a web developer. We’ll cover the basics which include colors, borders, padding, margins, lists, fonts, backgrounds, tables, links and floats. This is a very basic screencast, so if you are already familiar with these topics, this might be just a review for you. Watch this screencast and more at TeachMeToCode.com
Remember - Ruby object persistence
Remember provides quick and easy Ruby object persistence using Moneta to interface with key-value stores via a Hash. This allows you to have a globally persisted hash whose keys are available across different servers or ruby instances. [more inside]
Better Task Management with Nake
Nake is a task manager inspired by Rake. As well as Rake, Nake supports dependencies, multiple task definitions, file tasks, rules etc, but it can do more. It also supports advanced arguments parsing and task configuration. Nake is also 4x times faster than Rake. Nake comes with a lot of useful tasks for gem building, installation and releasing, running specs and also with snake executable for system-wide task (similar to Sake for Rake). If you are looking for documentation, take a look at Nake Wiki or clone the repository and go through examples.
Radiant CMS extension deactivating
I’ve got a quick read on the deactivate method in Radiant’s extensions and exactly what it does and does not do.
IM New Year countdown with MacRuby
Matt Aimonetti wrote another example of how to use MacRuby for something you might not have thought of. This time he shows how to programmatically change your iChat status to display a countdown to 2010.
PHPs extract and compact functions implemented in ruby
Due to a series of questions on how to dynamically define local variables (which is an anti-pattern, mind you, you almost certainly should use a Hash instead), I went ahead and implemented Kernel#extract and Kernel#compact. Ruby being OO, those pseudo-functions would probably be better implemented as methods (e.g. Binding#extract), but that’s left as an exercise for the reader ;-)
Mongo3 - rule your mongoDB clusters
Just released V0.0.6 mongo3. If you mongo please try mongo3…
MailStyle: Easier HTML Emails
I’ve just released MailStyle, a plugin to ease the pain of writing HTML emails in rails.
Detect the language of a string
Matt Aimonetti just posted a short blog post showing how to detect the language of a string with MacRuby in less than 10 LOC. "Happy new year!".language # => "en"
Run, I18n, Run!
José Valim talks about the latest I18n gem release with the extensions newly added. It tells how to use them to speed up translations and includes some benchmarks as well!
Released Miso 0.3.1, which adds GraphicsMagick processor.
Miso, the unified API for simple image operations commonly used on the web, has gained a GraphicsMagick processor in version 0.3. Thanks to Paul Vaillant for the contribution.
Markdown reference for your projects
I just made a succinct and simple markdown reference you can include on your projects. human-markdown-reference is to markdown what human-textile-reference is to Textile.
Kill Trailing Whitespace With Code-cleaner!
I just released code-cleaner gem which is useful for removing trailing whitespace and adding missing \n. It has advanced whitelisting & blacklisting rules, so it’s clever enough to ignore your non-ruby files as well as your vendored dependencies. It can also add missing encoding declaration for Ruby 1.9 if you specify --encoding=[my-enc] and much more. [more inside]
[ANN] Ruby Challenge for Newbies by Peter Cooper is now live
The Ruby Programming Challenge for Newbies #5 by Peter Cooper is now live. You can submit your solutions before 20th Jan 2010. Participation is free and you can win attractive prizes.
Nezumi - iPhone app to manage your apps on Heroku
I just launched Nezumi which allows you to administer your Ruby apps on Heroku from your iPhone. It can be found in the App Store.
Blueprints 0.4.0 released
Version 0.4 of my factories and fixtures replacement gem Blueprints. Changes include refactoring some insides, blueprint method on active record object to update it’s attributes and passing options hash when building a blueprint.
Mongo3 - Rule your mongoDB clusters!
Just dropped a preview release of mongo3. An admin console for your mongo databases. Not much functionality just yet, but will get the idea…
CoffeeScript, a Little Language with a Pure Ruby Compiler
CoffeeScript is a little language with a Ruby-esque syntax that compiles into the good parts of JavaScript. The compiler uses vanilla Ruby classes for the lexer and code generation, and Racc for the parser. If you’ve ever wanted to use Ruby to experiment with a little language, it’s a good example to take a peek at.
has_scope and responders released
We, at Plataformatec, just released two new open source tools: has_scope and responders, both extracted from Inherited Resources. has_scope allows you to quickly map controller parameters to named_scopes and responders is a repository of Rails 3 responders, which can already be used within Inherited Resources. As conclusion of this refactoring, Inherited Resources finally reaches 1.0. Read the blog post to catch up all changes.
Generating Thousands of PDFs on EC2 with Ruby
For about two months, we’ve been working on a static website that exposes the results of complicated economics model to non-economists. We decided to make the site static because of the overhead involved in computing the results and the proprietary nature of the model. We would simply pre-generate the output for all valid permutations of the inputs. However, on a single machine, we found it would take 30 hours of uninterrupted processing! Clearly, this was a job for “the cloud”.
Active Record Enumerations (single db integer column) - plugin
I just added my first plugin ar_enumerations which allows to use “enumeration” field in your AR models. This plugin was at least useful for me, because it saved me from a lot of “has_many” tables and data stored to single integer column. Also I’m providing the sample application where you could see plugin in action. I hope this plugin will be useful for you too.