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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Updated Ruby Switcher: Working With Multiple Ruby Versions Has Never Been This Easy
The Ruby Switcher is a super-lightweight tool for quickly switching between Ruby versions. You can easily experiment with Ruby 1.9 to try out a gem or two, and if you run into issues, you can safely retreat back to 1.8.x (after you report the Ruby 1.9 problems to the gem’s maintainers, of course). The latest version includes single-line commands that install the various Ruby versions for you. Wanna try out Ruby 1.9.1? Just type install_ruby_191, and the Ruby Switcher handles the rest. The Ruby Switcher gives you shell-specific Ruby versions: while one terminal window is testing out a gem or app in Ruby 1.9, you can have another terminal performing the same tests with Ruby 1.8.7 (or JRuby, or Ruby 1.8.6, or REE, or Leopard Ruby, etc.). When switching between Ruby versions is this seamless, there’s no reason not to experiment.
Pomodoro Technique for more productive work
Pomodoro Technique - Agile way to organize, measure and set value for your productive work. Are there any Ruby Shops practising it?
[BOOK] Distributed Programming with Ruby
Today my book, “Distributed Programming with Ruby” became available on O’Reilly’s Safari. To see a more current revision of the table of contents, check out this blog post. I’d love to hear your feedback.
rcov, minus the segfaults
relevance-rcov squashes numerous bugs (including those gnarly segfaults) in the old version of rcov. Try it on your Ruby 1.8.x projects today, and if you run into any problems, fire up the report-cov-bug tool and let us know.
Audio interview with DHH
Randal L Schwartz has interviewed David Heinemeier Hansson for his FLOSS Weekly show. DHH talks about Rails, 37Signals, and how he came to coding late in life (relatively speaking).
A heated discussion about Rails on Reddit
A heated discussion about Rails on Reddit.
Why You Should Use Devver
There are many tools out there for continuous integration, but running a large test suite should probably happen before you commit your code: Why You Should Use Devver
How To Write A Simple Web Crawler In Ruby
How To Write A Simple Web Crawler In Ruby - takes you through what you need to know to write a simple web crawler in Ruby from scratch (all code is included). It also mentions some of the ways the web crawler can be made more useful and robust.
Developer Day Boston
Developer Day is coming to Boston on August 15th - we’ve successfully hit Durham and DC with our forward-thinking, technology-agnostic (but Ruby friendly!) events, and now Viget and Relevance are partnering with thoughtbot to bring it to New England. Registration is open now!
Site discovery and instant client APIs for your RESTful web application
Putting it all together - ResourceTemplates, described_routes and path-to — described_routes and path-to have come together nicely (thanks in part to the new link_header gem). This post explains how to add site discovery to your web application and get instant client APIs in Ruby.
Ruby, Rack and CouchDB = lots of awesomeness
In his latest post, Matt Aimonetti covers the simple steps to create a Rack middleware and how to log CouchDB queries or any thing happening in your application. Using Couch, you can log directly to a remote database and process/display them there. Even if you don’t care about Couch, it’s a great middleware example and shows some interesting Ruby tricks.
Drag & Drop Sortable Lists
A common (yet pretty) requested feature easily explained. Check it here.
Programmatically Creating Website Thumbnails
Programmatically Creating Website Thumbnails describes how to get those little images of a web page as a snapshot or image available to display in your application.
Getting to grips with git: differences and undoing changes
This is the fourth post in my Getting to grips with git series. It is concerned with looking at the differences between versions, and the various options for undoing your changes.
Conditionally using memcached in Rails development mode
Quick tip on how to setup Rails caching to use memcached conditionally, when the daemon is running.
Open source slides with Slidedown
Have too many slideshows in your organization? Have a jones for open source tools? Text files? Git? Same here. Give Slidedown a whirl.
VertaCount is a web based application to count everything you want.
VertaCount allows to create as many colourfull counters as you need. 8 hours was needed to write this application.
Wireframing Rails Apps
A quick look at a useful wireframing application to help you develop screens for your application before coding.
LessCSS goodies
If you use or plan to use LessCSS in your ruby project then check out css2less and rack-lesscss Rack middleware.
Rails Underground - Day 2 round-up
The 2nd day of the conference has just kicked off, and I’m furiously blogging away the summaries as soon as I can, so check them out Rails Underground 09 talks
Apple Push Notifications on Rails
Apple Push Notifications on Rails - APN on Rails is a Ruby on Rails gem that allows you to easily add Apple Push Notification (iPhone) support to your Rails application.
From the giant robots...
…two new projects: manage your github collaborators with enforcer, grade your projects with metric_fu/integrity using report_card, and also: make your test suite run UNCOMFORTABLY FAST
Add Authlogic and Lockdown to your rails app
Don’t stop writing specs if you start using Authlogic and Lockdown in your rails app!
Real Testing Example
Longish example of real tests from Cucumber to controller and model tests from Noel Rappin of Pathfinder and Rails Prescriptions: Read Part One and Part Two
Resource Controller for “Skinny” Rails Controllers
This blog post takes a look at some basic metrics associated with two projects to show how the resource_controller plugin can dramatically reduce LOC in your rails applications.