bgror

The Last Week in Ruby: Rails 3.1.1, Sinatra Recipes, Spree Gets Funded and more »

Created at: 18.10.2011 01:10, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous News

Back in 2008 and 2009, Ruby Inside had a long line of "Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts" posts, aimed at sharing a collection of news and libraries in one hit. In the last year, I've shifted Ruby Inside to focusing on less frequent tutorials or investigative features and have been putting all of the news on Ruby Weekly, my weekly newsletter.

There are still many, though, who would prefer to read the news in their RSS readers or on the Web, so I'm going to be taking the things I find for Ruby Weekly each week, doing a little reformatting, and sharing them here on Ruby Inside too. The longer articles will then slot in nicely in between :-)

So here we go, starting off from Ruby Weekly issue 63. You can check out the full 63 issue archive, if you like, or even sign up for Ruby Weekly here if you weren't familiar with it. Or, of course, stay here on Ruby Inside and get the same (or more) each week - it's your choice!

Without further ado..

Headlines

Articles and Tutorials

Presentations and Videos

Libraries and code

Ruby Jobs of the Week

Sr (Agile) Software Engineer at Apple [Cupertino, CA]
Apple is seeking the very best engineers to be part of a continuously tested and integrated development process in its Developer Publications team. The systems they build are used for all Apple developer documentation for Mac OS X and iOS. You need deep knowledge of Ruby including Rails, RSpec, Bundler and Devise.

Last but not least..

Thanking Ruby Inside’s September 2011 Supporters »

Created at: 11.10.2011 17:56, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous notweet

Ruby Inside wouldn't be what it is without you but it's time for me to thank the companies who also help to keep Ruby Inside going by sponsoring my work. Thanks!

I take care not to accept sponsors who have little of interest to the Ruby scene so hopefully you'll find something useful below - it's not a roster of faceless companies, these folks are doing great stuff.

Gauges - Simple, Sexy Real-time Analytics

Gauges is a tool for collecting and analyzing the Web traffic for all your sites in real-time using a fast, reliable, hosted system. You can even see overview data for all your sites on a single page. It comes from Ordered List, the same folks who built Harmony.

CodeSchool - Learn By Doing

CodeSchool is an innovative, interactive online marketplace where you can learn to code directly in your browser. Courses so far include the FREE "Rails for Zombies" (and forthcoming Rails for Zombies 2), Functional HTML5 & CSS3, and Rails Best Practices. They have some great stuff in the pipeline and if you're looking to pick up some new skills, definitely check them out.

New Relic — On-demand Application Management

New Relic is a full-stack Java, Ruby, PHP, and soon Python, application performance and management app that started life as a Rails-only service.

New Relic has long dominated the performance monitoring scene, particularly amongst Rails apps (folks like 37signals and Shopify use them heavily), but they've not rested on their laurels. Just a few months ago they released a Real User Monitoring service which goes right down to the customer experience. How quick pages load, how quick the pages are to render, etc.

Cloudmailin - Incoming Email for your Web App (As A Service)

Cloudmailin is a cloud service that can accept e-mail and then send the required data, real time, to your webapp over an HTTP POST request. Take the strain out of hosting your own e-mail infrastructure and let Cloudmailin take care of it instead.

RubyDrop: A Dropbox Clone in Ruby »

Created at: 26.11.2010 22:56, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Cool Miscellaneous

Ever used Dropbox? It's awesome. A cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, and even mobile) file syncing and backup service with 2GB for free (or 2.25GB if you sign up with this link). Well, if you'd like to roll out your own system on your own infrastructure, send some thanks to Ryan LeFevre, the creator of RubyDrop, an open source Dropbox clone based on Ruby and git.

Cloning Dropbox sounds like a tall order and in reality, "Dropbox clone" is a big stretch. RubyDrop is quite simple under the hood and focuses on the file syncing part of the problem. A Ruby process monitors a folder for changes and uses Git to do the heavy lifting and change management between your clients and a defined central server.

RubyDrop is not without its flaws. What happens when files are changed on multiple nodes and then clash? Your mileage may vary. What's good, though, is that Ryan seems keen to improve the system and has already planned a centralized server and is considering integrating rsync to make file syncing smoother. Ryan is a systems engineer at TwitPic with a background in PHP, JavaScript, and C but RubyDrop is his first Ruby project. I look forward to seeing more both from him and RubyDrop.

[sponsor] MinuteDock is a fast and streamlined time tracking/logging app that makes tracking time and sending invoices painless and easy. Check it out.

Is the Ruby Standard Library a Ghetto? »

Created at: 22.11.2010 22:14, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Controversy Miscellaneous

In The Ruby Stdlib is a Ghetto, Mike Perham argues that Ruby's "standard library" (all the libraries that come by default with Ruby installs) is old and crufty and suggests some parts that should be removed.

The Problem

In case you're unfamiliar with the term, the ever authoritative Urban Dictionary lists ghetto as, among other things:

an impoverished, neglected, or otherwise disadvantaged residential area of a city, usually troubled by a disproportionately large amount of crime

Anyone's who recently looked up documentation for stdlib-dwelling libraries has probably been a little frustrated. I see rants and raves from time to time on IRC and Twitter and I'm often surprised at how much isn't documented. Frequently, documentation advocates like James Britt will encourage people to start contributing documentation in an attempt to tidy up their own back yard, but the process is, IMHO, reasonably arcane compared to that of other open source projects.

A Solution?

Mike's suggests that we remove most of the substantial libraries, like Net::* (including the popular Net::HTTP), DRb, REXML, RSS, and even WEBrick, and to have them as separate, RubyGems-installable libraries.

I agree. Even forgetting the technical aspects, freeing these libraries from the clutches of the standard library and having defined maintainers (on, say, GitHub) could encourage more developers to engage with them, fork them, provide patches, and so forth, as we see with other popular Ruby libraries.

The sticking point? The "standard library" is called "standard" for good reason. You can install Ruby 1.8.7, 1.9.2, JRuby 1.5, or any mainstream implementation and expect to run require 'drb' successfully out of the box. Taking libraries out of the standard library would change this and, of course, require significant community agreement and discussion, not least from the Japanese Ruby high guard.

I applaud Mike for kicking off the discussion, though. In a year or two's time, we might get to look back at the discussion much as we can now look back at 2008's "No True 'mod_ruby' is Damaging Ruby's Viability On The Web" and breathe a sigh of relief.

AppSumo: A Discount Bundle of Webapp Credits Suited to Ruby Developers »

Created at: 14.11.2010 17:10, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous News

AppSumo is an intriguing "bad ass developer bundle" that brings together $1543 of credit for ten different Web app development related resources (most are Ruby focused or have Ruby APIs) for a mere $47 purchase.

The services include:

• Twilio - an API driven telephony service (I use this — it's great)
• Heroku - the Ruby webapp hosting environment
• Hoptoad - the errors notification service
• New Relic - the performance monitoring and application management service
• As well as Recurly, SendGrid, MongoHQ, SauceLabs, Infochimps and Linode.

Sadly I'm already signed up with most of these services and most of the credits are for new or upgraded accounts only, but if you want to give any of the above services a try or want to build a new app that relies on them, this looks like a steal.

I also need to put a big fat disclaimer here in case you have problems with AppSumo: I'm not related to AppSumo, getting nothing from them (shame!) and am not responsible if it turns out to be flaky. That said, I've only seen good reports so far (there are lots of them on Twitter). Enjoy.