bgror

This Week’s Ruby News: Ruby 1.9.3p0, OmniAuth 1.0, MagLev 1.0 and More »

Created at: 06.11.2011 00:54, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Compilation Posts News

The rapid descent of the weather towards winter is getting people to stay in and code and long may it continue given the quality of this week's releases: OmniAuth 1.0, MagLev 1.0, and Ruby 1.9.3, for starters!

Headlines

Articles and Tutorials

Screencasts

14 Talks from the ArrrrCamp 2011 Conference
ArrrrCamp was held in Ghent, Belgium a month ago and now videos of the talks are available. Enjoy Corey Haines demonstrating fast Rails tests, Andrew Nesbitt on A/B split testing, Elise Huard on 'data driven development' and more.

The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough: Go Deep on Ruby 1.9
The most comprehensive and up to date walkthrough of Ruby 1.9 for existing Rubyists. It's a commercial screencast by me, Peter Cooper. Ruby 1.9 guru James Edward Gray II even said he picked up plenty of stuff from it. There's a 5 minute sample available if you want to see how it works.

Libraries and code

Ruby Jobs of the Week

Last but not least..

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This Week’s Top Ruby News: JRuby 1.6.5, A New Prag Prog Book, Fast Specs, Rails Style Guide and More »

Created at: 27.10.2011 19:28, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Compilation Posts News

This week brings us a new JRuby release, some Ruby 2.0 news (but you knew that already, right? ;-)) and a new BDD library that seems to have struck a chord with the people I'm following on Twitter. Also, my Ruby Reloaded course is now also over half booked out so if you're curious, definitely check it out now.

Without further ado, here's a round up of the top Ruby news and releases from the last week, courtesy of Ruby Weekly:

Headlines and Releases

@CodeWisdom: Inspirational Programming Quotes via Twitter
I've started a new account on Twitter called @CodeWisdom, that's dedicated to sage programming related wisdom and quotes, as well as links to discussions on best practices and techniques. If you're on Twitter, follow along.

Ruby 2.0 Implementation Work Begins: What is Ruby 2.0 and What's New?
Ruby 2.0 is the next major version release of MRI Ruby, the de facto official Ruby implementation. What's it about and what might it include? Ruby Inside takes a look.

Articles and Tutorials

Screencasts

Libraries and code

Jobs of the Week

Last but not least..

Turbocharge Your Ruby Skillset With My Online Ruby Reloaded Course
Are you an intermediate Rubyist looking to boost your Ruby skillset with things like test driven development, OO design, building libraries and learning some of the lesser known nooks and crannies of Ruby? My Ruby Reloaded course runs in November and December and is now just over half sold out. If you want to join, check out this page for more info soon and use the code "SHOW" for $80 off the usual rate.

3 New Date and Time Libraries for Rubyists »

Created at: 05.05.2010 17:30, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Compilation Posts Cool Ruby Tricks Tools

In the UK there's a cliché that goes: "You wait hours for a bus, and then three come along at once!" So it went with these three Ruby date and time libraries. They all made an appearance on RubyFlow last week and are all useful in their own ways, depending on how you're working with dates and times.

ice_cube - Fast querying and expansion of event recurrence rules

ice_cube is a library by John Crepezzi that provides "fast querying and expansion of recurrence rules in Ruby." What this means is that you can create schedules powered by date recurrence rules that can be quite complex (e.g. every 4 years on a Tuesday in the first week of November). Rules like these are defined by chaining methods together, rather than using natural language.

To install:

gem install ice_cube

To use:

require 'ice_cube'
rule = IceCube::Rule.yearly(4).month_of_year(:november).day(:tuesday).day_of_month(2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
schedule = IceCube::Schedule.new(Time.now)
schedule.add_recurrence_rule rule
schedule.first(3)
# => [Tue Nov 02 05:04:38 +0000 2010, Tue Nov 04 05:04:38 +0000 2014, Tue Nov 06 05:04:38 +0000 2018]

ice_cube also supports exporting rules into iCal and YAML formats as well as a natural language equivalent.

John has put together a PDF presentation that shows off more usage, and there are some simple examples on the official site too.

tickle - A natural language parser for recurring events

tickle is a natural language parser for recurring events by Joshua Lippiner that stands in contrast to ice_cube's method driven approach. It depends on the popular chronic natural language date parser and appears (through my experience) to be for Ruby 1.9+ only.

tickle lets you throw it things like every 4 days starting next saturday, every other week, the tenth of the month and similar (there are a lot of examples on tickle's GitHub page). You pass these to the Tickle.parse method and you get the next occurrence of the rule.

To install:

gem install tickle

To use:

require 'tickle'
Tickle.parse('every 4 days starting next saturday')
# => 2010-05-01 12:00:00 +0000

tickle isn't particularly mature yet and it only makes it easy to get the next occurrence of your rule, but the developer suggests that once an event has occurred, you automatically run Tickle again to get the next date. In this way, it seems tickle is well suited for situations where only the next occurrence needs to be stored and the rule can be kept in a separate database column or similar.

business_time - Time and date offsets based on "business time/hours"

business_time is a new library that works with the concept of "business time" or "business hours." Rather than just letting you perform operations on dates by absolute numbers of days or hours, you can now work with business days and hours of your own definition. business_time depends heavily on Active Support.

To install:

gem install business_time

Note: business_time depends on Active Support (gem: activesupport)

To use:

require 'active_support'
require 'business_time'
# Examples "from now"
4.business_hours.from_now
5.business_days.from_now
# Using user supplied dates
my_birthday = Date.parse("August 4th, 2010")
10.business_days.before(my_birthday)
# Add a day to not count as a business day
BusinessTime::Config.holidays << my_birthday
# Overlapping days are OK
6.business_hours.after(Time.parse("August 3rd, 3:00pm"))

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #30 »

Created at: 19.04.2010 21:47, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Compilation Posts Elsewhere

The latest installment of our series of roundup posts, covering some of our latest findings in the world of all things Ruby. These items wouldn't make it in as separate posts, but they should be of enough interest to Rubyists generally to make it a worthwhile browse for most readers.

Camping 2.0 Released

Back "in the day", a gentleman and scholar called Why The Lucky Stiff built a teeny, tiny webapp framework called Camping. It was like an extremely light mix of Rails and Sinatra, except that Sinatra didn't even exist at the time. In late 2009, Why went missing and still hasn't reappeared, but Magnus Holm picked up the torch and has released Camping 2.0. It retains Camping's original flavor and hardcore spirit (it's only 3072 bytes in size!) but adds Rack support and simpler routes, amongst other things.

JRuby 1.5.0 RC1 Released

The JRuby team has announced the release of JRuby 1.5.0 release candidate 1. It comes 5 months after JRuby 1.4.0's release and features the most fixes of any of JRuby's development cycles. There are also a handful of new features and improvements, including better Windows and UNIX-specific support, standard library and RubyGems updates, Rails 3 focused fixes, performance improvements for Ruby-to-Java calls, and JIT compilation caching.

Ruby There: Ruby Events Listings

Ruby There is a new Ruby and Rails events listing site from Scottish Rubyist, Keavy McMinn. You can already submit events of your own or just check out what's coming up. We'll do a full post about it soon once Ruby There's listings have been integrated with Ruby Inside, as we plan to show Ruby event listings on all our pages. As an aside, Keavy is a great Rails developer and is currently taking on new work.

Isy: Yet Another Ruby Webapp Framework

Whenever I post about a new Ruby webapp framework on Ruby Inside, I typically get a response or two along the lines of: "Who cares? Yet another Ruby webapp framework? What's wrong with Sinatra and Rails?" Well, if that isn't you, you might be interested in Isy, a new webapp framework that's component-based and stateful.

Psych: Event-Based JSON and YAML Parsing

Aaron Patterson (a.k.a. tenderlove) of Nokogiri fame has written a blog post about building an event-bsased Twitter stream parser with Ruby 1.9.2 and Psych. Typically in Ruby, JSON and YAML parsing are done in an "immediate" fashion where you pass in the data and you get a Ruby representation back out. Event-based parsing instead uses callbacks to process JSON and YAML asynchronously.

PDF::Writer Deprecated - Prawn 1.0 Under Development

Prawn is a pure Ruby PDF generation library that abstracts away a lot of the PDF-specific nonsense into a form that makes it easy to produce PDFs from Ruby code. Its creator, Gregory Brown, has retired the older PDF::Writer library in order to focus on the development of Prawn 1.0. Gregory is keen to lay down a spec for Prawn 1.0's API and he's put a draft spec out there for everyone to comment on. If generating PDFs from Ruby is important to you or your app, you might want to get involved in this effort, as Prawn is sure to remain the #1 PDF generation library available to us for some time.

For Sale: RubyPlus.org

Bala Paranj is selling his much-celebrated rubyplus.org Ruby screencasting site. He claims it has 12,000 members and he's selling the site to fund the growth of his Zepho Inc company (which is focusing on a British accent training iPad app). Questions and offers can be directed to Bala at bala.paranj at zepho.com.

While we're in a mercantile mood, perhaps I should also mention I own rubyonrailswebhosting.com, railswebhosting.com, rorhosting.com, railstraining.co.uk, rails-training.co.uk, and ruby-training.co.uk.. and if anyone has any serious or semi-serious offer for any of them (I'm more than happy to sit on them, so it'd have to be worth it), contact me (see the Anything else section for my e-mail address).

Best of RubyFlow: 12 Ruby Links From March 2010 »

Created at: 19.03.2010 17:45, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Compilation Posts Miscellaneous

RubyFlow is Ruby Inside's community driven sister site where you can post cool Ruby links you want to share (even of your own stuff). With 20–80 posts each week, there's too much to cover on Ruby Inside, but I want to provide a regular roundup of the "best of" RubyFlow. This instalment covers early March — enjoy!

Figure out %s() and other % shortcuts I just wrote up all the %() shortcuts I know about go take a look and hopefully learn one or two you didn't know about!
by caius

An Interview Question That Prints Out Its Own Source Code (In Ruby) I recently decided to play around with writing a ruby quine (especially since there didn't seem to be many around). Along with discussing the possible merits of quines as an interview question, here is what I came up with.
by skorks

StackOverflow cool Ruby questions 4 Just posted the 4th post of this series.
by khelll

Rit – The anti-CMS content scheduling system in Rails Need to support business users updating website content? You need a CMS right? Probably not. Introducing Rit. – The anti-CMS content scheduling system in Rails. Rit. is a standalone web application that allows users to edit multiple editions of website content and designate when that content should show up on the site. Site content is served up to a consuming application as a web service.
by briandoll

Outsource your site-wide search with Binged An introduction to using Binged, a ruby wrapper for the Bing Api.
by kfaustino

Vim for Rails Development Where to start and how to learn Vim for Rails Development by referencing some books/screencasts.
by dalibor

Spree 0.10.0 Released We've just released the newest version of Spree which is an open source e-commerce framework for Ruby on Rails. Highlights include: theming, REST API and Ruby 1.9 support. See the release announcement for more details.
by railsdog

Install any Java library as a JRuby gem Charles Nutter said "… a prototype Maven server that looks and feels like a RubyGems source. By setting this server as a source (or passing it to the gem command), any Java library in the world is installable as a gem. Let me repeat that: ANY Java library in the world, installable as a gem. This means you can also use Maven artifacts as dependencies in regular Ruby gems, and it additionally means we won't have to re-release jar files into their own duplicate gems on the standard repositories. It's very exciting, and we hope to have it ready for JRuby 1.5." You can get it here: maven_gem at github
by datazoo

light_mongo: a lightweight MongoDB object persistence layer for Ruby LightMongo is a lightweight Mongo object persistence layer for Ruby which makes use of Mongo's features rather than trying to emulate ActiveRecord. It's an interesting alternative to the already popular and somewhat awesome MongoMapper.
by PeterCooper

Multiple CPUs => Parallel Testing (now for every test-suite) Parallel tests now suppots any kind of test-suite(Test/RSpec/Cucumber), speeds up e.g. action_pack test-suite by 200%. Finally a good excuse for buying Dual/Quad-Core. Speedup those tests, go parallel!
by grosser

Schema-Free MySQL vs NoSQL (with help from Ruby) There is no reason why we can't have a schema-free MySQL engine to compete with the NoSQL solutions. A look at what "schema-free" and "document-oriented" actually means, and the ruby code to make it work.
by igrigorik

And for comic relief (don't visit if you're easily offended):

Dicks 0.02 Released A new version of Boliver T. Shagnasty's dicks gem was released today. For those who don't know, dicks is a "Brutish way to print out a bunch of ascii dongs". Critical stuff here.
by wowzer