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Infinity Test: Flexible Continuous Testing with Multiple Ruby Implementations »

Created at: 29.09.2010 23:00, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous Tools

Infinity Test is a new library by Tomas D'Stefano that pitches itself as a "flexible alternative to Autotest." If you want your project's tests (both RSpec or Test::Unit are supported) to be automatically run when changes are made, this is a great place to start.

The big benefit of Infinity Test is the support for testing across multiple Ruby implementations, powered by RVM (a candidate for Ruby project of the year, if ever there were one). For example, if you have some Test::Unit tests that you want to be run on Ruby 1.8.7, JRuby, Ruby Enterprise Edition, and Ruby 1.9.2, you could run:

infinity_test --test-unit --rubies=1.8.7,jruby,ree,1.9.2

There's also a configuration file system with its own DSL to build more complex automated testing systems with customized notification systems and callbacks.

[ad] Ruby Inside's newest sponsor is Recurly, a recurring billing service. They promise "subscription billing in 3 easy steps" and you can start a free trial right now. Their API is Ruby friendly and on GitHub!

Building your own Fake Sinatra with Rack and Metaprogramming »

Created at: 27.09.2010 18:00, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous

http://teachmetocode.com/screencasts/faking-sinatra-with-rack-and-metaprogramming/ (or on Ruby Inside)

Charles Max Wood of Teach Me To Code Screencasts has put together a 13 minute screencast demonstrating how to use some Ruby metaprogramming magic along with Rack in order to build a small Sinatra-esque webapp framework. Watch the HD version at Vimeo or download the video to get the best quality.

Charles is also trying to raise a little money to help him get to RubyConf and do some coverage from there. If you enjoy this screencast, I'm sure he'd love a few bucks (and might sing your praises into the bargain).

10 Top Ruby Jobs for September 2010 »

Created at: 26.09.2010 21:32, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous

Let's straight into it. There are currently 10 great positions being advertised on the Ruby Inside jobs board. Here's a roundup:

CTO of Nurph at Nurph (a Twitter chat startup)
London / Remote, United Kingdom

User Interface Designer in the Solar Industry at Enphase Energy
Petaluma, California

Experienced Rails Developer at Daily Burn (a fitness webapp)
New York, New York

ProFounder Front end Developer at ProFounder Financial
Los Angeles, California

Lead Software Developer - New Media at America's Test Kitchen
Brookline, Massachusetts

Rails App Support Engineer at Engine Yard (who hasn't heard of these guys!?)
San Francisco, California

Software Engineer at HealthCentral
Arlington, Virginia

Lead Ruby on Rails Developer at TCI
Mountain View, California

Lead Software Engineer at HealthCentral
Arlington, Virginia

Sr. Software Engineer at Citrusbyte (a great dev team in LA, I've visited their place, they're nice!)
Los Angeles, California

Want your job(s) to appear on Ruby Inside and Rails Inside? Check out our "Post a Job" page for info on how it all works. Most positions get 2000-3000 views directly on our jobs site and are linked from ~300k pageviews on Ruby and Rails Inside.

Check Out The Companies That Make Ruby Inside Possible »

Created at: 20.09.2010 23:12, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous

It's time for us to thank the companies who help keep Ruby Inside (and often other Ruby sites) going by sponsoring our work. Luckily, they're all pretty interesting in their own right and have some worthwhile products and services to check out (and Linode recently put their prices down!).

Interested in sponsoring Ruby Inside & 17 other Ruby sites? Click here to learn more.

Recurly — Subscription Billing In 3 Easy Steps

Recurly is a recurring billing service, ideal for webapps and other subscription based systems. Recurly's goal is to help you boost your monthly subscription revenue without getting in the way. From their Web site you can sign up for a free trial and get playing in minutes. The customer experience is fully customizable and there's a "Advanced Subscription Billing" API you can use directly from your app(s).

Linode — Xen VPS Hosting

Linode is a Xen-based VPS (virtual private server) hosting service that's now in its 8th year. Plans start at $19.95 per month for a plan with 512MB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and 200GB of transfer bandwidth. Want 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and 400GB of bandwidth? That's $39.95 per month. Linode's major advantages over the competition are reliability and performance (as shown in these performance tests by Eivind Uggedal) and I've even "downgraded" from dedicated servers to using Linode because they're almost as good but for a fraction of the cost!

A non-disclaimer: Ruby Inside is hosted with Linode but the hosting is all paid for separately and is not related to their sponsorship. I'll be sticking with them - they provide an amazing service.

New Relic — On-demand Application Management

New Relic is a Java and Ruby application performance and reliability monitoring and management service that started life as a Rails-only service (and it's still great for that!). It's truly enterprise-grade software but with the flexibility and accessibility of annual, monthly, or "on demand" pricing, catering to nearly all types of customer. With New Relic you can monitor your apps, find slow transactions, see specific SQL queries, and even run a code-level thread profile. Trivia: New Relic is an anagram of founder "Lew Cirne"'s name!

Scout — Hosted Server Monitoring

Scout is a simple yet highly flexible hosted server and application monitoring service. It's powered by plugins written in Ruby that are designed to cover all sorts of use cases (monitoring CPU, networking, IO status, MongoDB instances, etc.) and you can write your own if you have other requirements. Getting started with Scout takes just two commands (installing a gem and running the "scout" process). In most cases, it takes less than five minutes to log on to your server, install the Scout agent, and start seeing data in your control panel.

Want to join them?

If you're interested in sponsoring Ruby Inside, get in touch with our advertising guru James Avery using this form.

James has just started to offer a great package for any companies interested in being seen in the Ruby and Rails worlds. On a monthly basis (or just a 2 week run, if you prefer) you get a spot in the "Web Publishers Room" (~75k impressions a month across 15 different Ruby-related sites), Ruby Inside (180-200k impressions per month), RubyFlow (~70k), Rails Inside (~25k) as well as a mention in a post like this. So that's about 350k impressions over 18 well known Ruby and Rails sites - $1500 for a month or $750 for 2 weeks (the latter is ideal for a launch).

Read Ruby: A Free, 19 Chapter Ruby 1.9 Reference Guide »

Created at: 20.09.2010 15:24, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous

Read Ruby is an online "book" about Ruby 1.9 in a mostly referential style. It's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license so is reasonably "free" if you want to make and share changes, as long as you're not doing so for profit.

The author stresses that the book is in "a very rough state" but it looks pretty good to me so far. There are 19 chapters covering broad topics like strings, character encoding, IO, files, and objects in general. Notably, the book is heavily focused on syntax rather than instruction.

The book's source files are hosted on GitHub if you want to get involved. The build process involves Mustache, Nokogiri, Pygments, OptiPNG and YUI Compressor, so it's not for the light of heart.