Ruby on Rails Planet

Practicing Ruby: A Newsletter by Gregory Brown »

Created at: 10.11.2010 17:21, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: News

If you've been following the Ruby scene for a while you'll have heard of Gregory Brown. He's the author of O'Reilly's Ruby Best Practices, creator of the Prawn PDF library, and the head honcho of the Ruby Mendicant University. He does a lot of community funded Ruby work and his latest attempt to help fund his work is Practicing Ruby, an e-mail newsletter and discussion group dedicated to helping intermediate Rubyists to sharpen their skills.

Each week, Gregory will choose a topic that he thinks trips up intermediate Ruby developers from time to time and dig deep into it by sending background information along with discussion points and questions for readers. A separate mailing list for discussion will be made available. The first topic Greg will be covering is Ruby's method lookup path.

So what's the catch? The subscription is $5 per month, the proceeds of which will enable Gregory to continue work on the Ruby Mendicant University. At least 109 people are confident of Gregory's abilities though - that's how many have signed up as of today. Good luck to Gregory and good luck to you too if you decide to sign up.

Oh, and don't forget Ruby Inside's own Ruby Weekly newsletter (free!), of course. Every Thursday, a single mail with a roundup of the week's top Ruby and Rails news :-)

[suggestion] Interested in learning how to create your own programming language or just how the process works? Check out Marc-André Cournoyer's Create Your Own Programming Language. Even Matz said it's "the book I want to read"!

Heroku Launches Facebook App Hosting Package »

Created at: 10.11.2010 02:43, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: enterprise News

Heroku, a popular Ruby webapp hosting platform that's picked up $13m in funding, has today unveiled their new Facebook App package. The package is aimed squarely at people wanting to develop Facebook apps and brings together several of Heroku's main offerings in a single, discounted monthly package.

Facebook apps represent a sizable portion of the close to 100,000 apps currently being hosted on Heroku, so the company felt it was time to target them directly. The package offers a Ronin-level dedicated database, 20 worker/dyno processes, 1GB of Memcache, New Relic Gold, and $200 of "platform credit" to add other features (such as SSL or the Sendgrid e-mail system).

It's not cheap but the package takes $2000 of retail services and offers it up for $1500 per month. It seems like quite a jump for anyone currently running their Facebook apps on a few VPSes but I suspect there are many existing Heroku customers who will take the opportunity to get a stiff discount on their hosting, though the Facebook App package represents a fixed offer with fixed specifications for now.

In other news, Heroku has reported that their experimental Node.js support program went well and that they'll be rolling it out for everyone in 2011. Given the opportunities for Ruby and Node.js to work alongside each other, this could be a great step forward.

Chronic 0.3.0 Released: Improved Natural Language Date/Time Parsing »

Created at: 26.10.2010 03:54, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: News

Tom Preston-Werner has pushed out version 0.3.0 of Chronic, the popular natural language date and time parsing library for Ruby. It's a significant release because the last was 0.2.3 back in July 2007! Grab it now with gem install chronic

Despite the long time between releases, Chronic hasn't gone without attention. It's been sitting on GitHub and attracting patches for years, but Tom (who's already pretty busy, y'know, running GitHub) has now decided to bundle it up and push it live.

What does 0.3.0 get you?

Improved time-zone support
Handles "on" in phrases like "10am on Saturday"
Now ignores commas (which could throw it off before)
Supports "weekend" and "weekday"
Allows numeric timezone offsets (e.g. -0500)
Support for seasons
"a", "p", "am", and "pm" parsing
The typical bugfixes and low level improvements

Chronic is basically a Ruby institution by now (I first posted about it in September 2006!) so check it out. But if you're still itching for other ways to work with dates and times, check out 3 New Date and Time Libraries for Rubyists from May 2010. Tickle is particular interesting as it allows you to parse natural language requests for recurring events rather than single times.

Want to join the Engine Yard Beta Program? »

Created at: 22.10.2010 19:56, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: cloud News Engine Yard Beta Program

Deploying, automating and managing production Rails applications is always changing – new stack elements, new features in our cloud platforms, and new tools to help development. We think many of these features will be interesting to you whilst they are still in development. If you do too then welcome to the Engine Yard Beta Program!

In advance, we want to thank you for your participation. Your feedback is very much appreciated. It helps us ensure we continue to deliver top quality features to you and all of our customers.

There are three parts to our Beta Program:

Beta Announcements
Alpha Features and Improvements
Beta Features and Improvements

Beta Announcements

We care about you and your production Rails applications. If you are interested in the latest features and stack improvements we’d prefer that you self-selected yourself, rather than us notifying all 1500+ hard-working customer teams. So, we created a Beta Announcements mailing list to quietly inform you about new features that you can trial, if you or your team are interested.

It is self-selecting -- join if you are interested. Of course, I personally highly recommend it for all customers to give you visibility into what features are coming down the Engine Yard pipeline. Something wonderful and empowering might be coming soon!

The Beta Announcements list is only available to Engine Yard customers. To join the Beta Announcements list:

Go to the Documentation site
Login (via the top right “Login” link)
Follow the new Beta link at the top of the page
Or go to the Beta Announcements section
Fill in your email and click Subscribe!

Alpha Features

“Alpha” features are initially implemented with the minimum required functionality, are still in development, and may use Open Source technology that itself is not qualified as “production-ready”. We think some customers and partners may want it sooner than later and are happy to help us iron out any missing bits.

For this reason we created a way for a small handful of our customers to help us, and for us to help you, on each new feature. We call these Alpha Features.

For Open Source stack items, the underlying technology might be rock solid but it may be classed as an “Alpha Feature” because it is relatively new to the Engine Yard Technology Stack. Once a few customers have trialled it and given it the green light, and we’ve finished our documentation and Support training, we’ll move it to Beta and beyond.

Alpha features are currently available to test on an as requested basis for customers who are willing to help us move these important features forward from Alpha to Beta.

Alpha features carry a warning: do not request support via the normal support channels.

The current list of Alpha features is top secret, but includes [redacted], [redacted], and [redacted]. [Ed: @drnic seriously, stop it.]

Engine Yard customers, jump into the Beta site (see instructions above) to see the current list and request access if they excite you.

Beta Features

When we feel a feature is close to being ready for production applications, has been used and verified by a handful of customers, has a set of documentation and once our Support team is trained on the feature/technology, we will then promote the feature from “Alpha” to “Beta”.

Beta features are visible and usable by all Engine Yard customers but carry a warning: do not request support via the normal support channels. There is a mailing list for each Beta feature to discuss bugs, issues and feature requests with Engine Yard staff and other Engine Yard customers.

The current list of Beta features isn’t top secret at all. It has been omitted from this post for the sake of brevity, replaced instead with this long sentence.

Support Details

Access to the Beta program does not require an Engine Yard Support agreement. If you help us to help you with new features, we are extremely grateful.

Each new feature or improvement has its own support channel, rather than the standard support channels like the ticketing system, community site, IRC, etc.

Summary

The Beta page will now be the canonical page describing which features are available for trial, how to access them, how to request support and report bugs. It is very exciting to continually improve the transparency of operations at Engine Yard, and make it easier and more engaging to talk with our customers.

Again, many thanks in advance for your assistance. We're grateful you're willing to help us deliver a wonderful Engine Yard service and experience to make your web applications successful.

Microsoft Jettisons IronRuby Into The Open Source Community »

Created at: 22.10.2010 04:52, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: News Windows Specific

Back in August, Microsoft seemed to get tired of IronRuby so its project leader Jimmy Schementi jumped ship while asking the Ruby community to step up and get involved in its future. Today, Microsoft has announced new leadership for IronRuby (and IronPython) and has effectively jettisoned it into the community as a true fully open source project.

So who's in charge of IronRuby now? Jimmy Schementi, naturally, and Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the Mono and Gnome projects and generally all round super famous open source dude.

Schementi has written about what the leadership changes and Microsoft's announcements mean in the greater scheme of IronRuby's development. In short, Microsoft is no longer directly funding the projects but isn't restricting contributions or keeping code hidden behind the scenes anymore either (e.g. the IronRuby tools for Visual Studio).

Want to give IronRuby a try or get the source code? Head over to IronRuby's official homepage at ironruby.net.

[announcement] Want a fistful of links to the week's top Ruby and Rails news landing in your inbox each Thursday? Ruby Inside's sister project Ruby Weekly is for you — check her out.