Issue 116 - October 25, 2012
Featured
Right on schedule, the core Ruby team have announced a 'feature freeze' for the forthcoming Ruby 2.0. All this means for now is that no features not already approved by matz will make it into 2.0.0.
Jesse Storimer ('Working with Unix Processes') has released his latest book, Working with TCP Sockets. If you want to learn more about socket programming from a Ruby POV, check it out.
A superb Rumble with 500 teams taking part and findthin.gs, a TV series and movie search tool, took the lead with the judges, with 'Deploy Button' being the public's favorite.
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Reading
Rails 4.0's 'Turbolinks' feature has been.. a little controversial. Yehuda explains what they are, as well as why he's not entirely happy with them. And as a Rubyist who's also very deep into JavaScript, his opinion counts for a lot.
The folks at Dwellable looked at the Gemfiles of the ten Rails Rumble winners and put together some interesting stats of what gems and technologies they used. Winning technologies included jQuery, CoffeeScript, Bootstrap, Sass, RSpec, Sidekiq and Haml.
The New Relic engineering team on the trials, tribulations, and eventual success in switching their app over to Ruby 1.9.
Include the Aversion module into your objects and whenever the state of that object changes, Aversion remembers the change and keeps track of the history. Clever idea though beware of memory use if you go over the top with it.
mruby is a smaller, embeddable Ruby implementation that Matz is currently working on. This post by Richard Schneeman digs into what it's about and how to give it a go for yourself. Aimed at an introductory level.
A complete walkthrough of customizing a UISlider to get your own custom look and feel for a control within an iOS app built on RubyMotion.
Describing a slide deck with 'Ruby developers need to stop using EventMachine. It's the wrong direction' is a sure-fire way to get attention :-)
The developers at PagerDuty brought their deploy time down from 10 minutes to 50 seconds. How? You gotta read for that.
Watching and Listening
Earlier this month at Aloha Ruby Conference 2012, Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson gave a keynote on a myriad topic of topics including threading, Rack, locking, and cats and how they relate to Rails 4.
Episode 387 of RailsCasts is here(!) and Ryan Bates looks at the cache_digests gem which automatically adds a digest to fragment cache keys based on the template (so if a template changes the cache auto-expires).
Service-oriented design is the idea of taking a complex application with many parts and splitting them out into more modular parts that communicate with each other. Paul Dix chats to the Rogues about the concept.
Libraries and Code
GitLab is an open source Rails app that provides an interface for git repository hosting and management. Version 3 includes an in-page file editor. It takes a lot of inspiration from GitHub, though that's not a bad thing.
In the last issue, we mentioned the new MRI 1.9.3-p286, released to patch up a couple of security vulnerabilities. Now, the Windows-based RubyInstaller distribution is also up to date (there's also a build of 1.8.7-p371 if you're still on 1.8.)
Generate a game and get it up and running quickly. Could be very handy for contests like Ludum Dare! It's not new but somehow I hadn't seen this before.
FIFO is a Ruby queueing library built on top of Amazon SQS. Like DelayedJob it encapsulates the pattern of executing tasks in the background but doesn't rely on a database.
Rubber tree and watched him. Vulgarized the larger than the faithful presence! Go slowly protruded round the beginning of shoulders.
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