Issue 129 - January 24, 2013
Featured
When debugging routes it can sometimes be difficult to understand exactly how the paths are matched. This pull request by Richard Schneeman adds a JS based path matching widget to the /rails/info/routes page. Includes a handy animated GIF to show off the feature.
A new book from SitePoint written by Darren Jones. They gave me a copy which I've skimmed and it seems pretty good if you want a thorough and up to date introduction to Sinatra.
A popular conference. CFP ends March 14th.
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Reading
A fine article from the always high quality Practicing Ruby journal.
Explains what mutation testing is (and how it can make your code more robust) and how to use the Mutant tool to perform mutation testing on your Ruby projects. If you're ready to take another step up the TDD ladder, start here.
The Out-of-Band Work feature allows one to perform arbitrary long-running work outside request cycles without blocking HTTP clients. The primary use case is to run the garbage collector in between request cycles so that your requests will finish faster because they will be interrupted less by the garbage collector.
Brian Leonard, Chief Architect and Technical Co-founder of TaskRabbit, looks at how we can get around module/class level singleton configuration/execution to reach more flexible, thread safe solutions.
MRI guru Pat Shaughnessy is back with another in-depth look into MRI's heavy use of C macros and how they're used when working with arrays internally.
Relates to Richard Schneeman 'In Browser Path Matching' pull request included in the Featured items (above).
An example of using a collaborator to prevent non-domain responsibilities from creeping into a domain model.
Darren Jones, author of Jump Start Sinatra, asked several Rubyists about their structural and stylistic preferences when building Sinatra apps.
Libraries and Code
Converts Markdown into HTML, adds syntax highlighting, supports rich media embeds, auto-links contained URLs, and sanitizes the final HTML.
Rails 4 was on its way to using MiniTest::Spec as the superclass for ActiveSupport::TestCase. But in one of many reversals, the work was pulled. Minitest-Spec-Rails makes reintroducing MiniTest::Spec support for both Rails 3 and edge Rails easy.
KidsRuby is a simple Ruby-based development environment aimed at teaching kids to program.
A concise, fast ElasticSearch client that tries to stay out of your way and follows the ElasticSearch API as closely as possible making advanced techniques easier to implement. (If you've not seen ElasticSearch yet, it's a powerful open source distributed search engine server.)
Comes from Twitter. Helps with Content Security Policy, HTTP Strict Transport Security, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options and more.
See the examples in the README to get a feel for if it'd suit you. A key new addition is 'natural assertions' which let you write assertions using natural Ruby code without any specific matchers (an idea I've personally been very keen to see become more popular).
Jobs
A leading social gaming company looking for an engineer to be responsible for backend systems including technologies such as Ruby, Rails, MySQL, and Couchbase.
Europe’s largest holiday rental booking, HouseTrip was ranked by Wired Magazine the number two start-up in Europe (2012). We're currently looking for passionate Ruby developers to help make it a distributed, world-class web application.
Last but not least..
In 2013 I'm going to be adding several new newsletters to the Cooper Press stable (of which Ruby Weekly is the oldest). One launching in the next few weeks will cover PostgreSQL, the popular open source database engine. We have a great, experienced curator lined up so it should be great. I have an even bigger one to announce next week, however ;-)
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