Issue #34 - March 24, 2011

News

MacRuby 0.10 Released: XCode 4 Support and App Store Submissions
It's not a major release but MacRuby 0.10 is out and it boasts XCode 4 support, an improved deployment tool with App Store compatibility, and more.

DataMapper 1.1 Released
DataMapper, a popular ORM and alternative to ActiveRecord, has hit 1.1. Lots of performance improvements caused by clearing up some bottlenecks.

EnvyLabs Launches Code School
EnvyLabs (of Ruby5 and Rails for Zombies fame) has launched Code School, an online screencast plus live coding learning environment. Their first courses are Rails for Zombies and Rails Best Practices.

Articles and Tutorials

Ruboto: Ruby on Android
In an article for the IBM DeveloperWorks blog, Chris King demonstrates how JRuby can come together with Google's Android project to build apps for the up and coming mobile platform. A good introduction.

How to Use the New JRuby Profiler
Daniel Lucraft demonstrates how to use the new performance profiler functionality in JRuby 1.6 (released last week).

Another Cool Reason Ruby is Slow: implicit super
Michael Edgar shows off some interesting facets to how Ruby deals with method parameters in relation to calling super. Brain bending stuff.

Mocking Kernel Methods with RSpec
Lucas d'Acampora Prim finds and explains a useful workaround to mock kernel methods (such as 'puts') in an RSpec scenario.

PDFKit Overview: Generating PDFs from Rails with Haml and CSS
Ken Collins presents a walkthrough of using PDFKit and Rails to produce PDF files based on a Haml template and stylized with CSS.

Meet the Goliath of Ruby Application Servers
2 weeks ago I posted about Goliath, a new Rack-based async webapp server framework. This week, Ilya Grigorik of the Goliath project caught up with InfoQ and gave them the lowdown on what Goliath is and why it's useful.

Vim Ruby Runner: Running Ruby Code from Vim
Henrik Nyh demonstrates his new Vim plugin that brings TextMate style Ruby code running (using Cmd+R) to the Vim editor.

Libraries and code

RubyVis: Ruby Port of JavaScript Data Visualization Tools
Rubyvis is a Ruby library that lets you build a wide range of good looking graphs and charts in SVG format (which you can then convert to other formats as you wish). It's a port of the JavaScript 'Protovis' library.

AlphaDecimal: Integer to 'Base 62' Conversion
Do you want short URL friendly representations of integers? AlphaDecimal will convert to and from a base 62 format made up of A-Z, a-z and 0-9.

live_ast: Live Abstract Syntax Trees of Methods and Lambdas
live_ast is a library by James M Lawrence that gives you to_ast and to_ruby methods on methods and lambdas/procs so you can look at the structure of your code on the fly. Ruby 1.9.2 and up only.

Earthquake: A Ruby Twitter Client
Earthquake is a Ruby-powered Twitter client by jugyo. Wynn Netherland shows it off.

state_machine 0.10.0: Mongoid support and more
Aaron Pfeifer has unveiled version 0.10.0 of state_machine, a state machine system you can extend your classes with. It's a major release following on from 7 months of work.

Ruby Jobs of the Week

Ruby on Rails Developer [Portland, Oregon]
LegitScript is a rapidly growing verification and monitoring service for online pharmacies looking for a Rails developer close to Portland, Oregon.

Ruby on Rails Developer [New York, New York]
Democracy Now! is looking for a talented Rails developer to work on a freelance basis on their site.

Software Engineer [Arlington, Virginia]
HealthCentral.com is looking for an exceptional problem solver with Ruby and OOP skills along with a BS/MS in Computer Science.

Screencasts

Using ActiveRecord with Sinatra
Screencasts.org presents a 10 minute walkthrough of building a basic URL shortener using Sinatra with ActiveRecord picking up the database duties.

Token Fields with jQuery for Rails
With the jQuery Tokeninput plugin it is easy to add an auto-completing list of entries for a many-to-many association to a form in Rails. Ryan Bates shows us how.