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Issue 55 - August 18, 2011 
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 55 of Ruby Weekly!
This week I'm experimenting with including images with some items. Sorry if it seems a little random to start off with but I want to see how it goes. On Ruby Inside, images have helped a lot over the years and I want to see how it plays out with e-mail too.
Headlines
On Ruby Inside I cover a new lightweight Ruby version management tool built by Sam Stephenson (of 37signals and Prototype.js fame), compare it with RVM, and cover a little of the drama that unfolded around the project this past week.
Aaron Patterson has pushed out the latest production release of Rails which primarily fixes 4 key security issues: filter skipping bugs, SQL injection issues, strip_tags parsing error, and a UTF-8 escaping vulnerability.
If you're still working with Rails 2, Rails 2.3.14 gives you the same security fixes as gained in Rails 3.0.10. It's worth the upgrade.
Articles and Tutorials
Ilya Grigorik looks at Rails 3.1's asset pipeline and how to add simple Google Closure support to it. Google Closure is a JavaScript optimizer/compiler and library covering common JavaScript patterns, data structures, and more.
For RubySource, Ian Oxley presents a simple introduction to the divisive Haml HTML markup language which is popular amongst Rails developers.
An interesting PDF-based presentation by Evan Light about building DSLs in Ruby and, specifically, using abstract syntax trees to represent them rather than the instance_eval approach. It starts slow but gets very interesting by the end.
Charles Oliver Nutter of the core JRuby team writes about how JRuby uses the JVM's new 'invokedynamic' mechanism. Very technical stuff but catnip to those of you who love implementation details.
Pow is a tool for OS X by 37signals that makes it easy to run Ruby webapps locally for development purposes. In this post, Assaf Arkin shows how to create a simple proxy so you can use Pow to serve up a local Node.js app instead.
Screencasts
It's a rare treat to see Geoffrey Grosenbach of PeepCode speaking, so enjoy this talk of his from Cascadia Ruby 2011 about the role of creativity in programming.
Ryan Bates' latest episode of RailsCasts looks at the asset pipeline feature in the forthcoming Rails 3.1. He dives into the magic of how it all works in a mere 11 minutes.
Presentations from Evan Phoenix, Sandi Metz, Paul Dix, Casey Rosenthal, Jeff Casimir, and Ryan Smith are available, along with a compilation of snippets from people with 'rejected' talks. The video quality is excellent.
Rubyist Elise Huard presents a 10 minute talk about the experiences and insights gained from her trip to Japan for the 'last' RubyKaigi (Ruby's home conference, if you will).
Libraries and code
Cramp is a fully asynchronous realtime web application framework in Ruby. It is built on top of EventMachine and primarily designed for working with larger number of open connections and providing full-duplex bi-directional communication.
MailForm lets you send e-mail straight from forms in Rails with internationalization support, validations, attachments and request information.
TestRocket is a library by Peter Cooper, yours truly, that won a recent CodeBrawl contest. It's mostly a fun project but gives the tightest looking tests (measured by the byte) I've seen in Ruby so far.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
AppFog (born from PHP Fog) is the leading platform-as-a-service originally built for PHP, but expanding. They're seeking exceptional developers (writing in Ruby), systems engineers, and designers to work on their systems. AppFog is based in Portland, OR but they're comfortable with remote working too. Smartness is key and trumps academic qualifications.
Last but not least..
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