Issue 58 - September 8, 2011
From the Editor's Desk..
A seriously bumper issue this week (hope you have a coffee ready for all of these great links) and we're again sponsored proudly by Scout! Want to reliably monitor a server cluster without a sys admin? You'll love Scout (and you can even write plugins for Scout in Ruby itself).
Headlines
A month ago, I reviewed the official Ruby language Web site and discovered it was riddled with out of date content and inaccuracies. Many great folks leapt into action and now Jean-Denis Vauguet has put together a quick update on how things are going with ruby-lang.org.
The Rails 3.0 'free student manual', a 183-page PDF written by Bryan Bibat, breezes through the basics of Rails and building a Rails 3.0 app. It's a slightly scrappy but laudable effort and he's working on updating it to 3.1 as we speak.
Articles and Tutorials
Over on Ruby Inside this week, I put together an introduction to MiniTest::Spec, a super lightweight RSpec-esque testing library available in the Ruby 1.9 stdlib (and on 1.8 with a quick gem install).
A blast from the past (Christmas Day, 2003) when Hiroshi Sugihara shared a chatlog from Ruby's earliest days back in 1993 that showed how the name 'Ruby' came about.
David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Rails and partner at 37signals) quickly explains what key tools 37signals' developers use to work on Rails apps on their Macs.
Ever tried the 'ri' Ruby documentation tool and found it doesn't return anything of value? R. Tyler Croy explains how to 'fix' it and get the right documentation built for a productive ri.
Avdi Grimm says: 'To be a successful mockist, you must dislike mocks.' He moves on to explain the divide between developers who heavily use mocks in unit tests and those who don't and explains why mock objects are a code smell.
An interesting blog post by Steve Klabnik where he looks at some patterns of using regular Ruby classes to break up functionality in Rails models (rather than keeping it all piled up there).
Matt Aimonetti looks at the inefficiencies of using instance_eval to execute a passed block in a different context and then, importantly, a workaround to 'precompile' the block and improve performance (which is improved upon in the comments section).
Videos and Screencasts
In just 8 minutes, Ryan Bates shares a flurry of useful Rails 3.0 to 3.1 migration and upgrading tips and tricks, focused on dealing with the new asset pipeline.
Libraries and code
ComaLisp is a dialect of Lisp written in Ruby, built by Howard Yeh.
Maxixe is an interesting library that can analyze a corpus and then split another text into 'segments'. Mostly use for Asian languages, in English this could split something like "ilovemydog" into "i love my dog" by learning the tokens from a larger corpus.
Alondra is a framework for adding real-time push events to your Rails 3.1 apps, powered by EventMachine, ZeroMQ, and WebSockets.
Combustion is a minimal Rails app packaged into a gem that's suited for testing 'Rails engines', themselves modular Rails applications that can be joined together.
sinatra-assetpack gives you a convenient way to set up how the serving of your JavaScript, images and CSS are served up in your Sinatra app. No special routes to create by hand, just load up the gem, set a few options, and off you go.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Internet Marketing Ninjas is looking for expert Ruby developers (and junior ones too) to work on their industry-leading Internet marketing tools. A 60-150k salary range is given with a signing bonus too for good measure. Ideally you'll have some Rails 3 experience already under your belt.
FreeAgent are looking for full-time Ruby engineers of all levels to join their engineering team in a brand new office in beautiful Edinburgh.
Last but not least..
RubyPair is a searchable directly of individuals who would like to remote/in-person pair on things Ruby, built by Evan Light. An interesting concept.
I never want to 'junk up' Ruby Weekly with gaudy ads or 'sponsored mailings' you're not expecting to receive, so any support you can give to unintrusive issue sponsors like Scout is much appreciated :-) (Even just a 'click and read.')
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