Issue 60 - September 21, 2011
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 60 of Ruby Weekly. This week we're sponsored by Scout - the hosted server monitoring folks. Want to reliably monitor a server cluster without a sys admin? Check out Scout.
Headlines
The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough is a thorough, up-to-date video-based walkthrough of Ruby 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 from the 1.8.7 user's perspective. What's new? What's gone? What's different? I've covered it all in a mega screencast for you. It's $16 and presents everything you wanted to know about Ruby 1.9 but were afraid to ask! :-)
Articles and Tutorials
Gregory Brown shares five object oriented design principles (collectively known as SOLID) and demonstrates why each is relevant in Ruby.
A great set of slides by Aman Gupta that walks through using a fistful of tools to debug performance and memory leak issues in Ruby and Rails. I like the bit about plugging a 10MB per request memory leak in Rails 3.
Devise is a popular Rails authentication library that provides everything you need 'out of the box'. Some people have found it a bit opaque and would prefer something more modular. Jose Valim notes, however, that you can use Devise in a modular, bare-bones fashion already!
An elegant start to a series of posts by Rein Henrichs on how to built a Turing machine simulator in Ruby (in essence, a super simple VM).
Ariejan de Vroom presents a detailed writeup of how to set up the deployment for a webapp using Git and Capistrano on a Nginx and Unicorn powered stack in order to get super fast, no downtime rollouts.
Matt Aimonetti demonstrates how to build a tiny Rack middleware to send the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header in order to allow cross-domain AJAX requests to hit your app.
Screencasts and Video
Active Admin is a well designed admin interface system for Rails apps. In this week's RailsCasts episode, Ryan Bates shows how to install it and hook it up to your app.
There are lots of reasons to understand distributed systems. Among them are the facts that the principles can improve your site's availability, performance, and even maintainability. In a talk at GoGaRuCo 2011, Tyler McMullen talked about some principles, patterns, and pitfalls around creating your first distributed system.
TDD is becoming the way to write code. But do we do this with our command-line tools? How do you write a test that your awesome application cleans up its temp files? What's the easiest way to check our app's exit codes? This talk answers those questions with some real-world examples.
Libraries and code
RVM is a popular tool for installing and managing multiple Ruby implementations and JewelryBox is a GUI app and menu bar item for Mac OS X that makes it even easier to use RVM. You can even switch Ruby implementations directly from the OS X menu bar.
Redis is a popular key/value data structure store written in C. David Turnbull has written an EventMachine powered port entirely in Ruby.
TagLib is a library for reading and editing the meta-data of several popular audio formats, such as MP3's ID3 tags, and Robin Stocker has built a Ruby interface to it.
Temple is an abstraction and a framework for compiling templates to pure Ruby. It's all about making it easier to experiment, implement and optimize template languages. If you're interested in implementing your own template language, or anything else related to the internals of a template engine, check this out.
Capistrano Colors is a project by Mathias Stjernstrom that aims to make Capistrano's output more user-friendly. It can be installed on a per-project or system wide basis.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Last but not least..
KidsRuby makes it fun and easy for kids to learn how to program. It works on Windows and OS X but there's also a "Kids Ruby OS" version that's an entire custom Linux distribution. KidsRuby also runs on the forthcoming Raspberry Pi 25-buck computer.
Our sponsors Scout recently put up an interesting blog post explaining what 'load averages' are all about on Unix-like operating systems (e.g. Linux or OS X). Is a load average of 3.00 OK on a quad-core system? Find out here.
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