Issue 61 - September 29, 2011
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 61 of Ruby Weekly! This week we're sponsored by Startup Digest - the folks to rely on for weekly e-mails about startup events near you. In other news, Ruby 1.9.3 release candidate 1 is out - well worth checking out.
Headlines
Yuki Sonoda has unveiled the first 'release candidate' version of MRI Ruby 1.9.3. The focus with 1.9.3 has been on a better implementation rather than language changes and it sports a radically different garbage collector.
GemStats is a project by Brian Cardarella and Nick Plante where you can upload your Gemfiles (they don't usually contain anything top secret) and they'll collect the stats on which gems people are using in their apps right here, right now. Once they have enough results, they'll share them (and Ruby Weekly will link to them).
It's no secret that the always-useful ruby-doc.org site has been looking a little dated recently, but James Britt has been working on an all new version which is in beta now. Check it out.
It's Gregory's headline, not mine, but Gregory Brown is relaunching his weekly e-mail 'journal' where you get an article digging into a Ruby related issue. It costs money but the content he's made free from the first run shows he knows his stuff.
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Articles and Tutorials
Over at Ruby Inside, I've summarized the new features and changes in Ruby 1.9.3 as compared to 1.9.2. There's also a presentation by Yuki Sonoda of the core team on what 1.9.3 represents, as well as a hint at Ruby 1.9.4 and 2.0.
Brian Doll of New Relic has collated together Ruby and Rails version usage statistics from New Relic's customers. Ruby 1.8.7 is still holding the lead but 1.9.2 is rapidly catching up. And, intriguingly, thin has pulled a lead over Passenger in the dispatcher/server space.
The first in a series of articles by Chris White about concurrency in Ruby from the point of view of TCP servers. This time he digs into threads and forking off processes, but part 2 goes into creating your own event loops.
Shane Brinkman-Davis takes a look at the 'state' of concurrency in Ruby 1.9.2, the various approaches you can adopt, and why they can fall flat.
Video and Presentations
This week, Ryan Bates tackles Spork, a tool that gives Rails apps a boost during testing by forking your app's process on each test run rather than reloading everything from scratch.
Charles Nutter and Nick Sieger of the JRuby core team have put together an hour-long presentation walking through JRuby. Learn what JRuby's all about, how to install it, how it works with the JVM, and more.
A short presentation slide deck by Chris Eppstein, creator of Compass and Sass core team member, on Sass and its inclusion (and use) in Rails 3.1.
Libraries and code
method_locator is a library that determines the method lookup path of a particular object / class / module and finds all places (represented as UnboundMethod instances) where a callable method is defined on an object.
TestTrack provides sane defaults for using Javascript test frameworks with the Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline. It allows you to write and run Qunit or Jasmine tests while leveraging the new compiling power of Tilt and Sprockets 2. You can even write your tests in CoffeeScript, if you like.
Campfire is a popular hosted chat system by 37signals and Will Jessop, also of 37signals, has put together Scamp, a framework for writing bots that will sit and operate in Campfire chat rooms.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Last but not least..
I've created The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough, a thorough, up-to-date screencast walkthrough of Ruby 1.9.2 and 1.9.3. What's new? What's different? It's thorough! Even Ruby 1.9 guru James Edward Gray II said "I know Ruby 1.9 pretty dang well and I still managed to learn probably ten things" :-)
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