Issue 62 - October 5, 2011
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 62 of Ruby Weekly! This week we're sponsored by Scout - the hosted server monitoring folks. I've spent the last 24 hours collapsed in a heap after picking up a 24 hour stomach flu from my daughter, so apologies if I've missed anything this week :-)
Headlines
Sinatra, the popular webapp DSL / microframework, has reached version 1.3.0. The significant addition this time around is a 'streaming API' for streaming data to clients instead of delivering it all in one big package. Sinatra 1.2.7 is a small patch release of the older branch.
Within a week, James Britt has pushed the 'beta' version of ruby-doc.org live to the main site - it has an all new layout. Some parts of the site are still out of date but it's a nice improvement.
You've probably enjoyed Ryan Bates' Railscasts Ruby and Rails screencasts for free over the past few years. Ryan's now extended it into a 'pro' version which offers an extra episode each Monday that will dig deeper into a more advanced topic.
Brightbox is a popular UK-based Rails hosting company who've had a 'cloud' service in beta for a while now. Today, co-founder Jeremy Jarvis has announced its full public availability. There's load balancing, mappable IPs, image import/export, and more.
From Our Sponsor
Monitoring a server cluster without a sys admin? You'll love Scout. You can be up and running within five minutes and then configure your monitoring and reporting scripts online (they'll be automatically and securely retrieved by each of your monitored servers). Easy for sysadmins and non-sysadmins alike.
Articles and Tutorials
Fresh from Gregory Brown's new Practicing Ruby newsletter comes an article all about writing clean, decoupled Ruby code that 'stays out of your way'. Lots of code examples and best practices in here for writing code that won't give you a headache later on.
The creator of Cucumber, Aslak Hellesoy, talks about the removal of web_steps.rb from Cucumber, why it happened, and why relying on web_steps.rb was a bad idea anyway. If you're a Cucumber user, this is well worth the read.
Jared Ning shows off how to use the elegant MiniTest::Spec library (part of 1.9's standard library) to test a Rails 3.1 app. A handy guide.
Envy Labs has paired up with the maintainers of popular online Ruby REPL TryRuby.org and rolled out an interesting Why-themed redesign.
Matt Aimonetti gave a talk at RubyConf about MRI internals but wanted to give more detail on Ruby's concurrency issues and the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock). What is the GIL and why does MRI have one anyway?
Jeff Kreeftmeijer shows off an interesting technique of putting a gemspec and library file together into a GitHub 'gist' in order to create an easily deployed RubyGem you can use from a Gemfile. The 'Bang' library he shows off is interesting too.
Over on the RubyLearning blog, Victor Goff shows off the rubydoctest gem which lets you put simple tests into your source code in an IRB style using comments and then run them later.
Devops devotee (and Python fan) Bryan Berry claims that Ruby is 'fast becoming the default scripting language for sysadmins' and explains why.
Richard Taylor gives an interesting example of creating a Git 'gatekeeper' of sorts in Ruby which can control access to Git repositories on a per-user basis.
Screencasts and Videos
RubyConf 2011 took place just a week ago in New Orleans and you can already watch Matz's keynote online. It's 35 minutes long and he touches on his move to Heroku, the Ruby core team, and Ruby's progression to becoming an ISO standard.
The latest RailsCasts episode digs into Draper, a library that provides decorators/view-models for Rails apps. Draper makes it easy to apply the Decorator pattern to models in a Rails app and Ryan shows you how it can all come together.
Libraries and code
Fog is a Ruby library that can control multiple cloud infrastructure services through a common, abstracted Ruby API. Spin up servers, connect storage, manage DNS, etc, on multiple services in a similar way.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Made by Many is a developer of social products and networked services for the Web and mobile. They're looking for technologists to join their team and experienced Rubyists are particularly welcome since their main back-end technology is Ruby.
Kabam builds massively multiplayer social games for social networks, and they're looking for a Rails developer for a new Facebook game (which will be fronted by Flash). Lots of great perks and they're steps away from BART and Muni.
Last but not least..
Redmine is a popular open source project management webapp built in Rails. Redmine expert and core alumni Eric Davis has been working on a (paid) e-book for Redmine users to help them master the system.
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