Issue 64 - October 19, 2011
From the Editor's Desk..
It's issue (2 ** 6) of Ruby Weekly. This week I've reopened my Ruby Reloaded course for two new runs in November and December, but other than that no big news. I get the feeling we'll be seeing a final Ruby 1.9.3 release very soon though.. :-)
Headlines
Since its debut, Bundler has become an essential part of daily development life for many Rubyists, though many have complained of its lack of speed. Pat Shaughnessy looks at where Bundler 1.0 was lacking and why the forthcoming Bundler 1.1 will be a lot faster.
Ruby Reloaded is my course for intermediate Rubyists looking to 'level up' (TDD, OO design, and more). The 3rd and 4th runs are now open and run this November and December. Check out the details (and testimonials) and, if you're interested, use the code "WEEKLY" for $80 off.
DataMapper is a popular ORM (Object Relational Mapper) and a powerful alternative to ActiveRecord for many developers. Version 1.2 brings support for Rails 3.1, rewrites of key components, and a raft of general improvements.
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Articles and Tutorials
Over the years, there's been some misconception over what 'a ||= b' really represents in Ruby. I pick up the threads, simply explain and demonstrate what's occurring, and link to discussions that go into more depth.
Evan Phoenix, of both Engine Yard and the Rubinius project, explains the difference between concurrency and parallelism and looks at how Rubyists experience them on different implementations.
Graeme Mathieson digs into ActiveSupport's BufferedLogger, looks at buffered logging, how its flushing works, and how to tweak the flushing.
Kyle Neath of GitHub loves the Mustache logic-less template language but recognizes the reality of apps packed to the hilt with ERB. Along with Simon Rozet, he's come up with an approach to get Mustache-like detachment in regular ERB.
Rubinius is a popular alternative Ruby implementation and it's ripe for new contributors who want to make an impact. In this post, Brian Ford explains how you can get your feet wet with working on Rubinius and how its build system works.
Loren Segal does some analysis on the initial data from GemStats.org crossed with download data from RubyGems.org and looks at whether high download counts really translate into a high level of direct usage of a gem. The metrics are a bit shaky but.. look, pretty charts!
Jeff Kreeftmeijer looks at the slowness of the spec_helper file created by rspec-rails when using RSpec with a Rails project and then digs into working around it to speed up your test runs.
Presentations and Videos
Stanford has opened up some of its courses to the Web under the OpenClassroom program. One is a "Web Applications" course built up of 104 lectures covering HTML, CSS, Ruby, Rails, security, and deployment.
A 22 minute presentation by Ben Hughes about programatically transforming Ruby code, its applications, and the tools you can employ to do it yourself.
Libraries and code
Factory Girl is a popular fixture replacement tool / object factory used in model tests. The 2.2 release brings, and I quote, 'a handful of awesomeness to the table.' The new features are well summarized in this post.
HotCocoa is a MacRuby library that simplifies the process of building Cocoa-based Mac apps. The project seemed to stall recently but Mark Rada and others have been working on a fork that's now becoming an official release.
Locale Detector is a gem that checks the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE HTTP header sent by a user's browser in order to automatically set the I18n.locale setting in your Rails app.
Renee is a new Rack-based library for writing webapps and it integrates with Rack to let you mix and match with other frameworks. It was born from an attempt to create a 'cleaner and more powerful' DSL than Sinatra. Interesting ideas abound.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is a society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. They're looking for a developer to help modernize the Current Index to Statistics (CIS), an online database that contains bibliographic data of published articles and books in statistics, probability, and related fields.
Last but not least..
In an article for InformIT, Russ Olsen, author of Eloquent Ruby and Design Patterns in Ruby, guides us through the Ruby books he thinks are best at the beginner, intermediate and professional levels.
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