Issue 66 - November 3, 2011
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 66 of Ruby Weekly. The rapid descent of the weather towards winter is getting people to stay in and code and long may it continue with this week's releases.. OmniAuth 1.0, MagLev 1.0, and Ruby 1.9.3, for starters! And this week we're proud to be again sponsored by Scout, the awesome sys-admin-free hosted server monitoring service.
Headlines
The first production-ready release of Ruby 1.9.3 is finally here with patchlevel 0's release this week. I've already covered what's new on Ruby Inside (see the link below) but this is a nice step forward for MRI and worth checking out, especially if you want faster Rails loading times.
It's been a couple of years in the making but MagLev 1.0.0 has released. MagLev is an interesting Ruby implementation and virtual machine built by VMware's GemStone Systems division that orients itself around a novel object persistence layer. The best part? It's open source and MIT licensed. Expect to see more about this soon.
In a post to the ruby-core mailing list, Ruby 1.9 release manager Yuki Sonoda explains that Ruby 1.9.1 will get no official security fixes or releases after January 31, 2012.
From Our Sponsor
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Articles and Tutorials
The 'HTML5 Boilerplate' serves as a useful reference for Rails developers who want to provide structure and convention for the HTML, CSS, and Javascript of an app's front-end. But not all of HTML5 Boilerplate is useful for Rails developers, so with this guide, by Daniel Kehoe, you can pick and choose the components that are useful for your Rails apps.
The striking slidedeck from 'Programming With Nothing', a talk given by Tom Stuart at last week's Ruby Manor unconference. It demonstrates how to implement FizzBuzz solely by creating and calling Proc objects, all thanks to the lambda calculus.
Screencasts
Ryan Bigg (of Rails 3 In Action fame) has put together a 45 minute test driven walkthrough of understanding and implementing the famous Conway's Game of Life in Ruby using RSpec.
PJAX allows you to quickly update a section of a page using AJAX with automatic pushState support (for URL changes). In the latest episode of RailsCasts, Ryan Bates demonstrates how to use the pjax_rails and rack-pjax gems.
ArrrrCamp was held in Ghent, Belgium a month ago and now videos of the talks are available. Enjoy Corey Haines demonstrating fast Rails tests, Andrew Nesbitt on A/B split testing, Elise Huard on 'data driven development' and more.
The most comprehensive and up to date walkthrough of Ruby 1.9 for existing Rubyists. It's a commercial screencast by me, Peter Cooper. Ruby 1.9 guru James Edward Gray II even said he picked up plenty of stuff from it. There's a 5 minute sample available if you want to see how it works.
Glenn Goodrich presents a 15 minute screencast taking a look at the Pik Ruby version manager for Microsoft Windows.
Libraries and code
OmniAuth is a popular library for performing authentication against numerous external authentication systems (like OAuth, OpenID, Facebook, and Twitter). Version 1.0 brings massive structural changes (for the better) and even includes capabilities to do your local/internal authentication with OmniAuth too. This is a big deal.
hash_syntax is an interesting little tool that can go through a Ruby project and convert the source either to or from using the new Ruby 1.9 hash literal syntax. It requires Ruby 1.9 to run.
Appraisal is a testing tool that integrates with Bundler to test your library against different versions of dependencies in repeatable scenarios called 'appraisals.'
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Sharethrough is looking for senior application engineers to help build out their reporting and trafficking platform. You will play a significant role in designing and architecting the core pieces underlying the entirety of Sharethrough's platform. They're located in SF's Financial District.
Last but not least..
Spree is probably the most popular open source e-commerce solution built on Rails and there's a conference covering both it and Rails generally in NYC next year. There's already an impressive speaker line up, a GitHub sponsored after party, and an evening hackathon.
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