Issue 67 - November 10, 2011
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 67 of Ruby Weekly. After last week's bumper set of releases (check the archives if you missed it - link at the top of this e-mail) the Ruby world is quieter this week :-)
Headlines
It seems as if much of the Ruby standard library (often at the end of many stinging barbs) may be extracted from Ruby core and turned into gems that can be maintained separately. This post on Ruby Inside sums up the concept.
The next significant release of RSpec is afoot and its first release candidate is now out. Key improvements come to configuration (and being able to override it from the command line) and running examples in random (and pseudo-random) order.
RubyInstaller is a popular route to installing Ruby for Windows users, and a new version based on the all-new Ruby 1.9.3-p0 is now out.
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Articles and Tutorials
Take the + in "+5" or ! in "!true" and you're looking at one of Ruby's unary operators - operators that only take a single argument (in the form of a receiver). In this Ruby Inside post, I explain how they work and how you can twist them to your will.
Recently, Pat Shaughnessy did a great post explaining why the forthcoming Bundler 1.1 will be faster than 1.0. This time around, he looks at some new features, including bundle outdated, bundle clean, specifying install paths, and creating bundles that will work on machines that don't have Bundler installed.
Adam Keys shares his thoughts on the long-term future potential of Ruby as a platform and where it's likely and unlikely to go.
An interesting app built by Peter Jones that aims to be a self guided Rails 3.1 tutorial. The README is extensive and explains how to get started. There are also some reader exercises designed to stretch your coding muscles.
Screencasts
At RubyConf 2011, Thomas Enebo (of JRuby core team) gave a talk about Purugin, a plugin framework for building Minecraft modifications using Ruby.
Mercury allows you to edit a section of HTML directly in the browser with a WISYIWYG editor. In this week's Railscasts, Ryan Bates shows how to integrate Mercury into a Rails app.
Libraries and code
Likeable is a new open-source Ruby library built by Gowalla to store 'likes' on items. It works with ActiveRecord objects but can be used with any Ruby object that implements an #id method. If you have Redis ready and waiting, it looks pretty easy to get going.
With OmniAuth 1.0 out just last week, it's great to see Daniel Kehoe has updated his popular Rails 3.1 example app to the latest and greatest. If you want to see how to bring Mongoid and OmniAuth together with Rails 3.1, this is a great place to start.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Every programmer at Litmus remembers the first time they searched for an answer to their programming problem, only to realize they were the first to try to take it on. These days, it's an almost daily occurrence around here. If that sounds exciting to you, then we'd like to talk to you.
Last but not least..
Gemnasium is a new commercial service (yep, it costs money) that parses your Ruby projects' gem dependencies and notifies you when new versions are released. There's a 2 week trial if you want to get a feel for how it works.
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