Issue 71 - December 8, 2011
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 71 of Ruby Weekly! I'm wiped out after just finishing two days of running my Ruby Reloaded course, so not much to say today, but keep your eyes peeled for next week's issue as I'll be running a Ruby Weekly reader exclusive :-)
Headlines
The Confreaks have announced that all of the RubyConf 2011 presentations they recorded are now online with a full 65 videos to enjoy. I'll try to do a roundup soon but for now.. enjoy.
Ordered List (whose CTO is well known Rubyist John Nunemaker) has been acquired by GitHub. GitHub will be taking on the popular Gaug.es live statistics tool, as well as Speaker Deck and Harmony. A curious but brilliant acquisition.
Over on Ruby Inside I've put together a month by month retrospective of 2011, as it applied to the world of Ruby and Rails. Lots of 1.0's this year, including MagLev, Capybara, Cucumber, RefineryCMS, OmniAuth and TorqueBox.
Articles and Tutorials
Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson has been working on adding DTrace probes to Ruby 2.0 (ruby-head, for now). Already, he's used them to make a 6% performance improvement to 'rake environment' (which loads a Rails app's environment). An interesting tour.
Pat Shaughnessy takes a trip down (recent) memory lane and picks out some of the more interesting Rails commits, including DHH monkeypatching the Array class (Ed: arggg).
Andy Lindeman writes about referring to the file system during unit tests and some strategies to keep things sane. Enter: the 'fakefs' gem.
Not very specifically Ruby or Rails oriented but this article, written by a Rails developer, is a great introduction to 'spaced repetition', a concept that's ideal for learning technical knowledge.
RGeo is a library for building location-aware apps in Ruby and Daniel Azuma has begun putting together a fine set of posts dedicated to building RGeo powered location-aware apps in Rails.
My Ruby Show co-host Jason Seifer has put together a simple walkthrough of RSpec for the Think Vitamin blog. Ideal if you're new to one of Ruby's most popular testing tools.
Screencasts
With the release of OmniAuth 1.0 (previously in Ruby Weekly) comes a new 'Identity' strategy which allows users to register and login with a password if they don't want to use an external provider. Ryan Bates shows us how.
A short screencast by David Henner demonstrating how to use ror_ecommerce to put together a functional e-commerce site in about 15 minutes.
Laser is a general-purpose analyzer using traditional compiler techniques. It statically discovers properties of real-world Ruby programs. This talk by Michael Edgar is a whirlwind tour of what Laser can do, how it does it, and what it means for a typical Ruby programmer.
Eric Allam looks at the concept of running arbitrary Ruby code (which may contain nefarious trickery) safely.
Libraries and code
I've long fancied whipping up a simple DNS server for some reason, so I finally did it. The solution is structured and has comments explaining parts of the DNS protocol.
Porth lets you write Rails views in 'plain old Ruby'. Its primary intention seems to be to render XML and JSON representations made from Ruby-based 'templates'.
Whittle is a LALR(1) parser. It's small, simple and 100% Ruby. You write parsers by specifying sequences of allowable rules. For each rule in your grammar, you provide a block that is invoked when the grammar is recognized.
This isn't a new library by any means but it's still being updated and I've seen some people discussing it lately. Paper Trail lets you track changes to your models' data. It's particularly good for auditing or versioning.
'Gherkin' is the language Cucumber features are written in and Turnip is a Gherkin extension for RSpec. It allows you to write tests in Gherkin and run them through your RSpec environment.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Last but not least..
tddium is a hosted continuous integration service for Ruby applications. It automatically parallelizes large test suites and provisions sandbox instances of databases and search engines. There's also a Heroku add-on.
It's a long shot but if you're in Surrey or near London, you might like to attend this 'rebooted' user group in January. There's a chance I might even be there!
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