Issue 72 - December 15, 2011
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to Ruby Weekly. This week I have a subscriber-only treat: a heavy discount on Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough. I did a sale a couple of months ago but timed it wrong so couldn't announce it here. Other than that, I'm gearing up to take part in Ludum Dare this weekend. What's that..? Find out below :-)
- Peter Cooper
Headlines
As a Christmas treat for Ruby Weekly readers, I've made a special page for you to get over half off of my 3 hour Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough - currently the most complete and up to date guide to changes in Ruby 1.9. It's just $9 until December 19, 2011.
The history of TextMate, a Mac OS X text editor, is entwined with that of Rails as its initial fame came from cheerleading by Rails developers. TextMate 2.0 has been the Duke Nukem Forever of text editors for a long time now but it has finally been released in alpha form.
Got this coming weekend spare? Join in with the 48 hour Ludum Dare game dev contest. I give a full rundown of what's involved here and explain how to take part. And if you have no idea where to start, check out the game dev tutorial linked elsewhere in this issue :-)
Articles and Tutorials
I've put together a bumper tutorial about using JRuby and the popular LWJGL game library to build a small, performant video game with Ruby. It goes through every step of the process from start to finish so you can get something running even if you've never played with graphics coding before.
Still got the EventMachine blues? Kirk Haines of Engine Yard has put together a handy primer covering what events are, why you might need to be interested in them, and how the ideas behind EventMachine work.
'Pipes are the most powerful concept on the command line,' says Jesse Storimer, and he shows off a few tips and tricks to make your programs behave a little better when being used in a pipeline.
A slightly controversial topic but RubyGems maintainer Eric Hodel says that building gems directly from .gemspec files isn't the best way to go. He explains why and backs up his points well. I'm not entirely convinced but it's a good post.
Sinatra Up and Running is a new O'Reilly title by Alan Harris and Konstantin Hasse that hits just the right note for folks wanting to learn about the popular web application DSL. I've reviewed it and I like it.
Screencasts
ElasticSearch is a Lucene-powered distributed RESTful full text search engine that's growing in popular in the Rails world lately. In this episode of RailsCasts, Ryan Bates shows us how to use it to add full text searching to a Rails app.
A bonus video from my Ruby Reloaded course that I've decided to share publicly. I guide you through how blocks relate to procs, what procs are, what lambdas are, and how they can be used to form closures.
Libraries and code
Brakeman is a vulnerability scanner specifically designed for Rails applications. It statically analyzes Rails application code to find security issues at all stages of development.
Pusher is a popular online service that uses HTML5 WebSockets (and fallbacks) to provide webapps with realtime messaging. Slanger, by Stevie Graham, is an open source implementation of the Pusher protocol so you can run your own Pusher-like service locally.
Crummy is a simple way to add navigational breadcrumbs to your Rails applications. It's by Zach Inglis and works on both Rails 2 and 3.
I haven't given it a try yet and it looks rather experimental but CastOff claims to be a compiler for MRI Ruby 1.9.3 that can compile Ruby methods into C extensions.
A user-friendly subset of the S3 gem geared towards file system backup operations. If you want something super simple and only have a limited set of uses for S3, this could be handy.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Last but not least..
Berkeley is offering an online course, starting in February 2012, about the engineering fundamentals for long-lived software using Agile practices along with Rails. The best part? It won't cost you a bean to attend.
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