Issue 73 - December 22, 2011
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 73 of Ruby Weekly. If you're taking a break over this holiday season, I hope you have a good one and a Merry Christmas to you all. If you're itching for something to do, though, don't forget the Ruby tradition of releasing libraries and updates on Christmas Day. I'll be doing a roundup of any for Ruby Inside next week :-)
Headlines
O'Reilly has passed the reins over to Ruby Central and RailsConf 2012 will be taking place in Austin, Texas in late April. Little on the site so far but tickets are at least bookable.
The 4th annual JRuby conference takes place between May 21-23, 2012. Not much info yet but you can register. The earlybird tickets are mind-bogglingly cheap.
Rails 3.2 is getting ready to be released. It's not as big a jump as 3.1 was from 3.0 but includes some performance improvements for dev mode and routes, tagged logging, and a key/value storage pattern.
DHH announces that Rails 3.2 will be the last version of Rails to support Ruby 1.8.7 and that the master branch (a.k.a. 'head') of the GitHub-hosted Rails repo is now focused toward Rails 4.0 which is optimistically anticipated in mid 2012.
Articles and Tutorials
Java 7's JVM features significantly extended support for dynamic languages and in this walkthrough Charles Nutter shows how to get a Java 7 JVM up and running with JRuby. The result? Turbocharged Ruby performance (and JRuby was already the fastest implementation before this).
Steve Klabnik points out an interesting way to have more loosely coupled test step matchers by leaning on HTML's often overlooked 'rel' attribute.
Ever wondered what's going on when you run 'rake ..something..' from a Rails project? Erik DeBill presents a simple walkthrough of what Rake is about and how you can create your own tasks for it.
Jesse Storimer presents a compelling argument for using ./script/rails instead of plain old 'rails' on your Rails projects to get an improvement in load time.
Media
At RubyConf 2011 Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter of the JRuby core team talked about JRuby and explained how JRuby is a handy gateway to other languages and technologies via the JVM, including Clojure, JavaScript, and Mirah. A handy introduction.
The Ruby Rogues tackle Russ Olsen's awesome 'Eloquent Ruby' in the latest episode of their podcast. One of my favorite podcasts talking about one of my favorite books by one of my favorite tech authors. If you've not checked the book out yet, perhaps this will whet your appetite.
Libraries and code
Devise is a popular flexible authentication system for Rails and its 2.0.0 release candidate has been released. Want to be ready for the upgrade? Jose Valim explains how.
Mechanize is a popular Ruby library for automating interaction with Web sites. 2.1 can now verify SSL connections against the system certificate store, stream files straight to disk, support non-standard content encodings, support different instance based loggers, and more. A key update.
Feeling weighed down by the heaviness of Sinatra? No? Oh. Well, anyway.. Presto is a super lightweight wrapper around Rack for putting together simple HTTP apps without exposing you to all of the Rack internals.
Sinatra::Synchrony is a small extension for Sinatra that dramatically improves the concurrency of your webapp. Powered by EventMachine and EM-Synchrony, it increases the number of clients your app can serve per process when you have a lot of traffic or slow IO calls.
CookieTracker synchronizes settings stored in cookies with instance variables of the same name making them available to use in controllers and views. It's for Rails 3 on Ruby 1.9 only.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Last but not least..
Billing itself as "a unique and game changing five-month learning experience", the Hungry Academy is a project set up by LivingSocial and JumpstartLabs that aims to turn all accepted applicants into proficient Rubyists in 2012.
An interesting and light hearted online game where you have to write the shortest or fastest Ruby code possible. Beware, though, most of the top solutions shouldn't ever get near a real life app, so don't steal too many tricks ;-)
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