Issue 80 - February 9, 2012
From the Editor's Desk..
Wow, issue 80 of Ruby Weekly! It's been a mind bogglingly busy week for me so far so I'm going to shut up and let you get straight on the links :-)
Headlines
Michael Hartl, author of 'Rails Tutorial', has finished a draft of a new Rails 3.2-focused edition of the popular book and Web site. This is a popular way to learn Rails and it's only getting better!
Bacon is an interesting looking dev conference taking place in London this April. They're looking for Ruby, JS, HTML5 (etc!) speakers who can submit a proposal by February 17th. An awesome set of speakers so far, I'd go if I could!
From Our Sponsor
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Articles and Tutorials
A beautifully presented magazine article by Evan Phoenix about the background to Rubinius' creation and its development all the way up to 1.0. Not much tech stuff in here but a truly heartwarming story about the little Ruby implementation that could.
Pat Shaughnessy (who is going for the record of most mentions in Ruby Weekly ever) is back again with an excellent 'deep dive' into JRuby and how it takes our Ruby code and turns it into something the JVM can run. Divine!
Michael Bleigh of Intridea presents a quick Ruby-focused introduction to Amazon's DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service that's part of Amazon Web Services.
Marc Berszick presents a practical introduction to Ruboto, technology that allows you to run Ruby scripts on Android devices.
ActiveRecord::Base provides a useful out-of-the-box implementation of inspect that allows you to see the content of all of a record's attributes. In this article, Tim Riley shows how to customize and tidy it up.
Screencasts
Over the years I've collected 100+ bite-sized Ruby tips and tricks that I've seen surprise other Rubyists. I have bigger plans for them but decided to record a video showing off 24 of them. Enjoy these.. Ruby trick shots!
RABL - Ruby API Builder Language - provides a DSL for generating JSON or XML responses in a Ruby application. Learn how to share and configure complex JSON data in this RailsCasts episode.
Libraries and code
Heads Up is a simple HUD showing your calendar items for today, your unread emails and custom notes. The interesting part is it's an OS X app, yet it's built on Rails, JavaScript (using Spine), Rack::Offline and MacGap.
Strano is a Github backed Capistrano deployment management UI that can run any Capistrano task via a simple Web interface.
remote_table presents a simple, standard way of accessing the data contained in CSV, XLS, XLSX, ODS, fixed-width, and XML files as an array of hashes.
Pry is an awesome alternative to the IRB Ruby console and Plymouth will automatically bring up a Pry session when a test fails in your suite, putting you right into the context of the failure. Supports Bacon, Minitest and RSpec.
While ActiveModel has made models more consistent between ActiveRecord, Mongoid, and other ORMs, it doesn't cover every ActiveRecord feature. Bridging this gap is the inspiration behind ActiveAttr, a project by Chris Griego.
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Last but not least..
Keeping up on new tools, trends and ideas in the world of software development can feel like a full-time job so join your old Ruby Weekly pal over at the Status Code to get a wealth of programmers' brain-candy every Wednesday!
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