Issue 82 - February 23, 2012
From the Editor's Desk..
A lot to cover today so.. let's get straight to it! (Well, unless you want to check out issue 3 of Status Code, my new programming e-mail newsletter? ;-)) - Peter.
Headlines
Patchlevel 125 of Ruby 1.9.3 is the latest production release of MRI. It adds LLVM/clang support (ideal for OS X Lion users), GCC 4.7 support, and includes security fixes in the OpenSSL extension.
Phusion has unveiled the latest release of REE which is based on Ruby 1.8.7-p358 and RubyGems 1.8.15 and is compatible with XCode 4 and OS X Lion. However, REE is being slowly retired and no Ruby 1.9 version is forthcoming for several reasons.
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Reading
Matt Aimonetti of the MacRuby project gives an update on the state of MacRuby and points out some key areas where the team could do with some help.
The first article in a series where 'Working with Unix Processes' author Jesse Storimer implements a Unix shell in pure Ruby code.
Pat Shaughnessy returns with yet another great article diving into the world of Ruby intepreters and execution. This time he looks at the compilers in Rubinius and JRuby and what they're producing.
Over at RubySource, Mick Pack looks at the Service-Oriented Architecture pattern for building apps from a collection of segmented consumable services - all in the context of Rails.
GitHubber Jonathan Hoyt needed to write a Cucumber scenario that ran expectations against a new browser tab that would be opened. Here's how he pulled it off.
Focus on.. Micro Gems!
Zach Holman has packaged up 'test/spec/mini', a simple testing library originally developed by Chris Wanstrath, into a 'micro gem'.
An interesting concept is that of the 'micro gem', a gem you can store in just a few files on a service like GitHub Gist. Micro Cutter helps you with their creation.
Watching and Listening
Steve Klabnik has shared a 50 minute video of him working on a pull request for the RubyGems project. It's not a focused or narrated video but if watching a master at work sounds interesting to you, check it out.
Libraries and Code
Virtus is a partial extraction of the DataMapper Property API with which you can extend your Ruby objects with attributes that require data type coercions. Handier than it sounds; see the README examples.
A gem to access AlterEgo, a two factor authentication service built by MailChimp, the folks I use to send Ruby Weekly each week :-)
A simple file watcher and HTML file for Rubyists wanting to learn and play with CoffeeScript.
At a mere 5 years old, Hampton Catlin's make_resourceful controller abstraction library has finally been released as a gem and gets Rails 3.2 support.
Jobs
Carbon Five builds web and mobile products for startups, institutional companies and non-profit organizations using an agile process with cutting edge tools and technology. Join a team of seasoned pros in a collaborative environment and work on a new project every few months.
Tools
Flowstone is a commercial Ruby-based graphical development environment aimed at the robotics and device control field. Certainly looks interesting from the screenshots and a restricted free version is available to download (Windows only).
Pandalab has put together two free, reasonable looking iPad and iPhone apps for looking up Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3 documentation (note: they offer an in app purchase to remove their ad). If only I'd bought my iPad into the office today to try them out..
Gemfury is a hosted service for private and custom gems. Upload your gems, enable Gemfury as a source, and you can securely deploy any gem to any host.
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