Issue 83 - March 1, 2012
Headlines
Refinery CMS is a Rails based CMS which in its new 2.0.0 incarnation is now fully Rails 3.2 and asset pipeline compliant. This post sums up some of the changes. Congrats to them.
Xavier Noria of the Rails core team shares a new development that's in edge Rails (and due to be released in Rails 4): switching to using HTTP's 'PATCH' verb for making partial updates to resources.
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Reading
Pat Shaughnessy is back with a dive into Ruby's support for the concept of "goto" (a la your favorite pre 1990s programming languages). Did you realize Ruby has a hidden feature to support GOTOs and labels? Neither did I. Wow!
Matt Aimonetti presents an analysis and graph of the call stack involved when initializing an object with ActiveRecord, Sequel, and DataMapper.
The never-dull Giles Bowkett explains why he thinks Rails is old and busted and picks quite a few Ruby related scabs along the way. Sure, it's dramatic, but you might enjoy it.
And if Giles hadn't kicked Rails enough, Matt Aimonetti takes another look at it and explains what he doesn't think works well and what we can learn from Rails' mistakes.
Stephen Ball presents a two part series on building a Ruby library and gem from scratch including best practices like BDD.
The Fork/Join framework in JDK7 implements a clever work-stealing technique for parallel execution. Ilya Grigorik explains what it does and shows off some JRuby-based examples.
Andrew McDonough recently gave a lightning talk about a simple 'poetry generator' he built in Ruby. It's a naive approach but the outcome is great.
Watching and Listening
PeepCode has released the latest in its 'play by play' series with a two hour peep over the shoulder of popular Rubyist Aaron Patterson's shoulder. It costs a little money but it has gotten an excellent reaction so far.
If you're not yet sick of hearing about Twitter Bootstrap or want to learn how to work with it using Rails, Ryan Bates' latest screencast is a great place to start.
Libraries and Code
SimpleForm is a popular DSL for creating forms in Rails apps and version 2 is now out. It includes a new wrapper API to create custom input stacks and also includes some integration features for Twitter Bootstrap.
Like FileUtils, but provides access to zip, unzip, bzip2, bunzip2, tar, untar, sed, du, md5sum, shasum, cut, head, tail, wc, curl, etc. The README explains why you wouldn't want to just spawn these yourself.
Want to convert '15 hundred' to 1500? Or '$200 million' to 200000000? Cheddar has got your back.
Remember Heckle on Ruby 1.8? Mutant brings similar fun to Rubinius by modifying your code and running your tests to check they fail.
Jobs
Last but not least..
Zach Holman of GitHub presents some things that the developers at GitHub have done to help with the maintainability and reliability of their Ruby apps. Key takeaways are their 'bootstrap' script and using TomDoc for documentation.
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