Issue 84 - March 8, 2012
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 84 of Ruby Weekly! As always, more great Ruby stuff and quite a few key releases, including Bundler 1.1! And remember folks, be nice to each other :-) - Peter.
Headlines
Vagrant is a popular VirtualBox-driven Ruby tool for quickly building and deploying virtual machines for development and testing purposes. After years of development, it has reached the all important 1.0 release. Congrats!
No official blog post yet, but Bundler 1.1 is out and you can grab it with a gem install bundler. The big win on this release is significantly improved performance when fetching gemsets with complex dependencies.
Bug and (minor) security fixes. If you're on Rails 3.2, step up or, at least, check the security advisories.
On Sunday, GitHub experienced a security issue involving mass assignments in Rails. They've fixed it up now but you might want to get up to speed with what happened.
Reading
After the GitHub issue (above), Rails 3 guru Yehuda Katz came up with a proposal for improving how mass assignment works in Rails. I don't agree with the approach but it sparked an interesting discussion.
Have you ever developed in an assembly language? Have you developed an assembly language? Ever developed a CPU running your own assembly language? Alexander Demin shows you how in this fun Ruby-oriented walkthrough.
Mike Pack outlines how the Solr full text search server can benefit your project's indexing capabilities and shows how Solr can be used within a Rails app using Sunspot.
Got .rvmrc and .rbenv-version (and possibly more) floating around your projects? What if we had an ecosystem of fabulous Ruby managers that all understood the semantics of a generic dotfile like '.ruby-version'? Here's a proposal to weigh in on.
Multi-page 'wizards' are popular in both desktop software and webapps and Wicked by Richard Schneeman brings a way to make them easier to produce in a Rails app.
Nginx is a modern, open-source, high-performance web server that's well known in the Rails hosting world. In this post, Justin Kulesza demonstrates how to do a load balanced, reverse proxying setup with Nginx for a Rails app.
Jonathan Jackson looks at Conway's Game of Life, its rules, and an approach to implementing it in Ruby.
Logentries is a log management and analysis service available to use in Heroku. It's a commercial service but offers 1GB per month of logs as a free tier to try at least.
docrails is a branch of Ruby on Rails with public write access where anyone can push documentation fixes. Xavier Noria explains how it works.
Mitchell Hashimoto of the Vagrant project (which just hit 1.0 - above) shares his take on the history of Vagrant and the experiences it brought him. Always nice to see a post like this.
Libraries and Code
VCR is a library for recording a test suite's HTTP interactions to replay during future runs. Version 2 is now out and brings a lot more flexibility, custom request matchers and serializers, request hooks, and more.
The Rails commit that started the drama around the GitHub / Rails mass assignment issue. Linked for posterity but also because the comments turned into the typical meme-fest.
Zonebie helps you hunt down bugs in code that deals with timezones by randomly assigning a different timezone on each run.
An experiment in making a thread-safe, low impact library to measure performance metrics in your Ruby apps. One of the most interesting uses is to have it update your process's title so the metrics info appears live in ps or top!
A Ruby library and command-line program that converts Markdown documents into UNIX manual pages.
A humorously named and highly opinionated toolkit for building well-designed Web APIs, with a focus on Rails.
MethodProfiler collects performance information about the methods in your objects and creates reports to help you identify slow methods. The collected data can be sorted in various ways, converted into an array, or pretty printed as a table.
Jobs
One of the better designed and more creative job ad pages I've seen!
Pass a simple API challenge to apply..
Last but not least..
Marc-Andre Cournoyer, author of Create Your Own Programming Language, is doing another run of his online programming language implementation class where you learn to understand the internal underpinnings of languages and how to start creating your own. It runs March 27-28 and 'SAVEME50' gets you a discount.
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