Issue 87 - April 5, 2012
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 87 of Ruby Weekly! Well I warned last week's Ruby Weekly might not turn up and.. it didn't ;-) I was in the middle of some pretty intense travel but I'm back home now. Thanks for your patience.
Headlines
Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF's annual free software awards recently with Ruby's own Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto picking up the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. He joins a short list of open source heroes including Alan Cox, Larry Wall, and Guido van Rossum.
Working in Rails' view layer can be tricky with brittle, complex views all too easy to rustle up. This book digs into strategies and approaches for upping your Rails view game and breaking free from tangles of logic and markup in your views. Two thumbs up.
Dalla Rosa noticed a press release from Japan's IT Promotion Agency which notes that the long awaited Ruby specification (not to be confused with RubySpec) has been approved by the International Standards Organization as the ISO/IEC 30170 standard.
The usual laundry list of minor changes but the biggest deal here is the default value of 'config.active_record.whitelist_attributes' becomes 'true', inspired by the recent GitHub mass assignment issue. Note that the change only affects newly generated apps but you can learn more in this post.
Just a week ago Yehuda Katz (well known as the lead architect behind Rails 3) launched a campaign to raise $25k to build a Ruby and Rails environment installer for OS X. It has now gone on to raise over $40k but left some in the community wondering quite what was really needed.
A revert was made to Rails which took the xml_http_request? from returning true/false to returning a value that's 'true or false in the Ruby definition of the words.' This turned into the big Ruby drama du jour. My take? It ranks up there with the most bizarre commits to Rails but there you go.
Reading
Pat Shaughnessy, Ruby implementation spelunker extraordinaire, digs into Oniguruma, the regular expression engine used by MRI Ruby 1.9. What does it do and how does it process your regexes?
Could it be Pat Shaughnessy again? Yes, sirree. Here he digs into the 'bitmap marking' garbage collection algorithm that promises to reduce Ruby's memory consumption in Ruby 2.0.
Ken Collins has been working on minitest-spec-rails, a gem that makes it reasonably trivial to use MiniTest::Spec (part of the Ruby 1.9 stdlib) with Rails. Learn how here. Ignore the date on this article, it was just updated!
An extensive tutorial by Addy Osmani on building a Backbone.js at both the front and back ends. The server side part is powered by Ruby's light but powerful webapp DSL Sinatra.
Jonathan Jackson explains how to use the popular Jekyll blog-focused static Web site generator from scratch.
Is there a bundle command to tell you what would be updated with bundle update, without actually making those updates? With Bundler 1.1.. yes there is!
Watching and Listening
Copycopter provides an interface that clients can use to edit the text in a Rails application. Learn how to deploy a Copycopter server using Heroku and integrate it in a Rails application through I18n.
A 17 minute screencast walking through building a Ruby gem from scratch using Bundler and RSpec.
PeepCode continues its Play by Play screencast series with Jim Weirich, the author of the ubiquitous Rake build tool for Ruby and chief scientist at EdgeCase. Want a view over an experienced Rubyist's shoulder? This is a good place to go.
An epic 161 slide slide-deck by David Copeland, focused on threading and JRuby.
Libraries and Code
Mark Wunsch's Weary is a suite of tools built around the Rack ecosystem that makes it both easy to build elegant clients for (ideally RESTful) Web services.
A zero-configuration recursive hash for storing a tree of options in a serialized ActiveRecord column.
Popular OS X screenshot tool Skitch is dropping its native file sharing component so Mathias Meyer has built a Sinatra-based proxy that can accept files over WebDAV and then upload them to S3.
Jobs
Last but not least..
A lot of webapp developers seem sick of installing things like ImageMagic to do image cropping and scaling. Cloudinary adds another solution. It's a commercial service but makes it easy to do image manipulations via URLs.
There are lots of add-ons for the Heroku cloud hosting service nowadays but Ivan Schneider thought they were hard to scan through, merely being in an alphabetical list, so he built a different way to browse them.
You opted in to Ruby Weekly at RubyWeekly.com to get weekly e-mails about the Ruby programming language. Reading this as a non-subscriber? Click here to subscribe.
To unsubscribe, click here or e-mail the list maintainer directly at rw@peterc.org. To change your e-mail address, click here.
Address: Office 30, Lincoln Way, Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, Lincs, UK, LN11 9EJ