Issue 89 - April 19, 2012
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 89 of Ruby Weekly! RailsConf 2012 is taking place next week in Austin, Texas, so I hope you have a great time if you're going. The speaker lineup is excellent. But if not, never fear, I'll try and share videos and blog posts of the event in Ruby Weekly ASAP :-) - Peter.
Headlines
MacRuby In Action is a new book hat teaches Ruby developers how to code OS X applications using MacRuby, an OS X-focused Ruby implementation. Jerry Cheung, a senior engineer at Intridea authored the book alongside Brendan Lim and Jeremy McAnally.
The popular Apache and Nginx module for deploying Rack-based Ruby webapps gets an update. It now supports Apache 2.4 and the event MPM.
It's not Ruby specific, but GitHub's prevalence in the Ruby world should make their latest tweaks to the repository creation process interesting to anyone familiar with the service.
From our sponsor
Whether you need to get the foundations of a good polished design that you can customize for a client, or you just want to make a side-project beautiful, RailsThemes.com is going to get you where you want to go.. fast.
Reading
DCell by Tony Arcieri (of Celluloid fame) is an actor-based distributed object oriented programming framework for Ruby. It's hard to explain the concepts involved in a short summary but this post does a great job (think an easier, better structured DRb).
Phusion has been hard at work on the popular Apache and Nginx module (already mentioned above) and explains the internal overhauls that have taken place in the forthcoming Passenger 3.2.
Harvest is a popular time tracking webapp that uses Ruby behind the scenes. They've just done a big REE to Ruby 1.9.3 upgrade and in this post T J Schuck shares some notes about the process and the 1.8 to 1.9 issues they encountered.
A month ago, I shared the news of the Pragmatic Programmers releasing 'The dRuby Book' by Masatoshi Seki. Here, its translator Makoto Inoue goes through some of the topics covered in the book and shows off some uses of DRb.
Backbone.js is a handy JavaScript framework for developing webapps and Rails is similarly handy on the backend. James R Bracy of 42Floors shares how they use Rails and Backbone together and perform user authentication.
Watching and Listening
Ryan Bates continues his long line of awesome RailsCasts with a look at how to use the open source PostgreSQL database system with Rails and how to migrate an existing SQLite-backed Rails app to using it.
Steve Klabnik recently gave a talk on REST and Hypermedia APIs, the topic of his forthcoming book, Designing Hypermedia APIs. Audio isn't great but it's good to see Steve speak.
Kathy Van Stone delivers a talk about domain specific languages in Ruby, and shows a brief example. The talk is 40 minutes long and the audio quality somewhat better than Steve's talk above.
The Ruby Rogues sit down with renowned Ruby and Rails trainer Jeff Casimir to discuss his role with the Hungry Academy training program and to talk about the ideas behind training students in the art of programming generally.
Libraries and Code
Authority helps you authorize actions in your Rails app. It's ORM-neutral and has little fancy syntax. Just group your models under one or more Authorizer classes and write plain Ruby methods on them.
Pry is a popular (and significantly more powerful) alternative to irb, the interactive Ruby console. Version 0.9.9 of Pry brings line-based code highlighting, method finding, and a torrent of general improvements.
Her is an ORM that map REST resources to Ruby objects. It maps HTTP responses to Ruby objects (through JSON) and adds methods to Ruby objects to trigger HTTP requests.
cache_method caches the results of calling methods given their arguments. It's like memoization, but the results are stored in Memcached, Redis, etc. so the cached results can be shared between processes and hosts.
Redis Failover is a ZooKeeper-based automatic master/slave failover solution for Ruby by Ryan LeCompte. (Apache ZooKeeper is a tool for centralized server configuration, coordination, and synchronization.)
Jobs
Steve and Kate's Camp is seeking a senior web software engineer ready to get their hands dirty now and interested in growing and leading a technical team down the road. Experience with TDD/BDD, Ruby, Rails, and devops all useful. Based in Sausalito, CA.
Last but not least..
I've mentioned both Rails.app and Railcar in recent issues, but Rails One Click is another entry to the 'Rails installer for OS X' melee. It's a complete installer with a nice design and well suited to beginners. It focuses on installing only the minimum required to get started building a Rails app.
I've spoken to some readers recently who were surprised to learn I also run a JavaScript weekly newsletter, so I thought I'd give it another mention here. There's lots of exciting stuff happening in the JS world lately so if you want to keep up.. I've got the newsletter for you :-)
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