Issue 91 - May 3, 2012
Headlines
DHH rails against conservatism, people who think about the newbies, and ex-hippies, while celebrating progress and getting the audience to chant "I will not fear change, I will not fight progress". "Stay hippie," he closes.
Spree is a popular Rails-based e-commerce system and the 1.1.0 release brings support for Rails 3.2, an API overhaul, and more.
YARD is the Angelina Jolie or Jason Seifer of Ruby documentation tools; elegant, well-presented, and aging well. 0.8 brings i18n support, a new 'directives' system that can affect the behavior of the parser and your documentation and, of course, a 'lot more.'
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Reading
David Copeland, the author of Build Awesome Command-Line Applications with Ruby, shares some pointers to building good command line apps in Ruby.
Jonathan Rochkind puts several HTTP client libraries through their paces. Eric Hodel, author of net-http-persistent, gives the write up a thumbs up so that's good enough for me.
Mike Pack explores the 'exhibit' and 'presenter' decorator patterns. And if all this sounds like buzzword bingo to you, this is a pretty accessible introduction!
Cucumber is a popular natural language accepting testing toolkit for Ruby and in this post Matt Wynne has collected together ideas from various Cucumber maintainers to see what's coming in Cucumber's future.
The slides from a talk from Railsconf 2012 by Heroku developer Will Leinweber who shows off some powerful new features in Postgresql for working with schemaless data as well as JSON datatypes and embedded JavaScript.
Targeting C++ developers who are learning Ruby, Arpan Sen looks at six areas of Ruby that might trip them up: class hierarchy, singleton methods, self, method_missing, exception handling, and threading. If you already know your stuff though, steer clear.
Libraries and Code
Jon Leighton notes that classical Rails controllers violate the Single Responsibility Principle (part of the SOLID group of OO programming principles). Focused Controller aims to resolve that by splitting up responsibilities into an object each. The usage example shows it off best.
It seems Rails 4 is getting a built-in unified API for queueing! Enjoy this GitHub commit jam packed with comments and discussion on the development of this feature.
This project provides integration of Guard (a tool that handles and responds to events on file system modifications) into the Sublime Text 2 editor. Handy if you want your tests to run automatically but then see the results directly in ST2.
Thor is not a new tool but it has a new Web site so check it out. It makes an interesting alternative to Rake for certain use cases (although ultimately Rake and Thor should serve different purposes).
Firehose is both a Rack application and JavasScript library that makes building scalable real-time web applications easy. You'll need to dig in a bit though as it's a little buzzwordy on the surface.
Jobs
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