Issue 96 - June 7, 2012
Headlines
Rails 3.2.4 was released last week fixing two serious security vulnerabilities (explained in another post below). Rails 3.2.5 then followed a day later as 3.2.4 introduced a nasty scoping bug.
Back in 2009 Planet Argon ran a survey of how Rubyists were deploying their Rails apps. We got some interesting (and public) results from it. Now they want to do it again and, of course, share the results again too.
Engine Yard's RailsInstaller has long been a popular way to install Rails, Ruby, Git, Sqlite and other tools in one hit on Windows. Now it's here for OS X too.
From our sponsor
Michael Hartl has just announced the official release of the 2nd edition of his popular Rails Tutorial screencast series. It's 15 hours of 'over the shoulder' training in Rails 3.2 using Twitter Bootstrap, Ruby 1.9, and full on test driven BDD.
Reading
One of a series of posts looking at interesting Rails features that are no longer in the spotlight. Here, Robert May looks at the HTTP streaming features introduced in Rails 3.1.
Alan MacDougall demonstrates how you can set up vim so that you can send Ruby code straight from the editor into an interactive Pry session.
Louis Nyffenegger gives a scrappy yet practical explanation of the latest vulnerability in Rails (which has been fixed by Rails 3.2.4/5).
A somewhat chalk and cheese comparison framework wise but a reasonable discussion of the pros and cons of deploying a similar app using both technologies. An interesting sidenote is it compelled one of the creators of PhoneGap to write a post in response.
It seems automatic support for .rvmrc files to set the Ruby environment is going away in Pow. There's a simple workaround (using the .powrc file for each project) but it's worth noting for the future.
Uh-oh, controversy alert! Tony Arcieri attacks the myth that Ruby is the slowest language out there with a look at the Alioth Programming Languages Shootout. Sadly, the shootout is rather flawed but the real take away is that all four languages aren't far apart.
Watching and Listening
From RubyConf India comes a talk by Shishir Das and Nikhil Mungel about building elegant command line apps with Ruby (on Unix-like systems, naturally). Video good, audio not so good.
Libraries and Code
Sidekiq is a simple but efficient background job processor for Ruby (and Rails.) It's designed to be Resque-compatible but is faster as many jobs can execute in parallel. Version 2 adds scheduled jobs so you can say 'send this email 3 days from now.'
RubyMotion is a Ruby compiler/framework for iOS that has recently taken the Ruby world by storm. Its creator, Laurent Sansonetti, has now open sourced parts (but not all) of the framework so that the community can contribute to and extend the platform.
IProcess, short for Inter Process Communication(IPC) Process, is a collection of classes you can use to transport Ruby objects between processes running on UNIX-like operating systems.
Bored of plain old attr_accessors? Include the SmartProperties module and use the property method along with a name and optional configuration parameters to define new properties along with input conversion, validation, and default values.
Jobs
Join a killer engineering team to build out a social shopping application where users earn for a cause. You'll be working with Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, and building a product you're proud of with an awesome team.
As interested in technical verve as years of experience, IBM has positions for junior and senior engineers with a focus on those experienced with Rails, JavaScript, CSS and jQuery.
Last but not least..
A well put together slide deck by Brandon Keepers of GitHub with some interesting points on code smells, primarily focusing on testing.
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