Zen and the Art of Programming

Antonio Cangiano April 28th, 2008

This is the 5th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments.

Rails

For some, the greatest Rails news this week was the announcement of a third edition of the Agile Web Development with Rails book. It’s currently in beta and will be finished by October, much to the anticipation of many, I’m sure.

Another interesting development, this time based on actual code, was announced through a post by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, entitled Hey Rails, nice Rack!. Basically, he’s working on “porting Merb’s rack machinery to rails” and it’ll eventually be merged with Rails’ core.

Three Rails related articles caught my eye in particular over the last few days. The first is 5 little-known Rails methods. I’d like to think that most Rails developers already take advantage of them, but if you don’t, it’s a good idea to learn about them now. The second is Building a Social Network Site in Rails, which is not a step-by-step guide, but rather a list of useful resources for building such a site. And finally, I liked Database agnostic != database ignorant in which the author provides a very basic intro to SQL joins and indexes. A much needed piece in the Rails community.

Ruby

The big news in this realm is that GitHub has began serving RubyGems. You can follow the instructions here, and read a nice interview with Chris Wanstrath, too.

JRuby 1.1.1 was released and I’m constantly more impressed by the speed of development of that project. Speaking of which, Charlie Nutter has published an excellent overview and status update of the various alternative Ruby implementations - and don’t miss the video of John Lam’s presentation on IronRuby’s status and DLR.

RubyLearning published a guide to Yahoo! Web Services in Ruby. And by the way, the same site is looking for ways to promote their free Ruby eBook.

Three interesting Ruby articles I want to point out are A Look at Ruby Debuggers by InfoQ, a tutorial about building Mac apps with RubyCocoa and XCode and a screencast on video transcoding and uploading to Amazon S3. Nice stuff.

In the alternative web frameworks arena, Mack 0.4.7 was released as further proof of the development speed of this project. This week Feather was also announced and it’s an open source, lightweight blog engine written in Merb.

Until next week…

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• Merb , Ruby , Ruby on Rails , This Week in Ruby
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