Archive for the 'Merb' Category

This Week in Ruby (June 26, 2008)

Antonio Cangiano June 26th, 2008

This is the 11th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments.

This edition begins with some bad news: Several vulnerabilities that affect the main Ruby implementation have been discovered. There is no reason to freak out, but they are serious. An ill-intended person could take advantage of these vulnerability and execute arbitrary code. Matasano has a few practical examples which illustrate the vulnerabilities in question. To learn more head over to the official advisory. Unfortunately, the suggested upgrades (except those for Ruby 1.8.7) are currently not working for many Rails developers, who’re reporting segmentation faults. The Phusion team has created a patch that was reported to be working, but it would be nice to see the Ruby Core Team verify and incorporate it quickly. If you’re running a version of Ruby that shipped with Mac OS X, don’t upgrade yet. Instead wait for Apple’s Software Update.

RubyGems 1.2 was released and it’s much more responsive than previous versions of it were (no more bulk updates just to install a new gem). To upgrade run: sudo gem update --system (without sudo if you are on Windows). After a substantial refactoring, Mocha 0.9 – a framework for mocking and stubbing – was released this week. A new BitNami RubyStack version was released (1.2 beta) as well, which adds a lot of goodies to the package, including but not limited to NGINX, Thin, Rack, EventMachine and so on. Speaking of EventMachine, check out EventMachine: Fast and Scalable Event-Driven I/O Framework published by InfoQ. Last week they also published an interview with yours truly, in regards to the Ruby Benchmark Suite. I regret that the shootout testing hasn’t started yet as promised, but Murphy’s law got in the way.

For those interested in improving their language-fu, there were a numbers of interesting articles: Using select, reject, collect, inject and detect, Enumerating Enumerable, Macros, Hygiene, and Call By Name in Ruby Eliminating code duplication with Metaprogramming. Also noteworthy, this piece on working with Microformats from Ruby.

A Ruby Community Announcements group was started in order to provide a fast ML for announcements only. It’s for those who’d like to stay in the loop, but wish to avoid the high volume of messages in Ruby-Talk.

The erubycon conference about Ruby and the Enterprise will be held between August 15 and 17 (‘08) in Columbus, Ohio. They still have a few seats available, so if this topic is of interest to you, grab a spot while you still can.

Finally, if you’re hiring Ruby talent or plan to look for a Ruby job any time soon, take a peek at these 15 fundamental questions for Ruby interviews. They’re somewhat basic, but the article is a good staring point nevertheless.

ALT.rb

From the world of alternative implementations and frameworks, I found this article on Rubinius FFI, an introduction to MacRuby as a replacement for RubyCocoa, and the announcement of Merb’s run_later” method for backgrounds tasks, all to be informative.


To keep the good times rolling, the second edition of This Week in Rails is available on the official Rails blog.

This Week in Ruby (June 16, 2008)

Antonio Cangiano June 16th, 2008

This is the 10th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments.

As announced a few days ago, This Week in Ruby is being split into two parts: This Week in Ruby and This Week in Rails. The one you are reading is the Ruby edition, while Riding Rails – the official Rails blog – will host the Rails one. Links to and from each post will be provided, in case you don’t follow both blogs.

Ruby

The Ruby community has shown a clear interest in Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), so if you haven’t taken the plunge yet, check out Ben Emson’s introduction to RSpec Stories. Those who’re already well versed with RSpec, will enjoy an article by another Ben, in which RSpec’s DSL internals are explained in detail so as to cover an example of creating macros with RSpec.

The Pragmatic Programmers published a series of screencasts about The Ruby Object Model and Metaprogramming. So far they’ve received glowing reviews, including my own, hence I highly recommend that you evaluate them.

A couple of weeks ago I announced the creation of a Ruby Benchmark Suite project. The next shootout will take place starting from the 24th and I should be able to get the results up on this blog by the 30th of this month.

While working on modifying his RX Ruby Tokenizer to be included in the Ruby Benchmark Suite, Tim Bray reported a few considerations on the sad status of REXML and Ruby 1.9. It’s definitely an interesting read, and it’s important to increase the awareness about the current pains of working with Ruby 1.9 and REXML.

Yesterday, Tim also had a post titled Deletionist Morons about the controversy surrounding the proposed deletion of Why the lucky stiff’s wikipedia entry. The Ruby community at large vouched for Why, who is clearly one of its biggest, and definitely most original, contributors.

Finally, the fun Ruby article award of the week goes to Ilya Grigorik for his Tumblr, RMagick and a Photo Frame!

ALT.rb

RailConf’s presentation regarding MagLev has been an attention grabber in the world of alternative Ruby implementations. A video of Avi Bryant’s demo is now available online, as well as a somewhat older interview with InfoQ. You can read Chad Fowler’s take as well as mine.

MacRuby 0.2 was released about 10 days ago. For those not familiar with this project, it’s an Ojective-C based implementation of Ruby 1.9 for Mac OS X. The general idea is to have a Ruby version that lets you write Mac applications that perform reasonably well. In the upcoming shootout we’ll be testing this early release as well.

Those of you still working in Java, but interested in the possibility of using Ruby’s testing tools and frameworks, should pay attention to the release of JtestR 0.3. As you can imagine, this works thanks to JRuby’s interoperability capabilities with Java. If this alternative Ruby implementation for the JVM appeals to you, you should probably also read Thomas Enebo’s interview about the future of JRuby. Speaking of interoperability, at Tech Ed (that’s a Microsoft event), John Lam demonstrated a cool prototype for the integration of IronRuby and ASP.NET MVC.

Readers interested in contributing to Rubinius, should take a look at this write-up about getting started with hacking on Rubinius.

Web Frameworks

At the latest Toronto Rails night (which I didn’t attend, but I soon will be as I’m moving downtown), Rowan Hick presented Merb, and has now made his presentation
available online. Speaking of Merb, Engine Yard Express is a new free product that lets you try out an Engine Yard “slice” wrapped up in a VMware image, and both Merb and Rails are supported.

The 2008.06 version of Ramaze was released last week. Aside from switching from a numeric release scheme to a date-based one (which I personally like much more), this is a major release that introduces over 450 patches and a few changes to the internal API.

To keep the good times rolling, the first edition of This Week in Rails is available on the official Rails blog.

This Week in Ruby (May 29, 2008)

Antonio Cangiano May 29th, 2008

This is the 9th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments.

Ruby

Two days ago JRuby 1.1.2 was released. Amongst several bug fixes and improvements, this release is characterized by a focus on performances. Startup time, threading, method calling and YAML symbol parsing have all been drastically improved.

Huw Collingbourne of SapphireSteel, has announced that he’ll be releasing a complete book on Ruby, chapter by chapter, free of charge online. After reading the first chapter, I can attest that it’s excellent. Keep an eye on it, as new chapters get added.

The Pragmatic Programmers put out a series of screencasts for sale. The most relevant series for Ruby programmers is Everyday Active Record. The first two episodes (a half an hour long, each) are out and can be purchased for just $5 a piece. The preview — and Ryan Bates’s reputation — lead me to believe that they are entirely worth their very reasonable sticker price. Speaking of screencasts, a new one about merb-slices was released on Merbunity, check it out if you’re into Merb.

There were two important releases last week, Mack 0.5.5 — which features a new rendering engine with support for Haml and Markaby — and DataMapper 0.9, a major reworking of the ORM. A third release, which is perhaps just as welcomed, was launched by _Why who included a few graphical improvements for Shoes, his GUI application toolkit. Definitely neat stuff, which I invite you to take a look at if you’re working on a Mac.

Peter Cooper published 21 Ruby Tricks You Should Be Using In Your Own Code. You probably know already most of the common ones at least, but they’re quick and fun, so if you haven’t checked out the post yet take a moment and do so. Other must-read tutorials and articles were Ruby && DTrace! (really neat results), Ruby EventMachine – The Speed Demon by one of my favorite Ruby bloggers, and Will’s Guide to Mashing-up Remote Databases using Page Scraping.

In a post made a couple of days ago, Robert Fischer opened up a can of worms by bringing up the issue of Ruby and XML libraries. As most of you know REXML is far from being issue-free (performance in primis), and in The Status of Ruby’s libxml Robert uncovers that the author of LibXml Ruby is unable to actively pursue the development of his extension. This issue concerns me, but if I’m working with databases, I prefer to take advantage of DB2 Express-C ’s fantastic pureXML features, which give me the sort of speed, flexibility and stability that I won’t find in a Ruby library anytime soon.

Before highlighting some of the news from Rails-land, I wanted to inform you that a new version of The Great Ruby Shootout will surface in June, as I intend to test a couple of special new entries.

Rails

Today, RailsConf 2008 started and it certainly stands a great chance of being dubbed an exhilarating event. A few people enquired to see if they could meet me there, but unfortunately I couldn’t make it. Chances are that you’re reading this post from RailsConf. If that’s the case, say hi for me and don’t forget to visit the nice fellas from Engine Yard, Morph (my sponsor), Phusion and GemStone. Oh and also, feel free to pass around the url of this entry. ;)

Rails 2.1 RC1 is out, so you’ll find this article on upgrading to Rails 2.1.0_RC1 useful. Fabio Akita released a new version of his popular tutorials, Rolling with Rails 2.1 (part 1 and part 2). And if you are looking for an advanced authentication/authorization system for Rails 2, take a gander at Lockdown on RubyForge.

My friends at SeeSaw implemented a series of Rails Widgets which can easily be installed as a Rails plugin. Feel free to use them and/or contribute, in order to add further support for simplifying and reusing common UI elements. Speaking of shiny things, check out this Ruby on Rails icon pack; very pleasing to the eye, in my opinion.

RubyInside published a list of 28 mod_rails / Passenger Resources To Help You Deploy Rails Applications Faster. As DHH forecasted, “this could definitely become very popular, very fast ;)”.

New Relic released their RPM solution for monitoring and improving the performances of Rails applications to the general public. You can get it here.

And finally, some great news just came in, IronRuby is running unmodified Rails. “Excellent” (said in Montgomery Burns’ voice, complete with characteristic hand gesture).

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