Zen and the Art of Programming

Antonio Cangiano July 26th, 2008

This is the 13th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Also, if you enjoy the series and this blog in general, please consider recommending me on Working With Rails.

JRuby 1.1.3 has been released. This version includes several bug fixes and major speed and memory improvements.
Satish Talim of RubyLearning has announced a new course dedicated to the subject, and also interviewed Charles Nutter for the occasion, who provided some suggestions for RubyLearning participants. This week, Satish also interviewed Guy Naor, the CTO of Morph Labs, a prominent cloud computing Rails hosting company.

On the .NET side, things are moving just as quickly. Some great news emerged from OSCON 2008 regarding IronRuby, including the first binary release and the setting up of a project called ironruby-contrib on GitHub. This already includes the Rails plugin for Silverlight. Meanwhile, Peter Cooper published a great set of IronRuby tutorials to bring C# developers into the Ruby fold.

In the alternative framework world, Mack Framework 0.6 was released, which includes DataMapper 0.9.2 and RSpec support, transactional tests, internationalization and other improvements. The roadmap to Merb 1.0 was also posted on the official blog.

I had previously mentioned a few well known issues with Ruby and XML. Well, it appears that there is hope regarding a libxml-ruby resurrection after all. RedCloth 4 was also released this week.

Two interesting articles were: Don’t forget about RubyForge, which covers the issue of mass migration towards GitHub, and Modules underuse by Jay Fields.

Toronto’s sponsor-less conference RubyFringe is over and according to its participants it was fantastic. I truly regret not being able to participate in it. For those who were there, feel free to share your opinions in the comment section.

One last thing before you go; I must give my “caught-red-handed Ruby Community award” this week to Thiyagarajan Veluchamy. This dude thought it was a good idea to lift the entire content of one of my most popular articles from more than a year ago, even hotlinking the image, and then attributing the post to himself. Did he really think that no one would notice? Its link became popular on Del.icio.us for the Rails tag, and I got all sorts of emails from people who recognized my old (and now somewhat outdated) article. After a brief investigation, it turns out that Thiyagarajan has a habit of stealing content. Other articles appear to be copied verbatim from various blogs. Thiyagarajan, a word of advice, gathering inspiration from a certain post is fine, copying it is not. Especially if you try to pull it off by copying from someone who reports on the most interesting and popular posts in the community. That’s just a really dumb move.

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

• .NET , Ruby , Ruby on Rails , This Week in Ruby
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Antonio Cangiano July 11th, 2008

This is the 12th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. Also, if you enjoy the series and this blog in general, please consider recommending me on Working With Rails.

I’d like to start this edition by apologizing to my readers for the delay in publishing this edition. Things got pretty hectic last week.

As far as I know, there are no updates regarding Ruby’s vulnerabilities, but if you’re aware of any, feel free to state so in the comment section. Meanwhile, BreakingPoint Systems published a couple of extra problems that were discovered while analyzing those pesky security issues. You can read about them here.

As you may have inferred, I’m quite interested in the optimization of Ruby code. Ilya Grigorik wrote 6 nice tips for optimizing Ruby MRI, which may come handy to you.

A new chapter was added to The Book of Ruby by Huw Collingbourne. Read more about it and download it here.

The Ruby community is big on TDD and BDD and there is no doubt that testing is fundamental for good quality software. RailSpike opens a can of worms with its thought-provoking article, Testing is overrated. Whether you agree or not with its findings, it is definitely worth a read.

Ethan Vizitei has had a couple of compelling entries lately. The first is about handling Gmail’s imap from Ruby and the second deals with refactoring Ruby code.

Sinatra is an ultralight Web framework, while Datamapper is considered by many to be a valid substitute for Active Record. Nick Plante shows us how to use them together to create a Pastie clone. If you are into Datamapper or would like to just get a feel for it, consider reading over this cheatsheet as well.

In conclusion, InfoQ published a Metaprogramming roundup and the second part of their RubyKaigi 2008 coverage. The most interesting bit is about the exciting prospective of standardizing Ruby. That would be a leap forward for the language and our community.

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

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

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