1. map.resources :ruby [9]

    February 7th, 2007

    Concurrency. MenTaLguY shows five ways to do concurrency in Ruby: mutexes, futures, STM, actors and joins.

    ActiveLDAP ActiveLDAP gives you an ActiveRecord-like access to LDAP servers.

    Ruby in the Enterprise. Timothy M. O'Brien has a great write up on Bringing Rails to the Enterprise. He presents some of the myths, and the reality of using Rails in the field.

    ActiveSpec Luke Redpath brings us ActiveSpec, a framework for writing specifications. Looks similar to RSpec, but ActiveSpec deals with generic specification that can be used for test, just as well as validation and selecting from collections. Besides the multiple uses, ActiveSpec allows you to keep your specifications inside the model (a la Rails validation), but also reuse validations across several models. And check the teaser at the end of the post: using specifications with ActiveRecord find methods.

    IntelliR JetBrains adds Ruby support to IntelliJ. Watch the screencast.

    Posted by assaf Filed in map.resources :ruby

  2. map.resources :ruby [8]

    January 20th, 2007

    ARes Test Drive. Rick Olson takes ActiveResource for a test drive, using it to read and post to the Beast discussion forum. Looks like ActiveResource will not be part of Rails 1.2, but still the current version is promising. Check the post to see how much you can do with little coding.

    Debugging in Steel. Another reason for using Ruby in Steel: debugging Rails applications.

    What will DSL do for me? Russ Olsen wanted to test against a fake Web server, to keep the test cases simple, he created a DSL: “Clearly, anything you can do in potemkin you can do in plain old Ruby plus webrick. Potemkin just makes its easier, and easier, quite frequently, is the name of the programming game.”

    Rails 1.2 Rails 1.2 is officially out, with hundred of bug fixes, improvements, better ActiveRecord, UTF-8 support and ... the best framework for HTTP. Rails 1.2 breaths HTTP, RESTful all the way, and lets you build XML and JSON APIs in a few lines of code.

    And while you're at it, check out the Rails Cookbook, which covers Rails 1.2.

    s33r From Elliot Smith, s33r is a library for using Amazon's S3 service.

    Posted by assaf Filed in map.resources :ruby

  3. map.resources :ruby [7]

    January 14th, 2007

    Informix in Rails. If you're using Informix, check out what Gerardo Santana is doing to use Informix in Rails.

    ODBC. OpenLink releases version 1.3 of the ODBC adapter for ActiveRecord. Currently supports MySQL, Sybase, Ingres, Informix, Oracle, DB2, Progress and PostgreSQL. That's a pretty exhaustive list.

    Next Enterprise Ruby Studio. The next Enterprise Ruby Studio will take place in Reston, VA on March 28: “Attendees will experience, hands on, building an app using the most important technologies: data access through ActiveRecord and rBatis, messaging through Stomp, Drb and Rinda, data transfer using XML and JSON, networking using Mongrel, and building RESTful web service endpoints.”

    Get started with Cerberus. Yurii Rashkovskii gives a quick introduction to continuous integration with Cerberus.

    Refactoring Ruby. Jay Fields takes on refactoring, this time around, in Ruby.

    Posted by assaf Filed in map.resources :ruby

  4. map.resources :ruby [6]

    January 9th, 2007

    Capistrano 101 Geoffrey Grosenbach puts up another screencast, this time teaching you Capistrano concepts. If you're new to Capistrano, here's one way to learn more.

    Capistrano 1.3.1 Catch up on the new features in Capistrano 1.3.1.

    Down for maintenance, back soon. Mike Clark uses views to create custom maintenance pages. Cool trick. (Hat tip to Jamis Buck)

    Four choices. Andre Lewis lists four choices to jumpstart your Rails app.

    Easy feeds. Resource Feeder gives you RSS and Atom feeds with minimal effort. Ryan Daigle has the full scoop.

    Posted by assaf Filed in map.resources :ruby

  5. map.resources :ruby [5]

    January 6th, 2007

    Rails via Sysadmin. Ed Gibbs: "Turns out the first developer in our organization to actually bring in Rails and use it for something real is a Unix sysadmin."

    Abundance of opinions. Daily KOS is considering an upgrade, and debating Ruby, Python and Perl. What follows are over 700 comments on the pros and cons.

    Faster browsing with assets. One way to make your site load faster is to split it across multiple hosts. You don't need multiple Web servers, you're just working around the "2 connections per host" limit of your Web browser. Patrick Lenz has more.

    Always testing. Cerberus is a continuous integration tool for Ruby.

    JRuby interview. Nick Sieger interviews the JRuby team.

    Posted by assaf Filed in map.resources :ruby

  6. map.resources :ruby [4]

    January 5th, 2007

    Snippets. As I'm writing this, the Code Snippets in Ruby catalog has 455 snippets. That's a lot of tips, tricks and code you can learn from.

    The Ruby/Java Co-op. Ryan Tomayko about The Pending Ruby/Java Co-op: "It just seems to be in the right place at the right time."

    Hodel3000CompliantLogger Geoffrey Grosenbach explains on how to measure performance of your Rails app in production, using the Rails Analyzer Tools, Hodel3000CompliantLogger, and e-mailing reports to yourself.

    On video. If you're looking for a video or a screencast, you'll probably find it here (Ruby) or here (Rails).

    Exchanging. RExchange goes live with version 0.3: "RExchange is an easy to use Microsoft Exchange Server WebDAV communication wrapper."

    Posted by assaf Filed in map.resources :ruby

  7. map.resources :ruby [3]

    December 30th, 2006

    Upcoming in ASF 1.5. ActiveSalesforce announces version 1.5 for January '07. Major features include support for salesforce.com 8.0, test fixtures and migrations.

    E-mail attachments with Rails. Ben Curtis uses FasterCSV to generate report data, and ActionMailer to send it as an attachment. I didn't know you can send attachments that easily.

    SOAP4R Hell Working with SOAP4R, Brendon Wilson ran into some troubles and blogged about the problems and the fixes. If you're using SOAP4R, check this post and the follow up comments.

    Quality control. Kwala will check the quality of your Ruby code, including "checks for code duplication, cyclomatic complexity, lines of code, unit tests, various formatting checks, and require cycles."

    Flashy charts. ZiYa is a Rails plugins that uses Flash to create beautiful charts. No need to learn Flash in order to use it. (Via Ruby Inside).

    Posted by assaf Filed in map.resources :ruby

  8. map.resources :ruby [2]

    December 28th, 2006

    Humble Ruby. Jeremy just released his Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book. The PDF is free, $10 gets you the Bedside Reading Edition and bragging rights.

    Simpler migrations. I rely on Rails Migration to define and maintain my database schema. They're simple, concise and easy to extend with Ruby code, on the off chance I need to transform some data while doing a migration. Could it get any easier? Maiha found a way to make Rails migrations even easier to write and maintain.

    Console like a Ninja. Amy Hoy reveals the secrets of the Rails Console Ninjas.

    The Big Rewrite "You’ve got an existing, successful software product. You’ve hit the ceiling on extensibility and maintainability. Your project platform is inflexible, and your application is a software house of cards that can’t support another new feature." Unfortunately, switching to Ruby for your Next Big Rewrite is no guarantee for success. Chad Fowler promises to tell us what can go wrong, through a series of blog posts.

    SQL Views for Rails More goodness from the ActiveWarehouse project, comes support for SQL Views in Rails.

    Posted by assaf Filed in map.resources :ruby

  9. map.resources :ruby [1]

    December 27th, 2006

    Acts As Enterprisey Andrew Stewart grants Rails a x-mas present and gives us acts_as_enterprisey.

    Ruport goes 0.7. "Ruport now has a brand new formatting system, some massive cleanup in the internals, and merry chunky bacon for all!" Check it out.

    Start here. Chad Fowler comments that "Rails is a gateway drug to both Ruby and the rest of the world of dynamic and previously-fringe programming languages." What about you?

    Wondering around. Check out Hobo, "an Open-Source project, designed to make development with Rails even faster than it already is." (Via Satish Talim)

    Railsbench. Railsbench is a collection of scripts for measuring performance of Rails apps. The latest version is now available as a Gem, and uses Gruff to create performance graphs.

    Posted by assaf Filed in map.resources :ruby