RVM goes 1.0

Jeroen Bulters do 26 aug 10

Exactly one year after the first installment of the Ruby Version/enVironment Manager (pick your flavour) we’re pleased to see the 1.0 release of this magnificent tool.

For those of you not familiar with RVM, it allows you to easily switch between different versions of Ruby and accompanying gems, even allowing you to run multiple versions simultaneously.

Easy (initial!) installation is done through:

bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head )

The ‘press release’ is available here, the website at BeginRescueEnd and the source at github.

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No more slow Date / DateTime

Daniel Willemse do 26 aug 10

Jeremy Evans recently brought out a new gem called home_run
What it does is, it replaces the Date and DateTime classes of the standard ruby library, with a C version of them. (works with both ruby 1.8 and 1.9)
Why should you get it?
Because the gem has proven to be up to 250 times faster than the standard library. This may vary depending on a few factors like ruby version and OS, but in every single case, its faster than the ruby implementation.

There are a couple of downsides to this gem, in that its not 100% compatible with the ruby library. Read up and decide for yourself if this is the gem for you.

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Ruby Koans

Dax Huiberts ma 23 aug 10

Ruby Koans is a new interesting project to help you learn Ruby using a test driven approach.

The Koans walk you along the path to enlightenment in order to learn Ruby. The goal is to learn the Ruby language, syntax, structure, and some common functions and libraries. We also teach you culture. Testing is not just something we pay lip service to, but something we live. It is essential in your quest to learn and do great things in the language.

Some more info about the structure of Ruby Koans:

The koans are broken out into areas by file, hashes are covered in about_hashes.rb, modules are introduced in about_modules.rb, etc. They are presented in order in the path_to_enlightenment.rb file.

Each koan builds up your knowledge of Ruby and builds upon itself. It will stop at the first place you need to correct.

Some koans simply need to have the correct answer substituted for an incorrect one. Some, however, require you to supply your own answer. If you see the method __ (a double underscore) listed, it is a hint to you to supply your own code in order to make it work correctly.

I’ve taken it for a short run and it’s very enlightening and entertaining. There’s no doubt you will learn some Ruby features or tricks you don’t know about yet.

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New speakers announced for RubyAndRails 2010

Chiel Wester vr 20 aug 10

We have announced some very interesting talks the last weeks for the RubyAndRails Europe Conference (21-22 October in Amsterdam):

• Corey Haines (Software Craftmanship)
• Jon Yurek (Culture of Testing)
• Joseph Wilk (Botanic Testing)
• Mathias Meyer (CouchDB)
• Dirkjan Bussink (Rubinius)
• Piotr Szotkowski (From Profiling Ruby 1.9 to Frankenstein Programming)

More speakers will be announced soon!

Tickets for the conference are still available via the conference website (http://rubyandrails.eu)

There is also still room for some teams for the Ruby Rumble on the second day of the conference. You can read more about that on the website!

We hope to see everyone on 21 and 22 October in Amsterdam!

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August 19th: It's Why day!

Paul Engel do 19 aug 10

Today, it has been 1 year already that Ruby tycoon / legend Why the Lucky Stiff (_why) has erased his online existence.

Why has provided many beautiful libraries for Ruby community. His list of contributed content is impressive, just to name a few:

• Hpricot
• Markaby
• Camping
• RedCloth
• Syck
• Shoes

Most of them can be characterised as compact, abstract, beautiful and efficient. I doubt there will be someone else like Why.

We miss you, Why! Hoping you’ll return someday.

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Ruby 1.9.2 released

Johan Vermeulen do 19 aug 10

Yuki Sonoda (Yugui) just announced the release of Ruby 1.9.2

Ruby 1.9.2 has the following changes:

• Many new methods
• New socket API (IPv6 support)
• New encodings
• Random class that supports various random number generators
• Time is reimplemented. There is no longer the year 2038 problem.
• some regexp enhancements
• $: no longer includes the current directory.
• dl is reimplemented on top of libffi.
• new psych library that wraps libyaml. You can use the library instead
  of syck.

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Reverse search in IRB

Roy van der Meij ma 16 aug 10

I just noticed this blog post: improve irb and fix it on mac osx
The first part had my most interest: Reverse searching in irb

And I have to say: WOHOOO :)

In terminal I use reverse searching with ctrl-R a lot.
In case you don’t know, with reverse searching you can easily search in your history of commands.
It’s definitely my choice of weapon in stead of bashing the up key.

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I 'Tweet' this

Jeroen Bulters ma 16 aug 10

Although I have a deep-rooted and sincere hatred towards Facebook ‘like’ buttons, I do like “Tweet this” buttons. I just prefer twitter over facebook (at least untill farmville introduces twitter integration).

The guys at Intridea were thinking the same and created a gem to make it easy to incorporate Twitter’s own Tweet buttons into your Rails applications.

Setup is as straightforward as can be. Install the tweet-button gem, include the TweetButton module in your ApplicationHelper (or any other for finer-grained accessibility) and you’re all set.

The only thing left to do is put the button right where you want it.

<%= tweet_button :text => "Pure awesomeness!", :via => "bulters" -%>

Clicking the resulting button will open up a popup which will allow you to tweet the text, followed by the url of the page (which, in turn, will be shortened automatically by Twitter’s future t.co service) and the associated user.

Of course, it is possible to set some preferences globally. This is done by setting the default_tweet_button_options variable of the TweetButton module. For example:

TweetButton.default_tweet_button_options = {:via => "bulters" }  

Incorporating tweet button’s can’t get any easier than this.

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The misconception on Ruby threads

Dax Huiberts ma 16 aug 10

Yehuda Katz talks about the misconception of Ruby threads and that they are not as bad as they seem.

This misconception is partly based on the fact that a multithreaded Rails app is not comparable to a higly concurrent application which most Ruby thread tests are based on.

The other part is that most problems date back to old Rails versions, old mongrel versions and the old mysql gem, which did not supply the required environment for correctly working threads in a Rails application.

The only ‘problem’ left remaining is that Ruby 1.9’s YARV VM doesn’t allow a Ruby process to run simultaneously on multiple cores, thus requiring one process per CPU core. This is not the case with JRuby and work is underway for Rubinius to use only one process for all CPU cores.

Read Yehuda’s article on Ruby threads for a extended overview of this information.

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New kid in town: Mongomatic

Paul Engel ma 16 aug 10

Untill a few weeks ago, there were two popular libraries to use MongoDB from Ruby: Mongoid and MongoMapper.

But there’s a new kid in town: Mongomatic!. This gem is created by Ben Myles and John West. Mongomatic as described on their website:

Mongomatic is a Ruby library that lets you easily model your MongoDB documents in your applications.

The primary design goals of Mongomatic are simplicity and adherence to MongoDB conventions. Mongomatic is not an ActiveRecord clone and has been designed to fit nicely with the document-oriented nature of MongoDB.

Features include cursors, hash access to your document and embedded documents, validations, callbacks and conventions for creating indexes and relationships.

In case you wonder whether Mongomatic is used in production: it is! Meta+Level Games does with the social game Shadelight.

Interested? Check out the Mongomatic website. It is easy to read as it describes all aspects very clear and simple.

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