Initial performance numbers would seem to indicate that Ruby 1.9 (due by Christmas) will be lots faster.
If you spend a lot of time in IRB (most of us probably do), it’s worth taking the time to learn how to customize it. This is a good start.
Nice clean library to generate fake data. The home page says it’s a port of Perl’s Data::Faker library, which I’d never even heard of.
A plugin to do OpenID authentication in Rails, in a RESTful way.
Competition is good. Merb and the like provide that competition to Rails. This article runs through an alternative to the Rails stack. It’s always good to keep an eye on what else is out there.
Ok, this is a bonus link. Not at all Rails related, but relevent to you if you’re reading this. Rands nails the Nerd. I mean, really nails it.
A new book from O’Reilly on troubleshooting Ruby (and Rails) apps. From the overview:
This short cut introduces key system diagnostic tools to Ruby developers creating and deploying web applications. When programmers develop a Ruby application they commonly experience complex problems which require some understanding of the underlying operating system to be solved. Difficult to diagnose, these problems can make the difference between a project’s failure or success. This short cut demonstrates how to leverage system tools available on Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, BSD or any other Unix flavor. You will learn how to leverage the raw power of tools such as lsof, strace or gdb to resolve problems that are difficult to diagnose with the standard Ruby development tools. You will also find concrete examples that illustrate how these tools solve real-life problems in Ruby development. This expertise will prove especially relevant during the deployment phase of your application. In this way, should your production Mongrel cluster freeze and stop serving HTTP requests, it will not take you 2 days to figure out why!
A nice, if a bit short, article on some of the changes that are coming in Rails 2.0. This is focused on what you will need to change in your application.
This is a beginner tutorial, specific to using Netbeans 6.0. I’ve not played much with the Rails support in Netbeans, but it looks impressive so far.
Jeremy Kemper recently committed a request profiler to Rails. It lets you make a request to a URL repeatedly, and then see an HTML or text report of where your code is spending it’s time. This looks very handy.
A walkthrough of building an app with Rails, which includes feature definition, using Piston to manage plugins, and Restful Authentication. Nice.
The Halloween Edition
One of the first tutorials I’ve seen that focuses on Rails 2.0.
This would seem to make deploying a Rails app on Amazon’s EC2 very simple:
EC2 on Rails is an Ubuntu Linux server image for Amazon’s EC2 hosting service that’s ready to run a standard Ruby on Rails application with little or no customization. It’s a Ruby on Rails virtual appliance. If you have an EC2 account and a public keypair you’re five minutes away from deploying your Rails app.
A collection of Rails links
This is a nice step-by-step article on integrating PayPal with your Rails application, using ActiveMerchant.
I’ve only skimmed over the new features in the upcoming 2.0 release of Rails, but this looks like one of the nicest features. This is a good explanation of how it works and why it’s useful.
A bugfix release of Mongrel is out. Looks like 1.1 is due soon, and it looks interesting:
“Mongrel 1.1 is coming real soon now with JRuby support and a few other things.”
Being a bit of an Emacs junky, I’m not sure how I missed this. Looks mature, and very functional, and almost TextMate-like. The link has a nice flash video of Emacs on Rails in action.
Sitepoint’s book “Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications” is now free, at least for the next month. I’ve only skimmed it, but it looks like a decent introduction, and the price is certainly right.
Approaching Normal is the personal site of Larry Wright, a 30-something technologist. I live in the town of Normal, Illinois with my wife and three children.
I have diverse interests, including Ruby on Rails, Agile development methodologies, design, and entrepeneurship. You'll find a little bit of everything here, but mostly technology and business stuff.
The opinions expressed here are mine alone, and not those of any employer - past or present.
I can be reached at:
via twitter
